LynetteRadio

djvx

[quote]
feh. 3d, vr, sl, bah! teh enter-nets r 4 porn!!1!
^_^ -{ZoMFg -- w00t!
I'm n ur blog, commenting ur discussion.
rofllololollerz
[/quote]

-- something witty and meta____ goes here --

beefhaze

rhinrichs

Comparing Second Life's "statistics" - however super-inflated as they are - with other popular sites is a good way to start. While the measurements are different - for instance, although you can be a return visitor to any of the social sites without ever registering, and that will show up on the pageviews per month column, in Second Life you have to have an account to be able to log in at all. The alternative is to compare Second Life with MMORPGs, MMOGs, and other synthetic worlds also requiring accounts to participate - and again there will be difficulties there, since most analysts refuse to "believe" the numbers for Second Life either. To make the case even more confusing, Second Life is neither a MMOG nor a "social web site", but probably something more akin to a cross-breed of MySpace and eBay within a 3D environment.

It takes an analysis of those three aspects to reach some conclusions. Throwing some statistics at it and see how it fares is simply not going to work. For instance, Amazon.com has perhaps a hundred million users, but rarely more than 10,000 are concurrently online. How does that compare to Second Life? It has far less concurrent users, but 50 times as much users. What is a "regular user" of Amazon.com then? Are they classified according to how much they spend there? And how many of the users logging in concurrently to Amazon.com are registered users?

The bit that makes things more complex here is that when a journalist wants to report on the "impact" of Second Life, it has to start from some statistics to catch their readers' attention. The journalist may have no knowledge of what the statistics mean and how they relate or compare to other statistics. Here is another statistic that I've used often in the past: "Google entries." eBay has 400 million, Second Life 23.8 million entries on Google (FaceBook has 34.4 million). So does this mean that eBay has 20 times the "impact" on the Web as does Second Life? It's a possible conclusion. In any case, when measuring the "impact" of Second Life, we don't have "standard statistics", but we do have some numbers - official ones from Linden Lab, which can be independently validated. The only issue remaining here is how to interpret them.

After thinking quite a bit on this article, and doing some research on my own, I saw that posting a comment here would be way too long, so I did it on my own blog - http://gwynethllewelyn.net/article131visual1layout1.html

Remember when Amazon was going to change the way we buy everything else?

Both hyped. Who knows...

Three cheers to the idea that reporters should check their stories, and what the heck, maybe even try out the service they are writing about.

But the idea of a company getting all up in their PR firm's grill to tamp down unsupportable claims? Well, that could only happen in an alternative world...

limnthis

jwikert

tparisi

but there's a perspective not to be overlooked; this is the same process that got the graphical 2d-based internet (aka "WWW") rolling.

AOL did the same thing as SL. in 1993 AOL was distributing a graphical browser and many people had a hard time telling it from mosaic or netscape or whatever. i was an AOL user in 1992 (and i was building web sites in 93) and people got really excited about AOL. and this is what second life is doing, as well.

they're proprietary, what goes in don't come out, they're an isolated island and you need to download a browser to use it. gee, and let me add another parallel which is that their technology is feeble and their methods of governing communities (as well as customer service) is lousy. i could list others. like the hype factor and the number of users.

but this 'proprietary island' model will change in the coming 1-3 years and we will see systems like multiverse, mediamachines, and community-based models crack this open.

anyway, AOL and SL generate interest for a model that eventually replaces them.

my point is this: SL and the media around it indicate that we are moving towards open virtual worlds. we've seen trends emerge, so let's watch history repeat itself. after all, SL is just AOL in 3d.

pighed

The left-brainers can continue to try to analyze Web 3D, and the analysts can try to put it in a box. I suspect that it will defy categorization for some time to come. Meantime, the people who will believe in it will continue to try to make it work. Personally I would bet my money on the second group-- oh wait, in fact, I have. But that's just me, and I'm a Believer.

