SL Name Watch is an ingenious program that tracks, well, Second Life names. Amusing on its own to know that there are 155,230 GossipGirls, I suppose. Also useful if you want to choose a specific last name.
But Adz pointed out a few weeks ago that Name Watch can give some deeper insight into what’s happening on the Grid. He notes that in conjunction with the sudden silence of the Second Life economic statistics, was a sudden purge of over 800,000 accounts:
“There is a pattern. Most of the affected last names were opened and closed before SLNameWatch.com was founded. The remainder are from a pool that was opened in late 2007. Therefore, I speculate that only the oldest of Second Life’s accounts, perhaps those without a valid email or with very long dormancy, have been intentionally purged.
The frozen 16.8 Million figure may be closer to accurate than the 17.0 million figure daily registration trends would predict. At the moment I am counting 16.5m residents. I don’t know what the economic stats page will say when they flip the switch back on over at LL. It depends on when it comes back. Expect a steady 13,700 new accounts per day. This means it will take about 30 days for new accounts to fill this deficit. Maybe LL will turn the economic stats page back on when the total residents figure returns to increasing territory, or about February 17.”
Whether this is connected to the sudden ‘disconnection’ of the economic statistics from public view, or is instead related to wanting a ‘wash-out’ period for the open space conversion is, of course, unknown.
Update: Tateru at Massively helps to put this in the context of past announcements.
That’s pretty funny that close to a million accounts were purged, however, no one really even noticed.
Linden Lab purges nearly a million inactive Second Life users…
Linden Lab has, for a very long time, published quite an array of statistical data about Second Life through a regularly updated (when it worked, which it didn’t always) set of statistical data feeds (mostly collected by aficionados and researchers). …
Although conspiracy theorists want to interpret every single move made by Linden Lab as evidence for some yet-to-be-identified global plot to take over the virtual world, purging of dormant or non-activated accounts is something you might expect ANY business to do as a matter of course. Having just gone through such a process in my real life business, all I can say is that it’s simply a way of reducing expenses.
Trimming down databases is a common enough procedure and I wonder why folks out there should be surprised that Linden Lab might do this. The surprise is more that they took so long - if this is, indeed, the “purge” foretold by John Zdanowski over a year ago.
I also noticed Tateru’s comment that “during mid-January, two sets of those feeds suddenly stopped working. A bug, we thought, as data-quality for the statistical has traditionally been exceptionally poor…” Well, as a private company, I hate to remind folks that Linden Lab have no obligation to feed ANY data to the general public and, as I have said before, I find the company rather too open about what it does. Apart from producing a P&L report once a year for the shareholders and the tax man, LL could legitimately turn off the phones and trash all emails automatically. Off-handedly or overtly criticizing any company for not telling you what it doesn’t have to tell you seems pointless.
I just hope they continue to purge more and deeper.
Sigmund:
You’re absolutely right, the Lab has a right to its own data and record purging is a common enough practice. However, the success of the Lab is dependent on the success of the content creators who use the SL platform. These are real people making real money operating in SL. Their success is the Lab’s success: as M and Philip have so often stated, as the content creators and enterprises go, so goes SL.
As an intelligent business person, I’m sure you’d agree to the importance of data as a decision-making tool. To take a simple example: would you bank somewhere that doesn’t tell you what its rates are or charges? Probably not.
The Lab isn’t obliged to publish stats, but the business people who use SL as a platform for their enterprise benefit by being able to predict and track trends so that they can make their own decisions about pricing, investment, and growth.
The very nature of SL and its policies, transparency, technology, IP rights (and protections, or lack thereof) is a shared ecosystem between the Lab and its residents.
This isn’t about conspiracy theories, it’s about trying to determine whether the lack of statistics is a period of adjustments in the baseline data, or an indication of something else gone awry that should be of concern to the enterprises that make money there.
If they purged names of people who never logged on, what of it? I must have like 30 of those types of accounts, when I was trying to make an account and got foiled, or made one and made a typo or something and had to let it go. So does everybody.
I agree with Sigmund and with Dusan. Purging those never-active accounts is an obvious necessity. However, the change in numbers is something that is easily misunderstood, unless explained.
This seems like the perfect sort of situation for a big post on the blog of the order of “Here’s what we’re planning to do, and here’s why it benefits everyone” sort of post. It’s a great opportunity to head off wild speculations and explain the benefits of the process before it happens. It goes a long way to demonstrate the sort of consistency of approach and communication which the enterprise likes to see in a service.
Only that explanation never happened, which is a bit sad.
The number of accounts that disappeared from in-world search has now exceeded 1 million.