As far as I know or can tell from the records, today Second Life hit peak concurrency of 60,000 for the first time (corrections please?)
A wonderful milestone. And coupled with far fewer glitches and crashes (for myself anyways) with the new Windlight viewer, plus statistics showing improved grid stability, a very nice way to start 2008. Congratulations Lindens!
Wagner James saw more than 61000
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/01/peak-second-lif.html
Second Life News for January 14, 2008
From: Virtually Blind Commentary: Top Five Virtual Law Analysis Fumbles Quote from the site – As virtual worlds continue suffering through legal growing pains, both mainstream press and the blogosphere are covering virtual law more often. There are a n…
does it really matter if they hit that high? the average user for SL only stays on for roughly 12-15 minutes (I believe thats monthly, but ill have to go look it up again)
compare that to avg. stick time for a web session or web page…
Concurrency is hardly the objective of SL, and I’ve argued before that the most interesting ‘stuff’ happening in SL is in the fields of academia, architecture, and corporate collaboration. It’s the 80/20 rule really – the greatest value being derived from SL may well be happening from the 160,000 of the 850,000 ‘regular’ users. Concurrency is one little dial on the dashboard and leads to the question of why it might be happening – as Wagner pointed out, positive press coverage in places like MSNBC.com which doesn’t treat Second Life as a novelty but rather a fact of the business landscape.
I also agree with Wayne. I’m no expert on Web site metrics but outside of social sites I’d guess that if an average Web site was able to say it had 24,000,000 user hours logged against it in the course of a month it would leave someone drooling.
I’m also no expert at reading the Second Life statistics tea leaves. I do know that numbers like the recent improvements to grid stability, increased island sales, and increased user hours when combined with a concurrency record are nice ticks in the right direction. I’m also of the mind that some of the most interesting stuff that will arise from SL will be the result of cross-platform projects that include time spent on blogs, Web sites, and in-world projects. SLoodle, for example, which allows development of courseware integrating in-world learning with the Moodle course platform.
A recent post that the US Department of Defense is using SL to train diplomats within a wider training program also suggests that there would be time “outside” SL that might easily be a lost metric – SL as an integral part of a Web-based toolkit of content is not reflected in user/hours or concurrency stats but may in fact have a deeper value in the long run.
That is, you don’t have to be IN world to be creating value for SL – and for many gaming platforms, they work hard to preclude out-of-world trading and other activities.
And I’m not sure what the latest stats are…(and I have loved Warcraft)…but for all the complaints about sim limits, I believe SL has long exceeded the total population that Warcraft can support on a given realm.
60,000 concurrent users on a realm of Warcraft would mean instant log-in failures – and that’s WITH the content taking 3 hours to load onto your own PC rather than being hosted, along with several billion user-generated items, by the platform provider.
Just a thought.