Hamlet…er, James Wagner Au reports on GigaOm that the active user base of Second Life is on a steady path to growth. The chart tells a fairly compelling story:
Of course, there will be the usual questions of bots or whatever, although I find it hard to believe that there are 100,000 new bots running around over the past 6 months or so. If these numbers are matched up to user-to-user transaction increases and other metrics, it’s an encouraging trend.
Definitions count. Depending on how the Lab has defined “repeat logins” (and I can think of at *least* two ways) that chart could as easily represent grid instability combined with viewer crash rates, rather than returning users.
Without the definition of what the data means, it’s *interesting* but it’s not actually *useful*.
True enough that we don’t know what “repeat logins” means precisely.
However, given the documented increasing stability of SL and the viewer, it seems unlikely that the growth curve is reflecting to any significant degree instability/crash-related logins.
To me, it still depends on what data we’re actually seeing charted. It’s got a name, but that could be quite a number of things.
I can’t in all honesty view the graph as much more than a curiosity without more information.
Well, call me a pessimist, but these are not statistics to feel great about.
It’s true that one analyst might say that yes, indeed, repeat logins are steadily increasing, but in reality one might also say that they’re increasing at the same level as they were back in July 2006.
The problem is, as the number of active users rises, this figure will naturally also rise – we would need to cross reference these figures the number of active users to find out if /repeat logins per active user/ are indeed increasing or dereasing.
I suggest the latter.
Regardless of the statistics, the reality is that technology is evolving and systems like this will be used more and more. Second Life will, undoubtedly, grow in the near future. Let it be 5 years or 10 years, it will be as common as video game consoles and the WWW. It is just a matter of time. I can’t prove this, but my background as a software developer and my education allows me to make these assertions.