“Journalists” Scramble to Hop onto the Anti-Second Life Bandwagon: What’s the point?
A recent veritable onslaught of anti-Second Life journalism seems to be the “scoop de jour” for the end-of-the-year tech stories. Shirky and others are having their five minutes of fame on the back of Second Life user stats. Good for them. I suppose when there’s nothing more important to write about journalists become mathematicians and market researchers to make ends meet.
I won’t even link to the stories here because I really don’t like the idea of a smirky-Shirky watching his web traffic soar and feeling justified in his empty attack. My normal reaction to such obvious “I better write a story on this thing everyone is paying attention to” journalism is to ignore it. Then I noticed that one of my all time fav websites, Boing Boing, excerpted the story and Xeni (Why Xeni?! You’re so cool!) called the story brilliant. Well, this got my knickers in a twist and now I just can’t sit back and say nothing about these reports.
I certainly can’t hide the fact that I have a bit of Second Life bias. I use the software to teach a university class and I think the concept behind the environment is the future of the web. That being said, I’m also a serious internet researcher and a social networking scholar. I know that SL is a bit of a current fad. I know that something better will no doubt come along in the next few years. But I also know that although the numbers reported in the media may seem inflated they still stand for something very significant that tells us about a movement that goes far beyond Second Life.
Rather than engaging in playground rounds of rib-poking and sneering, how about we actually think about what these, perhaps inflated, numbers mean in the bigger picture. Shirky’s most vehement argument is that the reported two million accounts on Second Life is a misleading number representing a large percentage of people who create accounts but never log in or log in only once and never return. Rather than looking at the big numbers let’s look at hard facts. On average 233,000+ unique avatars log in to Second Life in a seven day period. In the eight week period between October and December of 2006 the number of accounts doubled from one million to two million. Of course, we all know that an account does not necessarily imply a die hard user or even a user who actually logged in to the environment. However, doesn’t a doubling of interest of that magnitude signify something important?
Let’s do a quick comparison between the growth of Second Life and the growth of another much maligned and yet loved site, MySpace.
MySpace user stats are much more mysterious. According to recent Wired stories, MySpace boasts 87 million registered users. At one point in the last few years, the site claimed to be gaining 270,000 new accounts per day. This represents a .3% daily growth rate. Mind you, MySpace isn’t nearly as open with their numbers as Second Life is so these are approximate numbers based only on the bits of info that MySpace has been willing to provide. (Stats taken from here and here )
Second Life growth stats blow MySpace out of the water. If we look at a similar period of huge growth in Second Life, the period between October and December of 2006, the account growth from one million to two million in just eight weeks represents a 1.79% daily growth, almost six times the growth rate of MySpace.
We have no way of knowing how many MySpace users actually ever use their accounts. We have no data to show how many unique users log in on a daily basis to MySpace but I would gamble that the rate of users who log in only long enough to create a basic profile page and the ratio of unused Second Life accounts are nearly the same. In the same type of journalistic wave, both services have been publicized thus driving droves of curious folks to the sites just to see what the hubbub is about.
So what’s the relevance of these numbers? What’s the important step that Shirky and others skip to maintain their anti-SL vendetta? What we’re witnessing in both sites is a revolution in online social interaction. Whether users come back or not, their initial motivation in signing up for either service is the same: they wanted to find a way to connect to people. I don’t care if Second Life has two thousand accounts or two million accounts. I don’t care if MySpace has a returning user rate of 1% or 100%. What’s important here is that folks are seeking out online services that will connect them to other people. These users are trying out new social spaces at astounding rates. This is what we should care about. This is the big picture. The world is changing, folks. Whether it’s Second Life, MySpace, World of Warcraft, or Facebook, it’s a phenomenal change in the ways we, as digital humans, desire to connect to one another.
December 30th, 2006 at 11:27 am
You say “But I also know that although the numbers reported in the media may seem inflated they still stand for something very significant that tells us about a movement that goes far beyond Second Life.”
No one is disagreeing with you about the rise of a social movement. Those of us looking at Linden Lab’s numbers are actually asking a much narrower question: given the uselessness of Linden’s current metrics, how many people actually use Second Life?
You yourself get at this when you say “Second Life growth stats blow MySpace out of the water. If we look at a similar period of huge growth in Second Life, the period between October and December of 2006, the account growth from one million to two million in just eight weeks represents a 1.79% daily growth, almost six times the growth rate of MySpace.”
One possible answer is that many, many people are interested in Second Life. Another possible answer, however, is that it that with the dropping of avatar limits, it is the ratio of avatars to users itself that is changing, and that with the creation of a free basic account, the number of people who sign up but never log in or log in and quickly bail is also increasing. If this is true, then the second million Residents represents considerably fewer actual people than the first million Residents did, and also represents many fewer eventual repeat users.
