Well, I was going to do a little personal piece about recent pick-up grouping fun in Everquest II, but I suppose we ought to get this out of my system first:

Official Second Life Blog: I'll See Your Million And Double That

So there - Second Life has Two Million Residents, probably all going to the same Virtua-Duran-Duran concert as we speak! See the previous rant for my broad feelings on that, and a more real picture of the actual popularity of Second Life. The numbers beckon however.

The One Million Milestone was hit on about October 19th causing much rejoicing (and grumbling here) and today is December 15th, meaning that a million people have joined SL in 58 days. This makes 17,241 signups a day, or 718 an hour, or 11 a minute, or around one new SL Resident every five seconds, constantly for the last two months. Which is mad. Granted, I have no idea what a normal rate of signup for any other MMO is.

Yer man Jeff Linden there asks, rather glibly, when we think it'll hit three million and Tateru Nino, long time resident and Numbers Correspondent for the New World Notes blog, chimes in almost immediately with 'February 8th'. Personally, I think it'll be several weeks sooner, but given the neat graphs she makes, she does seem more numerate than me, and definitely more dedicated to SL, so is probably worth taking seriously - far more so than my half-arsed guesstimates anyway.

I know it seems like I have it in for SL or something, that perhaps I was savaged by a pine cube as a child, but part of it is annoyance with spin. SL is a good idea, and indeed I quite enjoy the parts of it that are nothing to do with The Media, Zietgeists, PR, Real World Crossovers and the like. I've seen a lot of fascinating places in world, and a great deal of passionate creativity, and would be prepared to admit that it isn't entirely about fox-people bumpfuzzling!

But casually surfing backward through the Offical Blog show that in the time between the millionth sign up, and the two millionth, there have been around 25 'Minor' incidents - things like Search, Partnering, Teleports, Inventory not working, about 9 'Show-Stoppers' - incidents where it's just not been possible to even log in, or stay logged in - databases, Sim failures, etc, and the like (not counting scheduled maintenance and update downtime), and two deliberate, and partially successful, grid attacks - malicious attempts to destroy the world, usually via Grey Goo - self-replicating objects. Your count may vary, depending on definitions, but it still paints a rather shaky picture. That doesn't even cover the CopyBot Affair, or a number of phishing and pyramid scams skulking along under the radar, as these didn't really 'break' SL in any way.

If LL spent a fraction of the time, effort and resources supporting this two million, with a robust and working world, that they do pimping how busy it is and trying to cram even more in, then perhaps folks like me, and increasingly, real SL Residents who care for and about their world, would be a lot less bitchy about it all. Fire some Marketing people, and hire more devs! They are hiring devs now in fact, but that's one hell of a PR Snowball to try and slow down now, and with this rate of growth, however fickle, it is going to be increasingly hard to keep up with the technical demands and load, I'd imagine.  I'm sure there is a light at the end of the Tunnel of Painful Progress, but it is less and less likely to be The Daylight of Web3.0, and more likely to be The Freight Train of Backlash. Choo choo!

Anyway, enough SL-Mania for now. I joined a Guild again, in EQ2 this time...more on how that's going later...


Edit: Haaaaang on a minute:

Residents Logged in in the Last 60 Days: 809,960
(From http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php)

Accounts signed up in the last 58 Days: 1,000,000

Add two days's worth (34,482, from above): 1,034,482 signups in 60 days

Soooo:

1,034,482 - 809,960 = 224,522

I might be getting confused with definitions here, but doesn't that mean 224,522 people have made a Second Life account, but have never used it to log in even once, not even to have a look for an hour and get bored? How does that work? It gets worse if you take into account that many of the 809,960 logins are existing residents who had signed up prior to the one million mark, and are still logging in. That can't be right - more than 12.5% of all SL Residents have NEVER logged in EVER?

I think the Maths is starting to consume my mind a little...I'm off for a bit of a lie-down. Therapeutic Ranting about class balance next time!