Why does this topic spark so much polarized discussion? Since I've been in the world of online 3D - about 12 years now - public opinion continues to divide evenly between the skeptical reactionaries and the starry-eyed zealots, with hardly any room in the middle for a realist like me. Clay seems to be in the former camp and I doubt anything is going to shake him of that.

What I fear most about articles like this is that it frames the dialog as a debate over the merits of the medium itself, rather than an examination of what is good and bad about one specific product. I think Clay doesn't care whether SL is good or bad: 3D is useless and this is the smoking gun he's been looking for.

The fact is, as pioneering as SL is, it is hardly ready for mass consumption. It's no surprise to me that only, say, 15% of those registered users do anything with the software on a regular basis. It's a hard product to use and it has a steep learning curve. Too bad Clay couldn't just stick to exploring that issue for its own sake.

tparisi

MOO/MUSH/MUX/TinyMUD grew out of, say it with me, MUD.

Lets go wild!

eraserhead

And it's that kind of pedantry that makes the mainstream users go wild!

Nick Douglas

eraserhead

I agree with you and here is a good article discussing the issue.

http://callfromnextlife.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-we-need-o...

It is pretty clear to me that SL will become open sourced and with IBM and Sun taking such interest, it is ony a matter of time before SL servers will be available outside LL.

Best regards,
Eric

IAmEric

I got a pre-launch demo of Second Life, straight from Mitch and the Second Life team, several years ago at PC Forum, so I'm well aware of Mitch's bullishness on the subject. Mitch has done more to advance the state of the world through better technology than I ever will, but neither my admiration nor awe for him is enough to make me suspend my own judgment, and on this subject, I think Mitch is wrong.

More to the point, my contention is not that LL is lying, but that they are happily tolerating unsupportable claims on their behalf made by the press. Note that the core of the piece is reasons why reporters, not LL employees, are treating the story with undue credulity.

Rosedale has been admirably direct in some forums, but quite content to have the "1.x million" figure quoted in others. I'd take LL's bona fides more seriously if they'd pull the Total Accounts number from the login page, and shrink the recently logged in window to 30 days, but these changes, as unlikely as they are, still don't begin to get at the real number, nowhere reported on or derivable from their stats page, which is return users.

As for the in-world experience, and especially the technological support for this sort of thing, you are reading something into the article that is not there. I am not a skeptic of the _technological_ success of SL, but of its social success. WoW long ago proved that the tech scales to many passionate users; the difficulty is in creating many passionate users.

As for pulling my punches because "there are lots of people involved", there are a lot _more_ people on the receiving end of the current hype, and they are the ones I'm concerned with. LL employees can take care of themselves; my audience is the people hearing only that there are millions of people using SL; they haven't been getting their USRDA of skepticism.

cshirky

In that time, we've grown out of our antiquated space-age concepts of "the future" and realized what the true powers of the internet and information age are.

spending as much time as you possibly can configuring an avatar for activity that is nothing more than an augmented version of getting *off* the computer in the first place is NOT what has made the web such a treasure trove of resources.

in fact, SL violates one of the prime capabilities of the web - interoperability. it's entirely proprietary. why would i spend as much time as i can making something arbitrary for a small subset of people to access? rather - ONLY that small subset of folks can access it, AFTER paying for it, and AFTER going through their own series of hoops to get to what you're offering.

the novelty of SL is what sells it. SL offers *nothing* past that novelty.

threv

There are two points to my argument: 1.) technology is ready for this now, whereas it wasn't even a few years ago, 2.) the accusations against LL are misdirected.

Regarding the second point, I already posted a quote directly from Rosedale. That was not obtained covertly. If you really want to know what LL is telling the media, it doesn't take a lot of effort to find it. The easy thing to do is to blame them for irresponsible reporting by media that really has no clue about it.

I just hope that bloggers can try to be a little more responsible when reporting material. Especially when there are lots of people involved, it makes sense to do a little homework.

