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!

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.

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.

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.

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?”