LL is selling SL to the highest bidder.

i couldnt be more sad than i am,i have always supported linden lab,and the recent events this was becoming obvious,i always supported linden lab,second life has made me dream,as well with many other people,A BIG BAH FOR ALL THIS

I have the feeling Philip wouldn't sell this company unless you pried it from his cold, dead hands.

It's his childhood dream, after all.

And you definitely don't sell a company that's growing at a ridiculous rate, has a customer growth rate of 15% ,and almost profitable with revenue in the tens of millions per year.

No, they won't sell SL. Or Linden Lab. We're stuck with them.

FOr those of you crying foul over the lack of ability to hear announcements and stuff, move your RSS readers to http://blog.secondlife.com/ .

philip childhood dream or not-this is all the signs for a sale,you need a business view to see it.

Of course he would want to sell it. He has to get rid of it as fast as he can. His company will become instantly worthless when a big software giant comes out with their version... the real mainstream version. Phillip knows its coming, so he wants to make money fast, before this ain't worth crap, and SL dries up. I'm guessing the company that buys it is the company coming out with the next big MMO and they're going to shut SL down, so they can remove the competition.

Well I don't know what to believe..
I'm hearing the forums will be shut down...i hear LL and/or SL will be sold to an other big company.

I'm just hoping IF they're selling LL and/or SL...that it will have very little effect on SL's community.

I don't think that they will ever shut down SL.
500.000 people are playing...and not to mention the large profit that LL is making from SL.

SL is like a goldmine.

It would be kinda weird to buy out your own competition and then simply remove everything you bought.
They will keep it , put it under their name..and make profit.


I'm just scared of the possible in-game changes.

Dear mina

If there is a scarying competition for SL coming in-and are the same ones buying SL,they wont care to shut it down at all-because the new one will be better
period

AAhh! >.< *closes eyes, plugging ears and chants* "No, not true not true... SL is not going to be shut down, not true..."

*looks up* Hey, very silly idea, please don't laugh to hard at this, I'm not a very smart fox... But what if *we* buy SL? All residents together?

This often-quoted figure is next to meaningless.

The number of registered accounts may be growing at 15% per month. How many of those log in a few times and never come back? How many of those actually contribute to LL's bottom line? How many of them are simply a drain on their resources?

How do measure what a user *truly* is when any person can register an arbitrary number of accounts without so much as a valid email address? Are there really 390,000 people using Second Life? Not by a longshot. Is the active population *really* growing at 15% per month? I would be surprised if it were, and their unwillingness to provide sufficient information to calculate population statistics for ourselves means we can only take their word for it.

I figure SL2.0 is around the corner somewhere...Maybe it will come with a merger? I think the software is too proprietary to just hand off to new a new company. Whoever enters next will need the Linden programmers or they (the new guys) will be lost in the code. Then there is the idea of going open source. I could see them merging with some big name big bucks company and bringing out a brand new product (from ground up). LL is a company with heart and soul, I believe they love what they do and wont sell out only for the money. Then again I'm no analyst.

So why are they trying to cut down on their real customer base? (real new accounts and not alts and griefing teens on the main grid)

Why should the fact that you are surprised by something mean dick to anyone else?

Because I'm so damn smart, and have the skills to meaningfully analyze bullshit statistics, which I've demonstrated amply in the past. When someone throws out a stat like "SL's population is growing at 15% per month", they should expect those of us with knowledge of statistics and significant background in data analysis to question that figure.

Do you have anything meaningful to contribute? Or do you simply intend to attack single sentences in a one-off manner?

Ricky: 1
Luciftias: 0

TacoTaco: 1

What about the growing concurrency rate?

Welcome To Google Life.

EA...SOE is there really a difference?

EA made a broken game and never fixed it

SOE made a broken game, fixed it which made it worse, fixed it which made it even worse,
alienating more of their player base with each fix

Both milked a cash cow till the cow is almost dead

Concurrency rate is growing, but not at nearly 15% per month. It's more like 5% per month based on population stats kindly provided to me by Chromal Brodsky.

Assuming a current peak concurrency of ~8,800, a quick simulation predicts that in one year, the peak concurrency will be less than around 31,000 with 95% probability, with maximum likelihood of concurrency at around 15,000. This assumes the exponential growth continues as it has in the past.

If the active population were truly growing at 15% per month, the peak concurrency should be over 53,000 in one year's time. My simulations give that a probability of much less than 0.1% of actually occuring.

This assumes that peak concurrency is growing at 15%, which I agree -- it's unlikely to be. However, as I remarked on my blog, while the peak number of concurrent logins is 3.93 times higher than it was 13 months ago, the minimum number of logins per 24 hours is now 5.67 times higher.

Clickable Culture notes that in Philip and Cory's talk at Google back in March, they said that there were "25,000 users logging in daily".

We don't have access to hard data indicating the total number of unique users that were logged in for any 24-hour period, but Chromal's data does indicate the concurrency rate every five minutes for the last 13 months. With this, it's easy to see that non-peak concurrent logins have been growing far faster than peak.

So, why assume that peak logins are a useful indicator of anything except... peak logins? The fastest growth is all happening during non-peak periods.

OK, so, SL is going to the highest bidder, I'll go L$10, anyone want to go higher?

I wouldn't buy SL with all of the sexuality in it... not with the prospect of internet legislature being passed changing the requirements to access adult material. It could be more expensive than SL's worth.

A new law to regulate adult content on the internet gets introduced as often as bush says "terrorism".

While I hear your frustration, amig0, I disagree that LL is trying to sell. Strongly. Willing to back up your claims with cash? I'd be willing bet that Linden Lab doesn't sell Second Life withing the next 12 months for US$1000.00. Why am I that confident? This is Philip's baby. After his past success, which doubtless set him up for life, he didn't NEED to create SL, he was fufilling a dream. LL's moving fast, trying to get a space where they can de-centralize and become more a browser provided than ISP or babysitter, IMHO. I agree with you that they're doing it too quickly and putting the cart before the horse in many ways (like opening registration before giving us the tools we need to deal with griefers properly, then rushing to kluge them in).

Any takers who want to sign an RL contract on that for US$1000?

Regards,

-Flip

The short answer is that peak concurrency has historically been used successfully as a population metric in online spaces.

You do make very good point though. The daily minimum is growing at a somewhat higher rate (I make it around 6% -- 8% per month compared to ~5%, with a much higher daily volatility than the peak concurrency exhibits) than the daily maximum. The difference in increase rates between peak and non-peak logins suggests geographically non-uniform growth. That is, users seem to be preferrentially joining from non-North American locations, thereby boosting non-peak concurrency numbers.

I would personally love to see 1-day, 7-day, 14-day and 30-day login numbers. *That* would be incredibly informative from a modelling point of view.