Number of Second Life Users Down to 800,000, But ...

Earlier this month, Backchannel Magazine wrote about the Creations for Parkinsons area, a article that Barbie Alchemi mentioned in a press release. The article gave it's population, or user base, estimated to be at 1.1 million in 2006. In 2013, Linden Lab claimed an active user base of one million. And today, Backchannel stated "An estimated 800,000 users are active on a monthly basis," saying they were told by Linden Lab. While there are a total of almost 50 million accounts according to Daniel Voyager's Second Life Statistic's page, it's not clear how many are alt accounts.

Eight hundred thousand seems small compared to Facebook, which Backchannel stated as having close to two billion users. World of Warcraft, which came around about the same time as Second Life has sometimes been used as a comparison as to how virtual reality hadn't quite caught on the same way as massive multiplayer online games, boasted a total of 100 million accounts (in 2014) with up to over 12 million active players. But it didn't last, and it's numbers of active players dropped to 5.5 million in late 2015 when it's owners announced they would no longer be publishing reports of active numbers. It's probably safe to assume it's dropped further.

Hamlet Au suggested recently in New World Notes that this lower number of active users may not be what it seems at first. Talking with Peter Gray (Pete Linden), he was told, "We've made a number of optimizations to our user acquisition efforts to get more qualified traffic ... As a result, though the total number of monthly actives has come down, the number of paying SL users has held steady."

In layman's terms, Pete Linden says the Lab has changed their advertising to get people more likely to stay and spend time and money in Second Life. Hamlet went on to say he's felt it's more active users numbered closer to 600,000 for some years, "So most likely, dropping from 1,000,000 to 800,000 reported users isn't so much a loss of actual people as a trimming of marketing fluff."

What do you the readers think? Have you noticed fewer people coming in, or has the number of those people leaving been replaced by new users coming in?

Sourcres: Blackchannel, Daniel Voyager, New World Notes

Bixyl Shuftan

"Meet The Lindens" at the SL12B

From Monday to Friday this week at the SL12B, the residents will get a chance to meet up with CEO Ebbe Linden and four other members of Linden Lab. The discussions will be at the Dreamatorium (Auditorium) at SL12B Astound (202/180/22) and will take place at 1PM SL time.

The schedule on the SL12B website is as follows:

• Monday 22nd June – Oz Linden, Engineering Director, Second Life
• Tuesday 23rd June – Patch Linden, Senior Manager, Product Operations, and  Dee Linden, Land Product Specialist
• Wednesday 24th June – Xiola Linden, Lead Community Manager, and Pete Linden, Senior Director, Global Communications at Linden Lab
• Thursday  25th June – Danger Linden, Sr. Director, Product, Virtual Worlds and Troy Linden, Senior Producer
• Friday 26th June – Ebbe Linden, CEO Linden Lab

While the Lindens have been making more appearances lately, it's still an uncommon event to get a chance to meet one. So for those interested (and who isn't) here's your chance.

A Letter From Pete Linden (Peter Gray) About SL 2.0

Xymbers Slade's old mentor group recieved the following message from  Pete Linden (Peter Gray)  in regards to the new virtual world Ebbe Linden (Ebbe Altberg) announced Linden Lab has been working on. He then forwarded the message to the Newser.

*  *  *  *  *

Here's what we've said:

Linden Lab is working on a next generation virtual world that will be in the spirit of Second Life, an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king. This is a significant focus for Linden Lab, and we are actively hiring to help with this ambitious effort. We believe that there is a massive opportunity ahead to carry on the spirit of Second Life while leveraging the significant technological advancements that have occurred since its creation, as well as our unparalleled experience as the provider of the most successful user-created virtual world ever.

The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don't want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start. That doesn’t mean you necessarily won’t be able to bring parts of your Second Life over, just that our priority in building the next generation platform is to create an incredible experience and enable stunningly high-quality creativity, rather than ensuring that everything could work seamlessly with everything created over Second Life’s 11 year history.

Does this mean we're giving up on Second Life? Absolutely not. It is thanks to the Second Life community that our virtual world today is without question the best there is, and after 11 years we certainly have no intention of abandoning our users nor the virtual world they continually fill with their astounding creativity. Second Life has many years ahead of it, and in addition to improvements and new developments specifically for Second Life, we think that much of the work we do for the next generation project will also be beneficial for Second Life.

It's still very early days for this new project, and as we forge ahead in creating the next generation virtual world, we'll share as much as we can.

If we had one message to share with Second Life users about this new project at this point, it would be: don’t panic, get excited! Again, Second Life isn’t going away, nor are we ceasing our work to improve it. But, we’re also working on something that we think will truly fulfill the promise of virtual worlds that few people understand as well as Second Life users.

