Shirky to TN Readers: Help Me Out?

After his piece on Second Life metrics at Many-to-Many spurred a lively discussion here on TerraNova, Clay Shirky has asked that we post this follow-up question here:

I've run across something funny about Second Life numbers, and wonder if any Terra Nova readers can help me out?

I've been trying to figure out how many return users Second Life has since posting my original question. Since the Second Life stats don't include historical Total Users numbers, it's hard to compare the growth of 'Last 60 Days' use with growth in total use. (You'd need the historical Total Users data to separate new signups from return users over time.)

While looking for that data, I came across this Next Net post, saying that a) Second Life has added a million to its registered user count between October 18 and December 14th and b) had only 829,537 people log in in the last 60 days.

How can both figures be true? How can they have added a million users in under 60 days, and have any return users, and still have less than a million logged in in the last 60 days? Since Linden Labs specifically says that the total number does not include "Folks who start the signup process but never complete it", I don't understand how Total Logged In can be less than Total Users Added in the same period? Did 150,000+ people bail after signing up but before even logging in? Or is this something else? Any elucidation greatly appreciated.

Comments

[Tom]

I think your supposition is correct -- some significant fraction of potential users will complete the signup process, perhaps go so far as to download the client, but never log in.

I have been aggregating total accounts registered, 7-14-30-60 day uniques, and hourly concurrency numbers for the past several months and can say the number of new accounts abandoned post-signup without ever logging in is no less that 20% of total accounts. If you try to calculate statistics assuming a smaller "non-login" rate, you start getting some craziness like negative retention rates...

[Cael]

Nailed.

They're counting the downloads, aren't they?

Goddam. I knew they were lying to us all.

[VanHemlock]

Definitely something fishy going on here. Been trying to work it out myself and came up with about 225k 'never-logins' but similar ballpark and quite peculiar!

I mean surely - you gone to the trouble of a download and account signup webpage - you're going to want at least *one* look, aren't you? That can't all be people going 'Oh, I'll have a look next month sometime.'

[Prokofy Neva]

And like "only 829,537 people log in in the last 60 days" is so significantly different than 1,000,000,000?

And even if it is, your obsession about this is a MMORPG vestige. SL isn't a game in the same way. It should be judged like a country, by its GNP and other indicators besides raw population.

[Prokofy Neva]

*1,000,000 -- and yes, the Lindens cook these numbers. Fascinating to study how/why they cook them But...again, it's a growing country with a booming economy. So when you're done peering into your MMORPG-contaminated geek-o-scopes, please look at the actual phenomenon of what people do there, how they make money, and what it sustains.

[Neils Clark]

At current I'm seeing "Total Residents: 2,079,863"

Total residents could include already established members who purchase additional accounts. This would run it up, and provide a somewhat more feasible reason for not logging in.

Still, It doesn't make any sense to buy an alt and never use it.

[Prokofy Neva]

Neils,

The numbers of alts or empty accounts has grown fantastically for two reasons:

a) the Lindens removed their ban on the creation of more than 5 accounts -- and that's a good thing. It was really silly to punish their long-term, paying, credit-carded customers for taking a 6th account for pay, when they were letting in thousands of freebies with no credit card check, enabling griefers to keep spinning accounts and gold farmers to farm newbie subsidized first land

b) large corporations have flocked to SL, and they often grab 100 accounts at once to be used by all their staff and visitors. While you can buy your own name now for $1500 as a corporate entity and $150 as an individual, some schools or smaller businesses don't want to spend that, so they buy up the 100 slots of a single generic last name. There are just way, way more accounts being bought and kept on hold to be used for events and staff.

[Douglas Thomas]

There are pretty demanding specs to run the program. It is not inconceivable that a significant number of people would register, download the client, and not have the hardware to run it.

[IAmEric]

Hi,

I tried this over on James' article, but either no one reads that blog or no one bothers to comment (is there a difference?).

My suggestion is for US to come up with a satisfactory definition of a "regular SL resident" or whatever and present that definition to the people at LL. Then ask them to report that number based on our definition. They would not be obliged to provide that information, but if it was a sensible enough request, based on what I know, it seems likely they would comply.

So how about it? Instead of being lame ducks, why not do something productive? Come up with a definition that is generally considered satisfactory, present it to LL, and see what happens.

I'm no expert on gaming statistics, but I am a scientist so this task shouldn't be too difficult.

Here is my initial attempt:

A Second Life resident is someone who maintains a recurring and regular presence within Second Life. Their account must be at least 30 days old and they must have maintained an average of 3 hours in world per week since the creation of their account.

How many Second Life residents are there?

Suggestions and improvements are welcome.

Best regards,
Eric

[Idyll]

Neva,
Where on earth are you getting these numbers and practices from, schools and small businesses? Schools are buying second life accounts? Where, who, why? Perhaps you are deeply vested in second life academia whereas I am not but this is the first I've heard of it.

"It should be judged like a country, by its GNP and other indicators besides raw population"

Why? It doesn't have the freedom to make its own laws.