This is why reasoning that the recent doubling of Residents must mean a similar increase in population doesn’t follow. The only metric that actually tracks with growth of users is growth of users, a figure we don’t have and don’t have a good proxy for. The one thing I’ve never seen anyone post on the Linden numbers issue is this: “I was curious about how many actual users there were using Second Life, so I asked the Lindens, and they said X.” Have you asked anybody at LL about how many *people* are behind the 233K number, for instance, and how many eventually stay?
You also say “What’s important here is that folks are seeking out online services that will connect them to other people.”
Having had a hand in the spread of the conversation about social software, I couldn’t agree more, but your observation about the larger attractiveness of social media has nothing to do with Second Life per se. A lot of people bought Sea Monkeys too, because they wanted the kind of experience they saw advertised. The question is not “Are people interested in what Second Life promises?” The question is “Is Second Life delivering on that promise?”
December 31st, 2006 at 7:40 am
Shirky - did SecondLife make a promise? Or is it the media and blogosphere which create the cognitive dissonance of which you write?
Honestly, Shirky, you took something we all knew already and spread it around the media. You look pretty good up there, but the reality is as far removed from that as the numbers you are griping about are.
You write of Sea Monkeys (the name of my browser, actually) - How many people have hammers? Are hammers bought with a ‘promise’?
Intellagirl is dead on. The sad thing is that you got a lot of reads but really haven’t contributed anything constructive w.r.t. numbers.
December 31st, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Taran, I didn’t take something “we all knew” and spread it around. I took something almost no one knew and spread it around.
Among the people who don’t understand that Residents does not correlate to users, either directly or by proxy, are writers at The Washington Post, The New York Times, C|Net, the Globe and Mail, USA Today, Forbes, Fortune, and CNN, among others. Even worse, and by extension, the readers of those publications don’t know it either. This is a population that dwarfs the number of people who understand how unhelpful the Linden numbers actually are.
This is my constructive contribution w.r.t the numbers — I am working to remove the false perception that the Residents figure is creating. After that, stories about SL will be more accurate.
December 31st, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Clay Shirky said: The question is not “Are people interested in what Second Life promises?” The question is “Is Second Life delivering on that promise?”
I’d say Second Life is providing exactly what was promised. Linden promised a virtual world in which you can live a second life, where you can do anything you want, be whomever you want. That’s certainly possible in Second Life as it exists right now.
This is not to say that living a second life appeals to everyone. Mario Bros. promised to be fun but I found it incredibly boring when it came out. It promised fun but fell short for me. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good product. It certainly delivered on its promise for a whole lot of people. I bought it with saved up allowance and played it. My purchase counted in the millions of copies of the game sold. Yet I should not have been counted in the number of people who enjoyed it. I think this is the case with just about every product in every category on the market. Even folks who use something on a regular basis may not like it, may not think it’s the best product available or possible.
Back to Second Life and its stats…I’d love to know how many residents are repeat users. I’d love to know average hours spent in the environment or the average number of times per week a resident logs in. I’d love to know how many people use alternate avatars and are counted twice in the stats. We won’t know those numbers until Linden offers them up. Like many of the great online movements, much of the real numbers are hidden from us so we are left with measuring a product by its impact on the culture. Second Life’s social impact is still rather minimal. It may seem like a revolution to those of use involved but the masses still haven’t heard of it. I still think that the rapidly growing interest, even if its only a passing curiosity that doesn’t result in a real user, there’s something meaningful in the growth.
P.S. A public apology to Clay Shirky for my “smirky-Shirky” comment in my original post. Still, I hope it made you smirk, Clay.
You’re asking tough questions about ideas that most people aren’t even looking at yet. Keep up the great work.
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Thanks for the interesting debate. As a second lifer I have often discussed the numbers with my second life friends. There are some obvious reasons to be interested. I share your academic curiosity Intellagirl, and I agree that SL is a sign of a major shift in social networking, and the transition to Web 3.0.
The other obvious reason that so many people are concerned about the numbers is that at the heart of the debate is commerce; more people, more income for resident businesses, and a significant growth in corporate attention. There has been much debate over the affect that corporate island buying is having on the population and the values of SL.
I also have an interest in digital identities. The ease with which we can all make Alts makes it tricky to extrapolate accurate numbers of discreet individuals from the official Stats.
It also raises an interesting conundrum. SL is a playground for testing digital identities, however, as Lawerance Lessig has pointed out in his latest book Code 2.0 there is increasing pressure on the ‘code’ to reveal ‘true’ identity or at least authenticate users due to the pressures of commerce and concern over cyber fraud and digital terrorism. Will Linden Labs be able to balance the issues of playful Alts with hard headed business concerns around authentication, privacy, and verifiable population statistics.
As the media blows hot and cold on Second Life many are missing the true innovation and realisation of the ‘Metaverse’ and the ability to creativly collaborate across the planet. I will be bringing design students to SL from my distant geographic location in New Zealand. I will be teaching remotely and working with others from all around the world on machinima projects. SL is an amazing opportunity to make the virtual real. Those of us who believe in SL should support Linden Labs and the vision of its founders against the stories of those who only see the prosaic.
Keep up the good work Intellagirl!