more on NPR on Second Life (was: The Ultimate Distance Learning)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Tristan Louis <tristan () tnl net>
Date: January 8, 2007 9:47:13 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: RE: [IP] NPR on Second Life (was: The Ultimate Distance  
Learning)

Dave,

A follow up on this for IP readers:

http://tnl.net/blog/2007/01/05/running-the-numbers-on-second-life/

In the comments, Clay Shirky and I go through further discussion too.

TNL

----
Tristan Louis
http://www.tnl.net


> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [IP] NPR on Second Life (was: The Ultimate Distance Learning)
> From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> Date: Mon, January 08, 2007 9:07 am
> To: ip () v2 listbox com
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: steven cherry <steven () panix com>
> Date: January 8, 2007 8:10:17 AM EST
> To: johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com
> Subject: Re: [johnmacsgroup] NPR on Second Life (was: The Ultimate
> Distance Learning)
> Reply-To: johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com
>
> At 6:54 PM -0800 1/7/07, Dewayne Hendricks wrote:
> > On Jan 7, 2007, at 6:17 PM, John Lyon wrote:
> >
> > o       IBM recently setup shop in 'Second Life'.
> > See "IBM to give birth to 'Second Life' business
> > group":
> > <http://news.com.com/IBM+to+give+birth+to+Second+Life+business
> +group/2100-1014_3-6143175.htmll>
> > o       I just checked and found that there are
> > about 2.4 million residents in 'Second LIfe' at
> > this time. I'm a member of that community and
> > am known there as 'Dewayne Draper'.
>
> Maybe you can say what you mean by "I just
> checked" and then tell us what the word
> "resident" means. Because it's been widely
> reported that the 2 million figure is based
> entirely on the word "resident," which turns out
> to have no no meaning at all:
>
> http://www.valleywag.com/tech/naming-names/the-tech-reporters-who-
> flack-for-second-life-224092.php
> The tech reporters who flack for Second Life
>
> "Here at KingsRUs.com, we call our website our
> Kingdom, and any time our webservers serve up a
> copy of the home page, we record that as a Loyal
> Subject. We're very pleased to announce that in
> the last two months, we have added over 1 million
> Loyal Subjects to our Kingdom."
>
> Put that baldly, you wouldn't fall for this bit
> of re-direction, and yet that is exactly what
> Linden Labs, a much-promoted maker of virtual
> worlds backed by Benchmark Capital, has pulled
> off with its Residents label. By adopting a term
> that seems like a simple re-branding of "users",
> but which is actually unconnected to head count
> or adoption, they've managed to report what the
> press wants to hear, while providing no actual
> information. <snip>
>
> http://valleywag.com/tech/second-life/a-story-too-good-to-
> check-221252.php
> A story too good to check
>
> Someone who tries a social service once and bails
> isn't really a user any more than someone who
> gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is
> a customer.
>
> So here's my question -- how many return users
> are there? We know from the startup screen that
> the advertised churn of Second Life is over 60%
> (as I write this, it's 690,800 recent users to
> 1,901,173 signups, or 63%.) That's not stellar
> but it's not terrible either. However, their
> definition of "recently logged in" includes
> everyone in the last 60 days, even though the
> industry standard for reporting unique users is
> 30 days, so we don't actually know what the
> apples to apples churn rate is.
>
> At a guess, Second Life churn measured in the
> ordinary way is in excess of 85%, with a surge of
> new users being driven in by the amount of press
> the service is getting. The wider the Recently
> Logged In reporting window is, the bigger the
> bulge of recently-arrived-but-never-to-return
> users that gets counted in the overall numbers.
>
> I suspect Second Life is largely a "Try Me"
> virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful
> new thing draw the masses to log in and try it,
> but whose ability to retain anything but a
> fraction of those users is limited. The pattern
> of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time
> users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most
> of the dropouts becoming immune to later use.
> Pointcast was a Try Me virus, as was LambdaMOO,
> the experiment that Second Life most closely
> resembles. <snip>
>
> http://www.valleywag.com/tech/second-life/virtual-world-stats-as-
> misleading-as-a-dating-profile-225349.php
> Virtual world stats as misleading as a dating profile
>
> There are only two things you really need to
> understand about the Linden story. First, any
> Residents figure from Linden is unrelated to the
> population of Second Life (because a Resident
> isn't a user) and growth in the Residents number
> is not directly tied to growth in users (because
> existing users can create new Residents). Second,
> any reporter who publishes a population figure
> for Second Life is snowing you on Linden's
> behalf, since Linden never tells anyone how many
> regular users Second Life has.
>
> Murphy misunderstands the argument of Naming
> Names. He explains the core complaint of the
> piece this way: "Second Life says it has about 2
> million subscribers, but that only about 800,000
> of them have logged on in the last two months.
> About four reporters carried the first number
> without reporting the second. That's it."
>
> Except that isn't it. Linden does not say it has
> two million subscribers. It is Mr. Murphy himself
> who helpfully but wrongly supplies subscribers as
> a synonym for Residents. And the issue isn't one
> Residents figure over another -- they're all
> junk. Residents does not refer to subscribers,
> members, citizens, customers, participants, or
> users. It is a count of signups, not people, it
> includes unknown quantities of failed logins,
> double-counting, and abandoned accounts, and it
> has varied over the life of the company. As a
> result, it is worthless as a measure of adoption,
> even as a proxy for growth. <snip>
>
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