Linden Lab publishes Second Life second quarter metrics

Reader Comments (3)

Tateru - a few comments:

1. The user to user transaction metric is a "gross metric" in that it captures a very wide range of transactions across a wide range of activities. There are multiple economic PhD theses to be written about it so really discussing it is out of scope for a blog post. We believe it is an important metric, but not the only one. It might be more useful to try to break it apart and understand it better. As they say, I don't make up the numbers, I just report them.

2. There are no changes to the U2U methodology, AFAIK.

3. The last time U2U transactions declined was two years ago after the gambling ban. It's been on a steady increase ever since. This time was the peak of the hype cycle for Second Life. Is it possible that the nature of the economy has changed since that time?

4. User hour growth slowed in Q2. But you don't discuss the impact of the bot policy on user hours, concurrency, repeat logins in detail. I am surprised as that is new information. Any thoughts there?

5. A clarifying comment on voice minutes. Voice minutes are counted by the number of users connected to a voice channel (by depressing the "talk button") multiplied by the length of time they are connected to the channel. They are "speakers" in that they depressed the "talk" button. This has not changed and the methodology is the *same* for teleconferencing providers as it is for skype, AT&T mobile and every other voice provider on the planet.

My apologies if my attempt to make an analogy with teleconferencing providers (where everyone is connected to a bridge but not everyone is talking all the time) and person to person phone (where two people are connected directly and generally one person or the other is always talking) confused you. Regardless, the methodology in terms of measurement is as described above and it has not changed.

6. In terms of per capita voice minutes, which ratio are you using? Voice minutes divided by monthly repeat logins? Voice minutes divided by user hours? There is no evidence of a *significant* decline, nor do I see any evidence of less voice usage among new users. Voice is an important feature of Second Life, and the majority of Residents use it.

7. I'd love to see your median concurrency charts and data. We look at that too. Concurrency might be a really interesting spotlight for a future post.

T

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The thing with Lindens is that they are shadier than Politicians which means that they are a whole factor below the honesty of used car salesmen.

There are three faults with the Lindens.

One is of course their revisionist rewriting of history, things like U2U not being important when it was bad then suddenly becoming relevant when it's good.

Another is that the love to change the goalposts in the middle of the game and stuff anyone who was shooting for goal right then

The last is they lie. M Linden, Jack Linden, the ex Kate Linden, Z Linden, and now T LInden. It is endemic in their organisation.

The cop out that "this is complex and there will one day be thesis written about it is a politicans answer" The question was...

a. Last year you said it didnt count
b. This year you say it counts

Which is it? a or b (there is no c answer, just those two)

Like the lies that Jack Linden sprouted with the cash grab by the Lab that saw myself and so many of my friends leave the game losing THOUSANDS of dollars the lies of T Linden are just to try and make this aging and very much failing platform continue to look good to the addicted they have captured so they don't lose the very last people they are still milking.

Get in bed with the Lindens, you are going to catch a venereal disease.

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Hmm. I think there's still a miscommunication in the understanding of voice-minutes. I'll send you an email and try to sort that out. What you've said is closer to what I was originally told, but from your posting yesterday, of course, we got a rather different impression. Happy to sort that out, though.

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