"what people do there, how they make money, and what it sustains"

... which is? I hear of lots of little microcontent businesses for micromoney, and a substantial porn-related business,

[Clay Shirky]

@Neva, I don't have an MMO obsession. In fact, I long ago ceded thinking about MMOs to Terra Nova, and Hunter, Ito and Dibbell raz me at conferences for not getting my Warcraft on.

I'm thinking about Second Life precisely because it isn't a game, and because it's being proposed as a fairly profound shift in the social fabric of the net, so I want to understand the cumulated judgment of its users and potential users. (And yes, 829K is quite different from 1M, especially considering that the latter figure includes all new *and* return users.)

Second Life looks like software to me, so I look at the figures as a userbase calculation, but if it looks like a world to you, just switch metaphors: the question I'm asking is, of the potential number of citizens in that world, how many have refused to use the passports they've applied for, how many who did visit have become refugees, and why did they leave?

[Clay Shirky]

@Eric, I kiss you!!!1!

I love this definition:

"A Second Life resident is someone who maintains a recurring and regular presence within Second Life. Their account must be at least 30 days old and they must have maintained an average of 3 hours in world per week since the creation of their account."

The one adjustment I might make is something like "maintained a minimum of 2 hours per week", because averages are susceptible to front-loading effects, like if I sign in once, play around for 30 mins, and then leave the client running in the background overnight, but never return after that, I could be counted as a regular resident 30 days later.

The other, more complicated question is the 1->N relation between users and avatars. You could maybe say "At least one of their accounts must be..." and "must have maintained, with any of their avatars, a minimum of..."

But those are niggles -- this is the crispest statement of the problem I've seen.

[Matt Mihaly]

Prokofy Neva wrote:

It should be judged like a country

I'm glad you're capable of reasonable agreement here. Countries are often judged on population. In fact, the US spends an incredible amount of money and time every 10 years trying to figure out how many people are in it.

--matt

[Prokofy Neva]

Not in the way you imagine, Matt, because you're introducing a fallacy here.

No, a country's population, while relevant, is not any sort of massive indicator of its well-being. You can have small countries that are very wealthy like Switzerland or very poor and oppressed like Belarus. Population ALONE is no indicator of ANYTHING.

That's why I urge getting away from this MMORPG concept, which works for online games like cable television, because the number of subscriptions tells you the number of people who bother to play and be entertained.

In a place like Second Life, like JFK Airport, some people come for short stays; some live there; some visit. You have to look at the GNP and other things like freedom indicators and the health and education systems.

[Prokofy Neva]

"A Second Life resident is someone who maintains a recurring and regular presence within Second Life. Their account must be at least 30 days old and they must have maintained an average of 3 hours in world per week since the creation of their account."

This is silly. Why would you have to stay on for 3 hours? You could be among the most wealthiest avatars, leaving out your vendor for your kick-a$$ vehicle or widget, and play WoW all day, but be logging literally for 5 minuts a week.

Length of log-in tells you nothing about the country. Lots of people have to stop in Ireland every year as their international flights refuel or they make a connecting flight. That's not telling you anything about Ireland other than that their airport duty-free stores have this or that income, which isn't going to be a really important descriptor of their internal economy and life.

[Prokofy Neva]

>the question I'm asking is, of the potential number of citizens in that world, how many have refused to use the passports they've applied for, how many who did visit have become refugees, and why did they leave?

I gave you this information already, for the border customs post that I can control.

[Prokofy Neva]

>Neva,
Where on earth are you getting these numbers and practices from, schools and small businesses? Schools are buying second life accounts? Where, who, why? Perhaps you are deeply vested in second life academia whereas I am not but this is the first I've heard of it.

From RL professors I know
From my tenants
From workshops I've attended in SL

It's routine to grab a group of accounts.

Why would that be hard to accept?

Any business project takes multiple accounts as a routine matter.

BTW, educational groups are given tier-free 4096 m2 land for I believe 30 or longer days as an incentive. so there are lots of school groups. These are college-level, not teenagers or kids because they can only be on the teen grid -- but they are there, too.

The Lindens have published the statistics for the number of educational groups in SL -- there were lots. And with $150 tier instead of $195, and sims for $950 instead of $1250, they have a non-profit rate, there are more and more.

Honestly, I'm not getting this: why all this shock, horror, skepticism, and sneering about SL? I mean, I speak as the official Infamous Antagonist of Second Life who sneers several times a day.

Huh?

Just go in, look at the map. Look at groups. Type in the key words. Go to infohubs. Fly around. It's all there to be seen.

[Prokofy Neva]

Second Life looks like software to me, so I look at the figures as a userbase calculation, but if it looks like a world to you, just switch metaphors:

BTW, that's the kind of condescending remark that I'm responding to, vigorously.

You are positing from your lofty domain as a computer social software Internet Web 1.0 geek that "it's only software; get over it".

But, frankly, it's a world. And I don't say this to be all sentimental and dewey-eyed about a crashy, laggy, opppressive place that is just as much dystopia as utopia.

I just explain, matter-of-factly, that when you have this many people gathering in a place and doing things in 3-D, it's a world.

Not because there are as many as they say.

Not because the hype is true.