IAmEric

However in your haste to call for the emperors clothes I think you miss an essential difference between Second Life and what has gone before, namely the rich support for user-content and in particular the scripting language LSL. These make Second Life a qualitatively different environment from its predecessors.

I'm a professional coder. I returned to Second Life a few months ago after having first tried it in early 2005 - at that time I'd dismissed is as a pretty thin experience not worth my time, and yes I do find it intensely irritating that my former logon is included in their total numbers. However this time around I've stayed, and because the power of the development tools, particularly LSL, has advance to that interesting point where the system can achieve things that the creators never envisaged.

Anyone who's ever developed an application with a significant user development environment behind it will recognise this phenomenon: the jaw-dropping moment at which one of your users comes back and does something with your software that you yourself never realized it could do. This is a very large flag that says pay attention.

Not everyone is a coder of course, but many people like to 'create' in some sense (even if it's just putting together a cool looking avatar). Second Life gives an opportunity for that and then, most importantly, provides a ready-made audience to show off. Sit in any popular gathering place in Second Life land you'll see this happening all the time. As one of my friends observed, Second Life is a vanity-driven culture. It sounds trivial, but to dismiss that would be as much a mistake as dismissing the importance of the fashion industry in real life.

Of course many people will never 'get' Second Life in the same way that many people never 'got' IRC. But I believe Second Life has now evolved to the point where it has sufficiently wide appeal that it is sustainable, even if the percentage of people to whom it appeals at the moment is still limited. What I think most likely to happen, and hope the Lindens can facilitate, is that as more capabilities are added (and more content is created inline) that percentage will grow. There are a lot of caveats in there of course, not least the scalability of the grid which has recently shown signs of strain, but to dismiss Second Life as simply a 'Try Me' virus is to make as big a mistake as the hype in the mainstream press. (Second) Life is more complex than that.

cruachan

Mitch Kapor on the Power of Second Life
http://www.3pointd.com/20060820/mitch-kapor-on-the-power-o...

and ask yourself if you are suffering from "macromyopia"."

I'm suffering from wall-of-text-aphobia. So someone who has a vested interest in SL can blow ALOT of smoke up ours asses.

Didn't read it, didn't need to. I probably speak for the majority of people when I say I don't need someone "explaining" to me the great things about Second Life.

I'm assuming most people who read Valleywag are not new to the internet, and have been around the virtual block before. SL is nothing new, go preach to the people who still log on to LambdaMOO and try and convert them, hell they already believe in that platform, your jobs half done.

eraserhead

Your use of immanent confused me. I can see how either imminent or immanent was appropriate. Did you mean transcendence or immediacy?

GlennFleishman

By your own admission,

"I may have been made immune to the current mania by ODing on an earlier belief in virtual worlds:"

I too was burned in the past by believing in this stuff. During the prior crazes, I was a graduate student at UIUC and had access to cool stuff at NCSA, e.g. the "CAVE", and similar things. However, I think your prior disappointments have made you too jaded. I suggest that you really take a second look at this stuff. I believe you will eventually come to an appreciation that "this time it is different". For example, what kind of bandwidth was available in 1993 or even 1996 for that matter? What was the state of graphics processors? Technologically, it is the time for this stuff to take off and we're seeing it happen.

If you haven't seen it, I also suggest you read this:

Mitch Kapor on the Power of Second Life
http://www.3pointd.com/20060820/mitch-kapor-on-the-power-o...

and ask yourself if you are suffering from "macromyopia".

Hamlet gave the link, but here is the direct quote from Philip Rosedale:

"Actually, it is much higher than that," he said. "Although Second Life is still challenging to get used to, about 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later. 10% is pretty good given the computer requirements and steep learning curve"

I also suggest you read Tateru Nino's blog. She has some fascinating and thought provoking articles.

http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/bloggers/tateru-nino

Best regards,
Eric

IAmEric

there are several, though simple things I don't get in SL.

Why do people build stairs and delicate escalators, if they can fly?

Why do they spend money (real or virtual) buying chairs if they cannot get tired?

