SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check – Valleywag
Clay Shirky delivers his take on SecondLife and puts virtual world mania into the proper historical context. I remain happy not to have committed time and money to a SecondLife project.
“Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand. Were the press to shift to reporting Recently Logged In as their best approximation of the population, the number of reported users would shrink by an order of magnitude; were they to adopt industry-standard unique users reporting (assuming they could get those numbers), the reported population would probably drop by two orders. If the growth isn’t as currently advertised (and it isn’t), then the value from scarcity is overstated, and if the value of scarcity is overstated, at least one of the engines of growth will cool down.”
Recently logged in is the key. I think about mature forum sites, where the tendency is to create a new login, rather than hit the “recover password” button. I frequently see the same users with 5 or more logins. There’s also a fairly substantial number of logins that are no longer used, as in people who haven’t logged in in the past three years.
When evaluating any media, registered members isn’t a good enough figure. Active members in xx time period is a better way to look at it.
You’ve got to wonder how much of “growth” is the existing users reregistering.