But because this many people gathering and doing things makes a world. It's not a world of fantasy men-in-tights stuff. It's a world where elves as well as IBM suits are co-habiting. But world is is -- and you'll be seeing lots more of them. Get used to it.

[IAmEric]

Hi Prokofy,

I hope I don't manage to get on your bad side. From what I've read, that is not a pleasant place to be :)

================
You said in a comment to what I said:

"A Second Life resident is someone who maintains a recurring and regular presence within Second Life. Their account must be at least 30 days old and they must have maintained an average of 3 hours in world per week since the creation of their account."

This is silly. Why would you have to stay on for 3 hours? You could be among the most wealthiest avatars, leaving out your vendor for your kick-a$$ vehicle or widget, and play WoW all day, but be logging literally for 5 minuts a week.

================

I don't know. I am trying to define a "Second Life resident". To be a resident implies that you actually live there. To be counted as someone who lives there, I think you should actually be required to spend time there. Perhaps 3 hours per week is not the best metric. I'm open to suggestions.

You can argue that the number of residents is irrelevant. That may be absolutely true for your purposes, but others may have a legitimate reason for wanting to know how many residents there are. For example, in economics, the "GDP per capita" is a useful statisic. To get at that, you need to know both the macro GDP AND the denominator, i.e. how many "capitae" (forgive my horrible conjugation!) :)

Best regards,
Eric

[Gabriel]

Just reading through the comments on the LL blog about 2 million residents (which are, by the way, more critical of LL than TN's are), and one of the comments caught my eye:

"Can you fathom how immense that truly is? What business, company gotten 16,000 new accounts [per day] for the past 2 months and managed to handle it as well as LL labs did."

Well, if you want to be technical about it: SOE, Turbine, Blizzard ...

[Tom]

If you want to include the fraction of avatars that leave a "fire and forget" vendor in your population number, then you could just modify the original statement to something like:

"A Second Life resident is someone who maintains a recurring and regular influence within Second Life. Their account must be at least 30 days old. In addition, they must have maintained an average of 3 hours in world per week since the creation of their account OR have performed an average of at least US$X per month in net financial transactions over the past 3 months."

The "net transaction" requirement will filter out anyone trying to boost the population number by passing garbage transactions between alts, yet will be sufficient to capture those who have some effect on the world of SL that does not require them to actually log in with great frequency. My suggestion would be to set X=$10, but others may prefer higher of lower usage thresholds.

[Baobab]

Quote Neva "I just explain, matter-of-factly, that when you have this many people gathering in a place and doing things in 3-D, it's a world."

So, by that wording I can rightly claim then; that World of warcraft, everquest, Dark age of camelot, and all the other highly populated MMOs that you shun, are also worlds. I post the following facts:

1> most of them use a 3d client.

2> most have as many or more people logged in at one time than second life

3> most of these people are actively doing something with other people on the server.

Therefor, by your own definition of what second life is it, is also an MMO.

[Clay Shirky]

@Prokofy, you say "This is silly. Why would you have to stay on for 3 hours?", but you don't actually respond. what is your definition of a resident?

[Prokofy Neva]

Of course they're worlds. No one ever said they weren't *worlds*. We just said they are *games* with closed systems. SL is a world with an open system and not-a-game.

People differ in their opinions as to whether SL is a MMO or even MMORPG. I think it's just a world that people use for different things.

Eric, I'm not the one who thought up this hippie commune California term "resident". We've always said it is misleading and horribly politically-correct sounding. To me, consures up visions of a hugely expensive New England psychiatric facility with nurses treading around in white soft shoes speaking in hushed tones about the "residents" when she means "patients".

They cooked up this term to use instead of "players" to get away from the not-a-game stuff and also to show the relationship to land, a business model involving contiguous land and parcels for sale, etc.

You get the term "resident" the minute you make an account, instead of the term "tourist". That's all. "Resident" *is* misleading, but it's merely the term for "accounts".

You could say "users" and "subscribers". The subscribers are people who *pay*. There are 36,000 of them.

While you can fume about my "bad side," I'm really terribly necessary corrective to the extreme geekiness of not only this blog, but most of the blogs pwning the metaverse now -- it's got to make room for more ordinary folks.

What I'm trying to do is point up this kind of scenario:

Plumber about New York City: that's not a city, it's just a collection of badly-flushing toilets and water treatment centers.

Electrician about Niagara Falls: that's not a city with a wonder of the world, it's just a lot of water and bunches of wires.

Clay Shirky about Second Life: that's not a world, it's just software.

People who make software cannot define and proscribe meaning and metrics for worlds. They simply have to zoom out farther from their obsessive collectivitis about counting the number of boxes of their software sold.

The counting of Second Life is a hangover from boxed games and from MMORPGs that judge success by subscription to games.

Second Life should be judged as a country by its GNP and other indicators.

So rather than ranting about how you can backdate this obvious truth to try to warp your bean-counting again back to counting citizens or saying that GNP depends on numbers of citizens, try to grasp the point here: sheer numbers doesn't make sense as a metric.

The metric has to be about what the numbers DO. The 12 million in Belarus aren't doing the same thing as the 12 million in some other country without a Soviet past, etc.