Best,
Peter

--
Peter Gray | Director of Global Communications

Linden Lab | Makers of Shared Creative Spaces

Check out what we're working on!

*Correction* I had the impression at first that Xymbers had contacted Pete Linden before getting the message. That wasn't the case. Pardon the error.

Ebbe Linden (Ebbe Altberg) Sits Down With Second Life Bloggers

On Tuesday February 18, Linden Lab's new CEO Ebbe Altberg, also known inworld as Ebbe Linden, met inworld with several Second Life bloggers. Pete Linden was also at the meeting. The bloggers were from left to right Saffia Widdershins. Daniel Voyager, Mal Burns (known as Aeonix Aeon in the past), Draxtor Despres, Inara Pey, and Jo Yardley. The meeting was a little more than an hour from 9:40 AM to 10:55AM SL time. Ebbe showed up as the robot avatar available to newcomers just starting out.

Most of the bloggers have already made their comments, Daniel Voyager (link), Inara Pey (link), Jo Yardley (link), and Mal Burns (link). Presumably Draxtor Despres will make his comments on his radio program later today (link).

The meeting was a friendly one, with some minor disruptions reported due to some bugs. Jo Yardley wrote that Ebbe asked if this was normal. Questions (prepared ones) were asked, and Ebbe answered. Among the things discussed were the new user registration, of which Ebbe thought the one he went through was lacking and needed improvement. Of how it is now he stated he needed to know more before making a decision. He was interested in meeting up with the leaders of educational sims and communities. He also wanted to learn more about sports in Second Life. He felt Second Life was the beginning of something big, "I have a huge belief that Second Life is just the beginning of something that can be much, much, much bigger," and wanted it more accessible to users.

He stated people in Linden Lab were interested in bringing back the JIRA, and were looking for a way to do it. He had been a user of Second Life in its early days, as was his teenage son before he was booted due to his age and went to the Teen Grid. He understood that the mainstream media did not see Second Life like it used to, and Linden Lab had lost control of the image of itself it wanted to deliver to the masses.

The writers were overall impressed with Ebbe, and expressed cautious optimism about him. This included Mal Burns, whom has been quite critical of Linden Lab in the past, "... I do feel differently than I have about all other predecessors for a number of reasons. I get a different 'vibe' off of this guy. I’m almost willing to say that he 'gets it.' Almost ... " The biggest beef Mal had was the setup of the press meeting, eight writers each having been privately invited by the Lab. Mal thought this kind of arrangement was bad because it would encourage sucking-up among bloggers, and discourage asking hard questions and critical writing about problems about the Grid.

No one from Second Life Newser was at the meeting. Neither was Hamlet Au, Linden Lab's onetime imbedded reporter. 

Daniel Voyager has a transcript of the meeting available on request, as well as a number of pictures on his  (Flickr).

Bixyl Shuftan

Direct Messages for Second Life Web Profiles Disabled

In October 2011, Linden Lab added a feature to residents' profiles on the Internet on https://my.secondlife.com . Already able to make public posts on them, they could then also send private "Direct Messages." This feature allowed users to privately communicate with one another without logging on. At least they could until December 2013, when residents began noticing this option was disabled. This was traced to some profile maintenance on December 12.

Inara Pey managed to get in contact with Linden Lab's communications director, Pete Linden. Pete told her that indeed the feature was no longer available.

On this inquiry, I can confirm that yes, as a result of a rise in abuse of the system, we have turned off the direct message function on My.SecondLife.com profiles.

This isn't the first time Linden Lab has given misuse of a feature as a reason for discontinuing it. Some third-party viewers had the ability to tell their users what viewer everyone else was using. But in February 2012, Linden Lab ordered that this feature be removed. Team Firestorm leader Jessica Lyon stated that the Lab had been asking her for several months about removing this feature saying there were reports of "bullying" because of it. It was a reason some residents found hard to believe was the Lab's main concern.

Checking my own profile, there were a couple spam messages. Not everyone on my feed had these, however, "Um, I don't see any ads."

While a few people seem to be in favor of the Lab's decision to remove direct messaged, "Yay! I found them annoying." The majority are not, "It's ridiculous for it to be shut off just because some people can't be bothered to use the tools already there to manage their privacy; it's not that hard to avoid getting spam or any PMs at all if one doesn't like the feature. Typical overkill to take it away from all of us who *did* use and enjoy it!" Loki Eliot joked, "OK so its not a good idea to tell Linden Lab of any bugs that can lead to service abuse in case LL can't fix it and decide to remove the service."

So it seems the feature is gone because of some spammers, "one rotten apple does spoil the bunch."

Sources: Daniel Voyager, Inara Pey, Ciaran Laval

Bixyl Shuftan