Nov 2nd 2011, 10:56 by G.F. | SEATTLE
PHILIP ROSEDALE is best known for his creation of Linden Lab's Second Life, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that currently generates $75m in revenue (according to the firm) from hundreds of thousands of active accounts. His latest endeavour, Coffee & Power, is also about connecting people, albeit in the real world, not Second Life's virtual sort. The service aims to connect creative types looking for odd jobs that may involve physical contact, but lack central dispatch.
The idea came to Mr Rosedale after he created an internal praise system at Linden Lab. Love Machine, as he called it, allows any employee to send praise to any other. Kudos are publicly available, added to the recipient's record and used to calculate cash bonuses and performance. After a complicated departure from Linden, where he was chief executive twice, Mr Rosedale has attempted to spread his form of un-management further through a firm called LoveMachine which, among other things, commoditises praise. (LoveMachine is no lark. Mr Rosedale has invested his own funds, and attracted others like Mitch Kapor, the pioneering inventor of Lotus 1-2-3 and an initial funder of Second Life, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos to chip in.)
LoveMachine has dispensed with a traditional programming staff. Instead it contracts out its work through another of Mr Rosedale's ventures, called Worklist. At Worklist, Mr Rosedale and his colleagues—along with others looking for someone to perform discrete programming tasks—divide the work into small pieces with detailed descriptions. The programming code for a whole project, such as LoveMachine, is available for examination by programmers to allow them to build their tiny piece so that it integrates seamlessly with the whole. Worklist itself is constantly being tweaked by programmers—contracted through the service.
Worklist combines open-source programming and microcontracting, popularised by Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but with rather more accountability and less anonymity. Worklist barely intermediates the relationship between a programmer and the contracting party. Rather than build vast, monolithic systems all at once, which often requires each coder to work simultaneously on various bits and bobs, projects are broken down into short, discrete tasks. This requires a novel approach to management. Rather than order people around, managers are responsible for partitioning and describing the work in such a way that others can perform them with ease.
Worklist was always meant for programmers and other techie types. So Mr Rosedale wondered if the idea could be made to work for other creative jobs. Ten months and 1,600 (Worklist-contracted) code updates later, a fully fledged service was launched on November 1st for what Mr Rosedale estimates to be a relatively parsimonious $180,000.
Coffee & Power is a kind of concierge service often available only in hotels and through large corporations. Anyone may post a job or offer a range of personal services, pretty much anywhere (although some tasks may require physical proximity). The site uses a form of quasi-currency, hearkening back to Second Life's Linden dollars. The coffee dollar (whose symbol, C$, must not be confused with the Canadian loonie) may be purchased for precisely one American dollar to bring money into the system. The firm expects cash to float from user to user within the system, and charges a hefty 15% redemption fee.
Mr Rosedale's venture is not the first to offer a similar service. TaskRabbit was set up in 2009 but only posts jobs offers, and is limited to a given city or area. GigWalk turns smartphone owners into local information gatherers, taking pictures of business interiors or examining products in stores. All three harness "gamification", tech-speak for dishing out game-like rewards, such as moving up a level, when enough real-world tasks are performed to the satisfaction of the dispatcher. Besides gratifying players, the scores signal worthiness to other potential employers.
What sets Coffee & Power apart may be its brick-and-mortar presence. Mr Rosedale plans to open a chain of cafés—or workclubs, as he prefers to call them. The first, in San Francisco, doubles as the firm's headquarters. It provides free coffee (or tea) to fuel the social interactions and power to fire up assorted portable gizmos such interaction may require. The firm, which occupies the second floor, requests (but does not demand, at least for now) that guests participate in the new online task economy.
Since the workclubs are not retail outlets in the ordinary sense of the word, they have relatively low overheads, according to Mr Rosedale. They ought to break even with modest task completion on the premises, assuming a reasonable amount of C$ redemption to hard currency. A small, but not nugatory portion of the transactions requires a safe physical place to meet, either to work together or to exchange objects, Mr Rosedale notes. The workclubs are the nexus. (Mr Rosedale is aware of potential tax issues from his time running Second Life, and is watching how regulators work with PayPal, among others.)
Your correspondent, from his perch in Seattle, tried out Coffee & Power while it was still in trial phase in late October. He offered C$10 (full disclosure: Mr Rosedale stumped up half the sum), for someone to visit the joint, say "hello", drink a cup of the free coffee and take a few photos. His bid was taken up by one user. Unfortunately, Babbage did not live up to Mr Rosedale's descriptive management. The jobber expected him to be there (not in Seattle), had forgotten to bring along her camera phone and was unclear on precisely what she was meant to do. A second bidder acquitted herself better, as had Babbage in instructing her.
The episode illustrates a broader issue about Coffee & Power's model. Good performance requires good management, be it descriptive, prescriptive or whatever. As more tasks are dispensed in this way, employers may yet get to grips with the new management style. That will take time, though. For now, the venture simply connects people wishing to transact—many, like Babbage, likely to make a hash of it. That is a long way from fuelling a thriving economy—or turning a profit.
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