Prokofy

[Gabriel]

"The counting of Second Life is a hangover from boxed games and from MMORPGs that judge success by subscription to games."

Except, when you get to it, SL is a business venture. LL is out to make money, and their idea is that by providing a freeform place to play and allowing many transactions to occur in it, they can take a percentage and make a profit. To LL, "subscribers" are extremely important because they pay for their hardware and their salaries.

Therefore, counting is not a "hangover" from other games. It's a valuable metric to determine whether SL succeeds or fails.

Let's move on to your next point, that SL is a country. I'm going to list several reasons why SL is not an independent state and is, in fact, software.

1. SL does not have internationally recognized boundaries. If this were the only reason SL was not a state, then it could be placed in the same category as Abkhazia (Georgia's breakaway region), Kurdistan in Iraq, Chechnya in Russia, and the Basque region in Spain. However, this is not the only reason:

2. SL does not have a government that provides public service and police power. It has, instead, a company with a customer service department. Which neatly leads into my third reason:

3. SL does not have sovereignty. The residents of SL live in SL because LL keeps it running. SL runs off of LL's servers, its software, and its whim. The residents cannot say "Let us cast off thesedigitalshackles and rise up to control SL!" and expect to run the game. LL is the only group that determines what happens, and they determine this independently of your actions.

Economic activity alone does not make you a sovereign country. You'll have to do much better than transacting money to convince anyone that you should be measured by GDP.

[Thomas Malaby]

Assessment, assessment, assessment. We're desperate to quantify as the precursor to significance, and the (let's be frank) out-of-proportion media attention that SL has garnered makes us all the more desperate to do so. The problem is, we *cannot* assess in any kind of precise way how important SL is in the ultimate sense -- there's too much still up in the air about it. It doesn't matter if we want a fundamentally population-driven metric or a fundamentally market-driven metric (like GNP), neither is going to give us a final word. In fact, each in its own way vastly distorts SL because SL is not one thing (and has shown that it generates the unexpected). Of course, more data (of all kinds) is helpful, but there's no reason to think one of them is going to settle this issue once and for all.

Whether SL is important depends both on what happens in or around it and the broader social transformations of technology and digital society of which it is still one (minor) part. It looks like those interested in making the case for (or against) SL's significance are going to have to do it the old-fashioned way (that would be reasoned argument and the marshalling of evidence, quantitative and qualitative). Anything short of that risks looking suspiciously like either zealous over-promotion or sour grapes. So perhaps instead of getting bogged down in definitional wrangling, we should talk more directly about what we're interested in, and why SL sparks, or doesn't spark, that interest.

[greglas]

I'm with Thomas -- though I guess this was a pitch by Liz to help Clay figure out the numbers, so we're kind of off topic.

With due respect to my own disinterest in the 100K vs. 2M question, I can see why Clay and others would want to understand this. If you're an investor or a business player and you're interested in comparing SL to other opportunities, you want to know how SL's churn rate compares to other Web 2.0 plays out there. If you're interested in Web start-ups, you want that context too.

If TN were interested in #s, otoh, we'd be paying as much attention to Sulake and Neopets as we do to WoW. They have high #s, good RMT economies, they're sticky, etc.

[Cael]

thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0thereisnoweb2.0.

It's just another hype bubble. See also WiMAX, Segway and Second Life.

[mjh]

On the original question: I went to a GDC session by Daniel James a few years back talking about the struggle to get people to play Puzzle Pirates, and he had a little chart: each step of the way--from visiting the web page, to downloading the client, to installing the client, to registering your account, to actually playing the game--there was a dropoff in the number of people completing it. People would even start downloading the client and then stop in the middle.

(i suspect this isn't unique to PP, but is true across all downloadable games, particularly casual or quasi-casual ones; personal anecdote reveals that my desktop is full of installers and shortcuts for demos that i've never worked up the gusto to click on.)

[Clay Shirky]

@Tom, if you're still reading, I'd love to compare notes on the data you've got.

[Prokofy Neva]

1. SL does not have internationally recognized boundaries.

It has recognizable boundaries -- they lie at the log-in point accessible from any computer with an Internet hookup.

They can use the trick Chechnya (Ichkeria) tried, which was to attempt to deposit at the UN headquarters their signed copies of various treaties, in the hopes that acceptance of the package might constitute de facto recognition of their accession to the treaties. Well, they got that far...Now they just need the perm 5 to open up the envelope...

Second Life could declare itself a sovereign nation, it wouldn't be the first nor last time, nor even the most absurd. It does have control over its borders; LL pretty much secures them, barring the occasional hack.

2. SL does not have a government that provides public service and police power.

SL does have a very primitive and Wild West or Wild East kind of sim government, and of course LL plays the role of a federal government. It definitely provides public service and police power. I think LL provides just as much government as, I dunno, Somalia right now, in its own digital, virtual, messed-up way.

3. SL does not have sovereignty.

To be sure, residents don't have sovereignty from Linden Lab -- we're working on it! -- but Linden Lab has emulated sovereignty from the State of California, whose gaming commission has not yet moved against its many casinos, for example.

Stand up, Tier Nation!

