Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka has gone back to blogging memories from his long career in tech, and just casually dropped a nugget of SL history that's new to me. Back in 2005 / 2006, a top tech company seemed seriously interested in buying Linden Lab / Second Life. Can you guess who that could have been?

No, not Apple, though there were rumors after an Apple Store "appeared" in SL (which turned out to be an impressive fan-made stunt), nor Google, though there was some serious speculation, after rumors emerged that they were building a virtual world (which turned out to be a half-ass attempt called Lively).

So, who?

Tell us, Cory:

There was a brief moment when it looked like eBay was going to buy Linden Lab. Philip and I had meetings with Meg and her tech consigliere Maynard.

Yes… eBay!

By "looked", Cory clarifies to me, he didn't see any specific acquisition offer from eBay — but the fact that company CEO Meg Whitman and COO Maynard Webb requested meetings with him and Philip Rosedale strongly suggested their interest in that direction.

It's not completely surprising, in retrospect: For one thing, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (as Cory notes) was an early investor in Linden Lab.

Even more key, Omidyar was an active SL user himself, along with his wife Pam:

During the mid-2000s, Omidyar immersed himself in the Second Life community, adopting a secret identity: a tattooed black man named Kitto Mandala [pictured above]. Even after Omidyar became a Linden Lab investor, Rosedale primarily interacted with his animated avatar. Mandala rode a Segway and wore a T-shirt that said KISS ME I’M LAWFUL EVIL. He could fly, and hardly anyone knew he was really a billionaire.

More here. I assume eBay's interest in Second Life was to create a kind of 3D showroom in the virtual world, where eBay sellers could show off furniture and other physical items. Or perhaps to integrate Linden Dollars as a currency option. It's a fascinating alternate history to imagine, though I strongly suspect it would not have ended well.

Anyway, read Cory's whole post here, which is actually about Facebook's famous / infamous slogan for its developers, "Move fast and break things." (Ondrejka later became a VP for Zuckerberg and helped drive the company to acquire Oculus, a story I tell in the book.)