Why do they replicate their rather low quality RL architectural, physical environment _exactly_ in SL when they have the tools to create _anything_ they want?

Why does everyone look like in SL as if they were from the front page of People magazine? Are there any ugly (normal, handicapped, not-so-cute, and/or with disabilities) people there at all?

I guess any of these questions point to some fundamental flaws in the logic of SL. But maybe I am wrong. When VRML was hot I had the chance to advise against investing in a larger VRML based environment, and ever since SL is around i wonder if I had made a mistake back then. In my gut though I feel that I was right, and I am right to be very skeptical now.

barrett

But yes, the idea of the Metaverse is ludicrous; if I wanted to walk through stacks of books, I'd go to Borders. The advantage of the Internet is that it -doesn't- replicate the problems of the phenomenological universe, and the metaphor of a 3D world with avatars is not a good one for most of the things you actually might want to do online.

costik

You aren't convinced that Second Life is the second coming of the Internet?

Blasphemy!

This is the future son! My god, how can you be so blind! Look, its 3-D, you can fly, you can create stuff and sell it! And by the way, have you seen the size of my virtual cock!

I for one am at my saturation point with Second Life hype.

SL has anywhere from 10-15k people on at a time, so thats what, less than 1% of "Total Users". Even if you say 17k, Mr. Au, your still at 1%. At best only 1% are on at any given time. Gee, I guess the other 99% just don't "get it".

New avatar creation counts towards those totals, so if you create an account, and never log in, your still counted. Also assume most people have more than one avatar. Then factor in accounts created by "land barons" used to purchase First Land. Cancel you account, your still counted.

I would be amazed actually if Second Life had 100k regular users.

As this article pointed out, SL is nothing new, its just a graphics engine strapped onto MUSH/MOO code.

People talk about its educational uses, well this was done with MUSHes and MOOs back in their "day".

People talk about making money in SL, well people are making money off other MMO's, big whoop. If you want to devote your time and effort to making a living off SL, more power to you, but don't get upset when people snicker at you behind your back.

It's SOOOOO refreshing to read articles like this, I mean there is only so much you can polish a turd after all.

eraserhead

Not quite.

690,800/1,901,173 is .36

That means the rate of return is 36%, not 63%. So, it's actually horrible. You just divided backwards.

Don't feel bad, I totally forgot how to figure out the break out point for a root locus lying on the real axis on my controls exam today... ba!

Adam

mpesce

the gargantuan amount of capital flowing into tech/new media stratups, married with the painful scarcity of successful exits from same, is fueling a hype machine like never before - absent real rewards VCs and entrepreneurs get desperate and start inventing imagined ones, or at least invent seeming metrics making usccess seemingly around the corner. the fact that the new nirvana is barely wiped down and propped up failed business models of tech bubbles past seems to bother, or capture the attention, of no one

Grand_Egress

At the moment I type this, Clay, there are 17,041 people in-world, and given the new account creation rate (about 10-14K total through a 24 hour period), only a few thousand of those are likely to be new users. Concurrent users at peak has exceeded 10,000 for over four months, and is now approaching 20K at prime time.

Also, that number has very little to do with "highly promoted events", because most events are architecturally limited to 120-140 people maximum, for one thing-- you can get around that, but it takes some serious planning-- and for another, most SL activity isn't based on around one-time events, it's based around communities and established popular sites.

Your point on churn rate is very well taken, however. One of my writers reported on the scene and has a very good quote from Philip about that:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/11/new_world_numbe.html

Wagner James Au

Adam In Texas

Thier conversion rate, the rate at which a registered user becomes an active (or rather pays) is debateable, but I would guess its about 5%

Passerby

And now I need to go snag Buble 30 (:P) just as a mere SEO measure.

franky

lynne

Narnia

SusanWu

Second Life is a brave prototype, but wait until this whole idea gets a "3.0" type of buzzword attached to it before it's ready for prime time.

Malaclypse