[Bill Ashbless]

@Neva: Second Life does not have political boundaries. It does not provide political or civic services. It does not have political sovereignty. It has 36 000 paying users. It is a dinky fish in a big pond.

Come back and try to talk intelligently instead of lying by twisting simple concepts.

[greglas]

Cael -- There is a Web 2.0. There is a Second Life. There's even a Segway. There's also a lot of hype about those three things.

Some words are pretty useless, but when people say a word as much as they've said Web 2.0, you can be pretty sure that they at least *think* they know what they're talking about. Whether that thing they think they are talking about is conceptually coherent or worth thinking about is another question.

I don't know exactly what Web 2.0 is, but here's one attempt to figure out what people think they're talking about when they talk about it.

[Amarilla]

Why all this shock, horror, skepticism and sneering about anything ? The truth is not important to anyone, anymore. We must to be told that Victoria allegedly has an affair at her teenage and she work for CIA;that's important;and that her husband maybe used to smoke joint during his trip to Africa-but we cannot disclose whatever documents on this , because are secret;actually,we are not accountable for what 100 important media freely chose to press about the subject;the numbers and figures about SL are not important at all : this is why LL post them on their site's front page.SL is not a MMORPG, but is a place where ppls are invited to do business,so, ofcourse, the real numbers and figures have no relevance.Afterall,LL is doing business with players money. The Metaverse is here,why all this shock, horror, skepticism and sneering ?!Why aren't you just happy for the 2 billion accounts?! Why dont you just transfer another $150 to LL's Bank account ?! Just believe us : everything is ok, we have 2 billion accounts, and there in Iraq are a lot of WMDs ;they even managed to buy some uranium.Oh, and they are linked to terrorists. And 386958 schools and small business feels a monthly urge to put their money in SL,wich have a steady tremendous growth rate.Dont you wanna be a part of it ?! Really, i dont get it : why would anyone want to know the truth ?!

[dave]

The million users stat reflects SL and Teen SL while the logged in stats reflect the particular server you are looking at?

[Verilazic]

What about measuring SL popularity by something along the lines of bandwidth usage and "server size." I'm not sure how SL works, but in WoW you can get a different point of view on the size of the "population" by looking at how many servers Blizzard has, along with how many users each server can handle.

[Amarilla]

Verilazic, The popularity tells just sweet nothings about how healthy is a business.A lot of bad businesses had a huge popularity. Then they discovered that Enron was based on hypes and inflated numbers, and fraudulent manoevres. There is nobody out there preventing LL staff to make 1 billion fake accounts and to " recycle " the currency. Or to make subscriptions and withdrawals of cash. This is why is important to keep the leisure aside of business : because we have different laws and accountabilities for each of them .

[blaze@blaze.com]

oh give it a rest folks. what's next, an article on how secondlife is killing baby kittens?

[Verilazic]

Good point Amarilla.

[Andy Havens]

Once again I'm horribly glad for Thomas Malaby... "Assessment, assessment, assessment." Not exactly how I'd phrase it, but 1/3 of close enough ;-)

Here's the thing: in marketing (my day gig) we always have a goal for measurements, and we measure for three main reasons: to assess (thanks, Thomas), to predict, and to compare. Often what we do is a funky combo of those. We don't measure just for the freakin' fun of it, because measurement (like any activity) takes time and resources. And, unlike other activities, measurement can generate lots of false wisdom and argument and smoke and bad feelings and gimcrackery.

Which is what's going on here; which is what Clay was complaining about in his article; which is what (I still think) he was doing in his article while complaining about it.

This is a long comment. Sorry, but I'm wading in with both feet...

Before setting out to measure, you need a goal for the measurement. If you think that "2 million residents" is a "bad measurement," you need to tell me what you want a "good measurement" to accomplish; what are you trying to predict, compare or assess?

"A Second Life resident is someone who maintains a recurring and regular presence within Second Life. Their account must be at least 30 days old and they must have maintained an average of 3 hours in world per week since the creation of their account."

Really? Well, in that case, if you were comparing SL activity to many other activities, most of us would not be:

- sexually active (plenty of folks don't spend 3 hours a week getting it on)

- spiritual (church and other religious activities count for less than 3 hours a week for many people)

- members of our original, nuclear families (I spend about 45 minutes a week in toto on the phone and writing emails with my parents and brother)

- audiences of any major network TV show in history (most of which last 30-60 minutes per week)

By the "3 hours a week" measurement, I'm not sure we do anything except work, sleep, watch TV and (in general) surf the 'Net. I read more than 3 hours a week, but lots of that is for work, some is magazines, some is blogs... Not all one source. Maybe I read in one book, but then that book is done and I move on... I don't spend no 3-hours a week on any particular site, that's for sure.

Maybe players of WoW and other... oh. Ah. Yes. Now we're getting somewhere. Is that what we're comparing SL to? Remember: predict, compare, assess. Are we comparing SL to WoW?

OK. Then I have question about WoW: How many residents does it have? Answer: zero. Even if you take the lowest number Clay's willing to allow for SL, it's a VW that allows for residency. Permanence. Economy. Creativity. WoW? Not so much. When I log off, my character is in The Land of Nod. I leave no shadow behind me on the server except generic stuff I can sell in the auction house, and nobody cares if they buy from me or my evil twin Tauren brother, Garth.

