Adam, Blog o Internecie   [11.28.06 05:33 PM]

What Do We Learn If We Digitize EVERYTHING?

don't even make us think about it...

Taran Rampersad   [11.28.06 06:54 PM]

The $10 question is - why isn't it being done within SecondLife? :-)

FEZ Rutherford   [11.28.06 11:39 PM]

[quote]The $10 question is - why isn't it being done within SecondLife? :-)[/quote]

Another one is: Will there be at last streams (audio/video) in SL....

FEZ

Justin Thorp   [11.29.06 05:54 AM]

Is the lecture going to be podcasted?

john   [11.29.06 08:05 AM]

2nd life has had a million people sign up and play, there are not a million residents. that the number of accounts that have been created over the life of the game

Ken Hoffman   [11.29.06 02:58 PM]

Webcasts of the Long Now seminars usually appear here eventually: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

Jim Stogdill   [12.02.06 08:22 AM]

I've been a SL member for a few months now and have been following it carefully. Here are a few things I've noticed (sorry if this doesn't completely follow from your original post).



* Since September total accounts has gone from ~900,000 to ~1.6M. During that time average concurrent logins has gone from ~6K to ~15K. Many of the new accounts are second accounts. You can tell by the number of people who a day after their account is formed have all cool skins, clothes, and know how to do all kinds of cool things. I don't know how to estimate how many of the 1.6M accounts are active. SL gives stats on how many people have logged in during the last 3 months, but given the half-life comment below I'm not sure how relevant that statistic is. Still active users who are over six months old represent a very long tail. The claims of an active community of over 1M seem highly inflated to me and in fact there is no way the sim grid could accommodate them if they did try to log in concurrently. The practical limit today seems to be ~20,000 total concurrent users with ~75 on a given sim.



* There seem to be two very strong usage "curves" in effect (this is completely anecdotal, I haven't measured anything).

**First the time spent on line by new users seems to drop off precipitously. A small number of new users are in all of the time, while many try it once and drop out, or try it a few times and reach some occasional use steady state.

**The second is a half life effect on users over time. Even those that use it a lot initially seem to drop out very quickly. If you spend time in a similar place over a two or three month period you will see the names of the steady visitors rapidly changing. Anecdotally half life seems to be about a week to two weeks, but it doesn't follow a asymptotic half life curve, it is more of a binary shift from all on to gone, maybe with some spiking at the transition.



SL is strongly novelty oriented as an experience since it lacks WoW's accomplishment orientation.



* One antidote for usage half-life seems to be land purchase, at least for a while. The novelty of hanging out is augmented/replaced by the novelty of building etc.



* However, as people buy land (with real rent due) and build businesses the generally low availability and reliability of SL is creating more than just an annoyance. It is akin to the power going out in your real world retail store every day but in the form of your world just disappearing or your store being coated in gray goo.



* There is a really interesting corollary to the half-life of experience that is related to behavior norming. Given the anonymity of the SL experience new users may feel unconstrained by the norms within the world (which vary wildly from place to place and in fact generally are quite different than the real world behavioral norms that would be expressed the same people). In some cases it isn't until a user has invested in their avatar (in the form of money or time) that they begin to feel compelled to conform to behavioral norms. As they become more linked to their avatar identity they become both protective of it and constrained by it. For a given group of people though, once the norms stabilize with investment in both avatar and identity, they stabilize in a very different place than they would for the same group of people interacting in the real world, which for many people seems to be the whole point of Second Life.



* SL is going through what may turn out to be a difficult walled garden to partially open transition. As they open up the client through LibSL they will enable more interesting businesses (those that are about form of experience rather than just in world content) but they are directly impacting the availability in the near term. A recent "copybot" development based on the opening of the protocols had hundreds of businesses shut down and made the news.



Finally, SL is tremendously immersive despite the fact that it is no where near as polished as any Xbox game you can think of, and that is because the content isn't in the form of 3D primitives, but is in the form of relationships. In my own in-world experience I've have long conversations with a young Saudi woman about Lebanon that I could have never had in rl because of physical distance, social norms, etc.