At the Metanomics session Monday the 21st, Mitch Wagner of Information Week and Gartner Fellow Steve Prentice expressed concerns about the future of Second Life. As a business collaboration tool, it is loosing ground to competitors like QWAQ.

Yet the back channel seemed more concerned with whether or not Mitch at Steve were analyzing Linden Lab properly. Is Second Life an application that needs to be constrained? Is it a platform that can serve many applications? Is it a community based upon a platform? Much of this will be questions that need to be answered by the new CEO.

Today, the new CEO was announced. His name is Mark Kingdon. He has been CEO at Organic, a leading online marketing firm, since 2001. During his time there Organic doubled in size.

Everyone is pouring over comments Mark has made, blog posts, interviews, etc., to get a sense about what he will bring to Second Life. Yet the view of what Linden Lab was looking for can be found in an interview Philip Rosedale did with Reuters in March where he said they were “someone who has experience with and a passion for growing this type of company — a software platform company.”

Presently, residents of Second Life expressed cautious optimism, waiting to see what sort of changes Kingdon will bring. Some of this reflects the different views about what Second Life is all about that different residents have.

A good summary of Mark’s background, and some of his articles can be found at ClickZ

The blog post from Linden Lab about Mark can be found here.