So. In a comparison of SL to WoW, in terms of creative VR tools, SL must be judged a complete and overwhelming success.

Except that's ridiculous. Because WoW doesn't provide those tools. So how can we compare WoW to SL in terms of...

Whoops. Back to where we started. Can't compare the two. Which is what I've been saying all along. You might as well compare WoW to the number of people who rented movies at Blockbuster or went to Disney World.

Because we're comparing things without a goal for that measurement. We're measuring because it's fun to say, "This thing's big. That thing's bigger. Look at how many people fit in the phone booth."

Which, yes, is the problem with all the "2 million residents of SL" press stories. [btw... there has been serious press about SL since 2002, not just since the 1 million or 2 million "resident" mark: see http://secondlife.com/news/]

But that's also the problem with simply saying, "Look at this number problem!" and not having a solution, other than saying, "I want a number that conforms to a different (3 hours a week?) goal-less paradigm."

OK. Enough on comparison. Until you tell me exactly what you want to compare SL to and why, I can't give you a reasonable argument for or against. Well, I'm trying on the "against" thing r.e. WoW and "3 hours a week."

Coming up with "apples-to-apples" comparisons is going to be a problem, because there's not a lot to compare SL to. Or, if there is, we haven't brought it up. Clay says, in his article, LambdaMOO. I find that so... odd... I'm just going to skim on by and assume the comment was meant as litotes.

Let's invite other comparisons, sure. That would be fine. As long as we have a purpose. If the purpose is to say, "Look. SL is better/worse than VR service A, B, C, and the numbers we've set up as a comparison bear that out..." OK. Great. That's a valid review system. That might help people choose one thing over another.

But, right now, would *ANY* measure of user acceptance of SL render a benefit to a potential customer that would help him/her choose to spend time in SL vs...

MySpace? Google Maps? There? WoW?

Right now, Clay thinks that the dubiously positive SL press is causing people to choose to try SL when it may be unwarranted. That really doesn't bother me much. If you're not media-savvy enough to read through some hype and judge SL on its merits after you give it a whirl... if it sucks for you, but you keep playing because the Business Week article was so rosy... well, you're a loon. I think the benefits to the VR/MMO scene from the SL press far outweigh the negatives of the dodgy numerics. We have far more people and companies interested in being involved than ever before. Which is great.

To summarize: If there's a good reason for a better number for comparison, and a good thing to compare it to, let me hear them. If not, complaint noted about the 2 million thing being PR noise. We knew that. Truly, though... I'm kinda over it.

We can talk more about assessment and prediction if you want. The first is often used to quantify internal company goals for shareholders, employees, customers, etc. They can be very specific and even personal. When you assess company strengths and weaknesses over time, those measurements can become (hopefully) predictive.

Let's look at the four logged-in numbers on SL's econ screen today (12/18). Residents Logged-In During:

Last 7 Days: 233,536
Last 14 Days: 338,946
Last 30 Days: 541,827
Last 60 Days: 832,134

Looking just at these numbers, from an assessment standpoint, we can see that the number of logins/day is:

For the last 7 days: 33,362
For the last 14 days: 24,210
For the last 30 days: 18,061
For the last 60 days: 13,869

Logins/day is a velocity number -- how fast are people logging in. Not a size number -- how many of them are in the system in total. Size is important, yes. But velocity is more so, because it predicts size. Looking at this, we see a good trend: More (much more) velocity in the more recent time frames.

OK. So you may say, "Well, all those 7-day numbers are because of new logins. Many of whom jumped on-board because of bogus '2-million resident' stories in the press."

Fair enough. That's one data point. Let's go back and look at the same data for November 18:

Last 7: (192,597) = 27,514/day
Last 14: (270,104) = 19,293/day
Last 30: (435,478) = 14,516/day
Last 60: (589,289) = 9,821/day

Similar pattern; recent usage/day is higher. But now, with two data points we can do some evaluation. From November to December, the growth in users/day at each level was:

Last 7 days: +17.53%
Last 14 days: +20.31%
Last 30 days: +19.63%
Last 60 days: +29.18%

Here's some weirdness! Even though we're thinking (supposing, pondering) that much of our rate of *use* is because of new (and, we think, shallow) users... the greatest rate-in-rise of use is in the oldest set of folks; people who've been "trailing" in the last 60 days.

Let's go back further to October 18... you can't get there from the drop-down that Linden uses, but you can type in the next logical URL for the Excel spreadsheet and get at it ;-)

7 days: (148,478) = 21,211/day
14 days: (194,072)= 13,862/day
30 days: (271,769) = 9,059/day
60 days: (405,931) = 6,766/day

which, when we compare 10/18 to the 11/18 data is:

Last 7 days: +22.91%
Last 14 days: +28.15%
Last 30 days: +37.59%
Last 60 days: +31.12%

Now we see two interesting things in this data:

1. Bigger month-to-month growth in October-to-November vs. Nov-Dec. Let me repeat; the *growth* in logins/day has slowed across two month's worth of comparative data. That's all that means. [There's a weird spike in there... in the Oct 30 day data... may be because of the password leakage issue]

2. And the lowest drop in the slow-down is in the 60-day bucket. We're now talking not even about velocity, but acceleration. Or, to be nit-picky, negative acceleration, commonly called deceleration. Size or volume over time-squared. Because we're measuring the change of logins/day over month. Time-over-time variation.

