A recent veritable onslaught of anti-Second Life journalism seems to be the “scoop de jour” for the end-of-the-year tech stories. Shirky and others are having their five minutes of fame on the back of Second Life user stats. Good for them. I suppose when there’s nothing more important to write about journalists become mathematicians and market researchers to make ends meet.
I won’t even link to the stories here because I really don’t like the idea of a smirky-Shirky watching his web traffic soar and feeling justified in his empty attack. My normal reaction to such obvious “I better write a story on this thing everyone is paying attention to” journalism is to ignore it. Then I noticed that one of my all time fav websites, Boing Boing, excerpted the story and Xeni (Why Xeni?! You’re so cool!) called the story brilliant. Well, this got my knickers in a twist and now I just can’t sit back and say nothing about these reports.
I certainly can’t hide the fact that I have a bit of Second Life bias. I use the software to teach a university class and I think the concept behind the environment is the future of the web. That being said, I’m also a serious internet researcher and a social networking scholar. I know that SL is a bit of a current fad. I know that something better will no doubt come along in the next few years. But I also know that although the numbers reported in the media may seem inflated they still stand for something very significant that tells us about a movement that goes far beyond Second Life.
Rather than engaging in playground rounds of rib-poking and sneering, how about we actually think about what these, perhaps inflated, numbers mean in the bigger picture. Shirky’s most vehement argument is that the reported two million accounts on Second Life is a misleading number representing a large percentage of people who create accounts but never log in or log in only once and never return. Rather than looking at the big numbers let’s look at hard facts. On average 233,000+ unique avatars log in to Second Life in a seven day period. In the eight week period between October and December of 2006 the number of accounts doubled from one million to two million. Of course, we all know that an account does not necessarily imply a die hard user or even a user who actually logged in to the environment. However, doesn’t a doubling of interest of that magnitude signify something important?
Let’s do a quick comparison between the growth of Second Life and the growth of another much maligned and yet loved site, MySpace.
MySpace user stats are much more mysterious. According to recent Wired stories, MySpace boasts 87 million registered users. At one point in the last few years, the site claimed to be gaining 270,000 new accounts per day. This represents a .3% daily growth rate. Mind you, MySpace isn’t nearly as open with their numbers as Second Life is so these are approximate numbers based only on the bits of info that MySpace has been willing to provide. (Stats taken from here and here )
Second Life growth stats blow MySpace out of the water. If we look at a similar period of huge growth in Second Life, the period between October and December of 2006, the account growth from one million to two million in just eight weeks represents a 1.79% daily growth, almost six times the growth rate of MySpace.
We have no way of knowing how many MySpace users actually ever use their accounts. We have no data to show how many unique users log in on a daily basis to MySpace but I would gamble that the rate of users who log in only long enough to create a basic profile page and the ratio of unused Second Life accounts are nearly the same. In the same type of journalistic wave, both services have been publicized thus driving droves of curious folks to the sites just to see what the hubbub is about.
So what’s the relevance of these numbers? What’s the important step that Shirky and others skip to maintain their anti-SL vendetta? What we’re witnessing in both sites is a revolution in online social interaction. Whether users come back or not, their initial motivation in signing up for either service is the same: they wanted to find a way to connect to people. I don’t care if Second Life has two thousand accounts or two million accounts. I don’t care if MySpace has a returning user rate of 1% or 100%. What’s important here is that folks are seeking out online services that will connect them to other people. These users are trying out new social spaces at astounding rates. This is what we should care about. This is the big picture. The world is changing, folks. Whether it’s Second Life, MySpace, World of Warcraft, or Facebook, it’s a phenomenal change in the ways we, as digital humans, desire to connect to one another.