3pointD.com

Tony Walsh over at Clickable Culture flags a post on the new official blog of Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world of Second Life, that talks about the way LL reports the number of SL “residents,” i.e., people who are members of the service. This number has generated no small amount of contention in the past, and it turns out that much of the criticism has been well placed. “The number that is currently on our home page is a time-weighted average between “total number of signups ever” and “total number of logged in users over the last 60 days”,” writes LL employee Sally Linden. The problem has been that LL failed until now to indicate how the number was calculated anywhere on their Web site or within their world. Fortunately, the two numbers are being unwound. Starting sometime this week, LL plans to publish them separately on their Web site. As of last Friday, total signups ever stood at 493,563, and total log-ins over the last 60 days stood at 225,028. (I’m assuming this latter number is for unique log-ins, though Sally doesn’t make that clear.)

The issue of how to count virtual world populations is far from settled. Especially among game companies, a wide variety of accounting methods are used, very few of which take into account how much time members and/or subscribers actually spend in-world. But much of this is an open question. If I pay $15 a month to Blizzard for my World of Warcraft subscription but play the game only once every 30 days or so, I am certainly a subscriber, but am I a “resident” or any other kind of entity in the virtual world? Or is my presence there so rare as to be insignificant? At what point do I count as a resident? What metric is the right one to use in that calculation anyway? Hours logged in per month? Per day? What if I log in rarely and yet somehow account for a large portion of economic activity, perhaps by having created something that sells well? Am I then a resident? Where does one draw the line? There is also the issue of alts. I have an alt that has no payment information associated with it, and so is not attached to my main account, Walker Spaight. I’ve logged in as both over the last 60 days, so I was presumably counted as two residents. Given that, even the 60-day figure is inflated and thus not as useful as it could be.

In the comments thread of Sally’s post, SL resident (!) Baba Yamamoto suggests LL “just throw out an XML file and give us API keys.” This, of course, would be the best solution, but it’s highly unlikely to occur. Very few companies give out that kind of information. What’s most important is that LL be very transparent about what the numbers they offer do mean. That hasn’t been the case up to now, but it looks like that’s beginning to change.