So not only is some of the greatest positive change over time (velocity) seen in the longest-lived bucket, but the lowest change in change (deceleration) is in the same bucket. Fascinating stuff...

Now... Just so we're clear that I'm clear... this analysis of mine is total crap.

It's based on three time-based data points, each of which is based on four numeric data points that relate to one statistic; log-ins. It's an interesting exercise. It says nothing, frankly, other than what I just said, summarized as:

From the months of October to December, we can see that the rate-of-use of Second Life, as measured by logins-per-day, rose across all categories of measurement (7, 14, 30 and 60 day buckets). The rate-of-rise seems to be slowing, however, as the most recent comparative period (11/18 to 12/18) shows a rate-of-rise of 17.53% vs. a rate of 22.91% for the similar period the month before (in the 7-day bucket). The largest rate-of-rise, however, and the lowest slow-down in same, is in the 60-day bucket, which dropped from 31.12% in Oct-to-Nov to 29.18% in Nov-to-Dec.

We know SL is growing. Therefore, again... this analysis is, except as an internal assessment, somewhat garbonzo. We can ask, "Why did the rate of growth slow from Oct-Nov to Nov-Dec?" Some (like me) might speculate that it has to do with the holidays. There's lots of that ho-ho-ho going on, you know.

But we've had huge SL press in just the last month, since 11/18. If the "2 million users" stories are causing all the froth, then the rate in growth should be on the rise over the previous month's timeframe. Eh? It will be interesting to see what the rate-of-rise does for Dec-to-Jan and Jan-to-Feb.

If it levels out for any reasonable time at, let's say (just eyeballing here), +15% per month (ie, 15% more logins/day every month than the month before), and we equate logins in some linear way with accounts and profit... then you've got a pretty robust growth mechanism in place. If churn has been, as Clay and others have been suggesting, 75% over the 4-ish year history of SL, that's about 2%/month (very rough; no geometry at this hour for Andy, sorry). If Linden can add 15% and lose 2% a month... OK, that works.

Again... That's a whole lot of spinning from just three month's worth of data. And I'm the one who's saying, "It's bogus spinning, AND it doesn't matter."

We still don't know, as Clay is asking, if these logins are "repeat" or "religious" or "heavy-duty" users. We don't know if 99% of these logins are for 1 minute and 1% are for 300 hours. That's important stuff, too.

I don't know enough about what any of this means to make a reasonable, goal-based, assessment of any stats we've got right now. I know enough, though, to be suspicious of both the flaming PR and the flaming thereof.

When SL has a similar enough or robust enough competitor (Rock on, Areae!), then I think we can get prickly about comparative stats. Or not.

I never liked "Everybody Loves Raymond," even though, apparently, everybody loved him. And I liked "Foucault's Pendulum" much better than "The Da Vinci Code," despite the wondermous success of the latter.

So, again, maybe stats are...less than what we need to "assess assess assess."

Here endeth the waaaaay too long comment. Sorry for the wind. At this point in such a new media, I'm just real leery of both overly-good press one way, and overly cynical press the other. I'd like to stay balanced and focused on what we do know about SL: apocalyptic furry goth disco diaspora gambling pron.

[Richard Bartle]

Andy Havens>Before setting out to measure, you need a goal for the measurement. If you think that "2 million residents" is a "bad measurement," you need to tell me what you want a "good measurement" to accomplish; what are you trying to predict, compare or assess?

What does Linden Labs have as its goal in announcing these figures? Publicity?

Virtual worlds have always boasted about the size of their user base. A newbie is more likely to head for a world with more players than a competitor, because "if it has more players then it must be better", right? It's certainly worth looking at first. If the numbers themselves are impressive in absolute terms, you don't even need a competitor: "eat rotten meat: a million flies can't be wrong".

Linden Labs wamt more SL players. Announcing how many sign-ups they have is one way to encourage this. The thing is, this is a mechanism that has been discredited in the rest of the virtual world industry, for reasons that apply whether your virtual world is game-like or social-only.

>Whoops. Back to where we started. Can't compare the two. Which is what I've been saying all along. You might as well compare WoW to the number of people who rented movies at Blockbuster or went to Disney World.

No, you can compare the two. SL and WoW are similar enough at a fundamental level that we can talk about them both on this blog and yet not have discussions about Blockbuster or Disney World. Usage figures are important because they're understood by non-players. Politicians may not understand why virtual worlds are worth anything, but they know what "7,500,000 players" means. Even though he doesn't write much about virtual worlds, journalists call on SirBruce ahead of almost everyone who writes on this blog because it's he who has the usage figures. Business plans always include usage figures for "similar products".

If nothing else, player head count is important because player head count is important..!

