SECOND LIFE, July 10 (Reuters) - A future where the Second Life Grid is a minor player in a sprawling Metaverse of thousands of competing virtual worlds sounds like a bad outcome for Linden Lab. But company executives say that’s exactly the plan.

In the wake of the recent first avatar teleport between Second Life and an OpenSim region, Linden VP Joe Miller, better known to Second Life residents as “Zero Linden,” spoke to Reuters about Linden Lab’s long-term strategy.

Linden aggressively pushed to develop a set of working protocols to allow interoperability across divergent virtual worlds. “Standards groups in general take forever to reach agreement,” Miller said. By working with partner IBM, Linden wanted to take a leadership role in getting OpenSim regions and Linden Lab’s Second Life talking to each other.

Challenged by competitors on all sides, including the recent entry of Internet giant Google into the virtual worlds space, Linden is banking on OpenSim to bolster its strong position in the virtual worlds industry.

“We want to broaden the market for virtual worlds as rapidly as possible,” Miller said. “The sheer size of the market needs to be several orders of magnitude larger than it is today.”

OPENSIM: SAVIOR OR COMPETITOR?

At first glance, OpenSim seems to directly undermine Linden Lab’s revenue model. While Linden earns token sums from fees on its LindeX virtual currency exchange and other activities, the company’s core business model remains managing “land.”

All virtual land in Second Life (except for a few regions hosted by IBM) runs on computer servers managed by Linden. Avatars who purchase land — essentially dedicated CPU time on Linden’s computers — pay a monthly land use fee known as “tier.” Despite stalling new avatar enrollments, technical glitches, and a shrinking paid customer base, Linden’s revenue-generating land supply continues to grow at 44% quarter-to-quarter.

The challenge for Linden Lab is that its monopoly is about to end.

Linden Lab put Second Life’s viewer software into the open source domain in January of last year. But to date, the company has kept its server-side code — which does things like manage inventory, handle logins, and run revenue-generating land — under tight wraps.

But with the viewer code public, eager programmers were able to make best-guess approximations of how Linden’s server-side computers run Second Life’s infrastructure. The OpenSimulator project, better known as OpenSim, has grown rapidly to provide many of the features offered by Second Life, but without any code running on Linden’s computers or money flowing into the company’s coffers. Already, a combination of pioneers and outcasts have begun migrating to OpenSim worlds.

LINDEN LAB’S NEW REVENUE MODEL

So if Linden Lab makes its money from land, and OpenSim can provide land to avatars cheaper than Linden can afford to offer, how will Linden survive as OpenSim approaches the feature set and reliability found today on the Second Life Grid? And why is Linden working so aggressively to empower easy traveling from Second Life and into OpenSim?

Linden’s plan, Miller said, is to identify “value-added services” it can offer to a potentially chaotic mix of thousands of disparate OpenSim grids. He declined to comment on the company’s exact strategy, beyond insisting that Linden has “some very specific plans.”

But in extended questioning Miller offered some insight on how Linden’s hopes to prosper in an OpenSim-dominated world.

“I could see Linden offering economic services, trading services, search services,” Miller said. Some OpenSim worlds may respect Second Life’s intellectual property protections and commerce functions. The Linden Dollar, with a years-long reputation of solid financial backing, may be positioned to become the gold standard of virtual currencies.

Miller also referenced the role VeriSign plays in the administration of the Internet by managing top-level “.com” and “.net” network addresses. Linden may one day play an active role in not only teleports between OpenSim worlds and the Second Life Grid, but between two otherwise unconnected OpenSim worlds.

THE SHORT TERM

The evolution from a company that sells virtual land to the infrastructure backbone of a diverse array of OpenSim worlds will be a slow one, Miller emphasized. And in a Wednesday statement on Linden’s blog, company CEO Mark Kingdon identified “platform stability, viewer performance, lag, inventory management” as priorities in the short term.

But Linden executives believe the day of OpenSim is coming, and pledge not only to help make it happen, but also to keep improving their own service. “We look forward to the day when the value of entering the Second Life Grid will be clear over the value of entering an OpenSim grid,” Miller said.