Weighing in at 1.5 billion square metres (579 square miles, plus change), Linden Lab's virtual world Second Life stacks up at the same size as Cedar County, Iowa, which we've chosen to give you a convenient physical world comparison for size. The figure comes from Linden Lab CFO John Zdanowski's (Zee Linden) quarterly metrics report for Q2 2008.
A sudden surge in land area was attributed to a drop in simulator prices earlier in the year, along with changes to purchasing conditions and capacity of Void simulators (also known as Openspace simulators).
Growth in premium accounts remains flat, apparently from the reduction in weekly stipend (from L$500/w to L$300/w) and also likely linked to the fact that no premium account is required to hold land on non-Linden-owned simulators.
Between the two of those items, there isn't any particular need or convincing value proposition for a user to have a premium account, unless they want to hold land on the Linden mainland, which continues to represent an increasingly diminished portion of the total land area.
User-to-user Linden Dollar transactions increased through the quarter, but there's still no sign that this represents a meaningful economic statistic.
User hours continue to trend upwards, but we're not really yet sure where that figure is trending, due to ongoing stability issues.
If you're a virtual world watcher, be sure and check out the full report, along with Zdanowski's pretty graphs.