LL is telling the world about its SL sign-ups because they hope to get more sign-ups as a result. It's a strategy that's working for the moment. The reaction of other virtual worlds is understandable, though: if the media think 2 million sign-ups is impressive, well look at us, we have X (where X>2) million sign-ups. Except, we've already been there, done that, and found there are better (albeit not perfect) ways of measuring the populations of virtual worlds.

Richard

[Ace Albion]

Going back to the numbers- I think Prokofy is right to suggest there are people (or organisations) who are signing up blocks of accounts with the same surnames. Because SL surnames are only available for a limited time, so anyone who, for example, wants to mark out a family's worth (either RL or SL roleplay family) of names will do so.

I don't have any numbers on that, except to say I know people who have done this- registered half a dozen accounts to bag surnames for a collection of avatars. They probably don't log them all in.

Dave's (I think- it was way up there somewhere) point about the signups including teen grid, and the logins including only the live main grid might be something. That or maybe they double count everyone who logs into the test grids too :)

[Amarilla]

Andy, with all respect, i can tell you exactely what a resident active player is : is that gamer who pays more $ than the company is spending for mantaining his account active. Yes, it's about a gamer, not about a working programmer doing a business with his work on LL's servers/platform : a real programmer would never give away his work under the provisions of SL EULA and ToS. We are talking about gamers/gamblers. Erm, ofcourse, this doesn't applies when it's about copy -bot.

Shirky,you aint gonna see any real numbers. Keeping tham secret is a part of the " technology ".

[Gareth Eckley]

N.B. The below is an opinion.

Ahahaha.

*Wipes tear from Eye.*

SL is a club. Or perhaps a service. Since it has no ability to project political power and no coherent or credible "voice" as a populace and can be ended with an axe and a large magnet, it isn't a country, developing nation or anything of the sort.

Until it has the ability to project force, it isn't anything but a sociology project and repeatedly stating how "it's a developing nation" isn't going to change that.

A cross channel ferry has a pool of changing visitors and some permanent residents. It does not legally fall within any other juridiction for much of it's existance. It has it's own set of laws. It has an active economy and a defined heirachy. It has it's own in-group linguistic terms.

A cross channel ferry is not a nation-state. A bunch of users connected to a server is not a QNE. Scale is irrelevant.

If your country can lose a vast chunk of it's populace because their REAL country changes their laws regarding net traffic or online usage, then it's not really a country, is it?

It's a fad. It will die.

A real metaverse will only come to pass when it's something millions of users get by default. A bit like how millions of people started surfing the web when their OS started coming with a web client and a PC with a modem.

[Prokofy Neva]

Andy, don't forget how your measurements can get skewed by the day of the week:

1. Tuesdays -- payday, when loads of people finally do log in those alts to collect their stipends -- and maybe pay monthly tier with them

2. Wednesdays -- patch day, when people don't log in at all, and wait for the jello to set the next day.

[Endie]

Prokofy said:
Second Life should be judged as a country by its GNP and other indicators.

O rly?

Why is it that the kool-aid consumers from SLtopia always claim to be a "country"? I don't see intermediate claims, nor a firm grounding in IR theory for their spoutings. I never see them researching and discussing precedents, either the serious attempts at micronationalism such as Sealand or the Freedom Ship, nor the equally loony cyber-babbling of those such as Cyber Yugoslavia?

Again, if any of the SL-advocates had bothered to acquire a grounding in what the rest of humanity has come up with, instead of blithely imagining that they tread on virgin territory, then they could try and appropriate Benedict Anderson's ideas about nations as imagined communities, or Hobsbawm's description of nations as political creations aimed at economic ends. I'd disagree, but I'd have to admit they'd be harder and more fun to argue with.

My suggestion is that the closest to nationality that Second Life could involve would be the treatment of avatars as legal persons, along the same lines as companies. Good luck persuading any judge in the world.

And there's the point: if no state in the world recognises you, then you are not a nation, a country or a state, either de facto or de jure. You are a bunch of hobbyists playing in a little, happy, furry-friendly cybergame (and oh, it is a game, even if, like golfers, some of you play for money).

[Amarilla]

Cmon Endie ! You aren't snip his bubble away , are you ?! Loooooool ! Endie, what are you trying to do here, are you trying to tell him that the Elves are not for real ??!!! It's not a game, it's a Metaverse ! Sleep well, sweet prince....ops, sry, dont forget the monthly subscription plzzzzzzz.....

3. SL does not have sovereignty.

To be sure, residents don't have sovereignty from Linden Lab -- we're working on it! -- but Linden Lab has emulated sovereignty from the State of California, whose gaming commission has not yet moved against its many casinos, for example.

"The law hasn't caught up with our illegal gambling den yet, therefore it must be legal"

The FBI could decide tomorrow that the "age-play" in SL warrants an investigation, and proceed to seize the SL servers just as they did to Steve Jackson Games when investigating hacking. At that point, the world goes *poof*, as does your investment in it.

[Prokofy Neva]

>SL is a club. Or perhaps a service. Since it has no ability to project political power and no coherent or credible "voice" as a populace and can be ended with an axe and a large magnet, it isn't a country, developing nation or anything of the sort

Many people say that about Belarus, too, yet, it has a founding seat at the UN.