Personally I think I understand how LL got itself into this situation way back in 2003 when first getting started… Their method of counting residents was not nearly so far off the mark, and as things progressed more and more people signed up and downloaded the software only to find their equipment would not handle Secondlife. Well the numbers kept looking better and better…until they reached a point where backtracking with more accurate figures just became a hard thing to do. Then the first mainstream press came along and those numbers were published and changing to more honest way of reporting number became even harder because their reputation wold be called into question.

I can understand how that may have happened…. It would be extremely hard to backtrack with out losing face. Kinda of like a snowball once it gets started rolling downhill.

What I think should be done is for LL to simply recognize is that they have forever changed the virtual world (for the better IMHO) and swallow their pride and lay out the true accurate numbers.

I understand there are many folks that don’t have any appreciation for secondlife… there is a huge learning curve to enter the world and not everyone is willing to invest their time to learn how to participate and reach a functional active role in the world. It has taken a year for me to learn enough to really begin to reap the benefits of Secondlife in a profitable way (admittedly I am a bit slow) and I am guessing this to be one of the reasons for a high churn rate.

I must admit that I am a FAN of Secondlife and it really wouldn’t matter if there were only a thousand people active… In fact considering all the server problems lately I think I would enjoy it more.

That said, I will do anything I might be able to do to persuade LL to bite the bullet and get more realistic with their figures.

Harold

If I was saying that the Lindens mulch their front lawn with ground-up baby kittens or some similarly scurrilous accusation, you could infer something from the source, but the questions I’m posing are actually pretty simple. I can’t see how the value of asking “How many users does Second Life actually have?” is much affected by the URL it appears under.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I agree those questions are important and fair but as for the bias part I must disagree based solely on where the piece is being published and the timing. I believe where your material is being published as well as the time does have some bearing on reader interpretation of bias, hence my first comment above. I didn’t say you personally have a bias, but wonder if Nick is a little too happy to have anybody with name recognition write a piece questioning Second Life’s numbers.

BTW, I do think you are right to question the numbers and agree with most everything Harold wrote in the post.

Let’s be real about Valleywag. The same Valleywag that was posting on the bathroom habits of Google execs for pete’s sake. I don’t take much seen there as serious and it’s problematic when they do try and break news because most of their content is rumor-laden and seems like sensationalism purely for the sake of entertainment. Hey, I can get with that format and have enjoyed the site, but not without some amount of suspicion as to motives.

Right or wrong, your material is subject of additional scrutiny for appearing in essentially the National Enquirer of tech. I can see wanting to get more exposure than you get in Many-to-Many, but since Denton took over the writing duties I think there has been a much higher percentage of anti-SL posts. That’s purely speculative on my part as I don’t have the exact figures, but as I mentioned to Harold above, it would be interesting to look at the data there and compare. I believe a graph would show a higher concentration of anti-SL posts at Valleywag.

Why the uptick in negative Valleywag coverage for SL under Nick’s writing watch (he’s always been the owner of course) if there is no bias? Did Valleywag just become interested in something that’s been around for 2+ years and been more active in 2006 than previously?

I wasn’t aware Nick was republishing your material. Though it’s none of my business I’m curious why in light of what I’ve laid out above and if you wanted to be taken in serious light you’d would want it republished on Valleywag? To cut to the chase, you’re doing Nick a bigger favor than he’s doing you.

And for the record if it matters, I consider myself cautiously optimistic to Second Life future. I think what they are doing for advancing public awareness of 3D virtual worlds for other than gaming (some reporters and journalists still wrongly refer to Second Life as a “game”) is noteworthy and deserving of attention, but their execution and platform itself is suspect to any person who spends more than a few days checking it out. Their biggest problem is reliability which any serious business must have. The reliability has gotten worse from what I’ve experienced and no matter how many new people/alts/avatars/residents they bring in that certainly isn’t an improving the problem.

Here are the three questions I’m asking:

1. How many people (not Residents) have created an avatar in Second Life?
2. Of that number, how many have returned 30 or more days later?
3. How fast is that latter figure growing?

The wildest fan and the most ardent skeptic of Second Life could agree on these questions, and could agree that their answers are free of interpretive bias.

Thanks for this, and let me know if you get any numbers that seem more accurate than the Residents figures. (You’ve got my email in my comment submission.)