What's so cool about content creation?

For those asking, I get my figures from hourly checks of the secondlife.com homepage, interviews with visitors to my sandbox, daily snapshots of the "Popular Places" list and weekly summaries from the economic statistics page.

As a strong supporter of Second Life (both in-world and out) and sponsor of the upcoming Second Life Community Convention (SLCC) I chose a project, in this case user retention, shortly after having 14 friends from Xbox Live (who also were big PC MMO users) try out Second Life. Of the 14 only two logged in a second time. I watched concurrency increase from my start in April, but it has more or less plateaued while the number ofaccounts continue to rise.

Yes, I too have ssen the occasional number go over 9,000. There have been plenty of days recently, however, that it has barely broken 7,000 at the high point.

While most would view Xbox Live as a "game", it is indeed a platform (and part of the upcoming Windows Vista in the form of "Live Anywhere" with a monthly fee and a content charge (the individual games). In nearly an identical timeframe Second Life had 300,000 accounts versus 2.5 million Xbox Live paid subscribers. Thee are far more PCs and Macs on the planet then there are Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles. I am interested in the reasons, and how Second Life can attract and keep the largest segment of 3D online space users, the "gamers".

I hope that Second Life can be seen as so much more than a business opportunity. But for those who do view it that way and like to look at these numbers, I wish they too would question why concurrency isn't over 10,000 based on the rise in accounts, much less a higher number, like 10% of active accounts.

I would agree, Xbox Live is a platform for connecting users and hosting games and other aplications.. It's a pretty good peice of work at that ;0

As to your friends, it's easy to come back when things are free. When more of their other friends start blabbing about Second Life they might want to try it again. If the development has move signifigantly enough and there is enough content targeted to your friends' interests, they may stay.

The process of developing content on an evolving platform, is that your content must also evolve with it. When a good set of CORE features are set and the platform is fairly stable I think development will increase. People will have time to learn the basics before things move on to the latest and greatest. Second Life as a platform is still very early in its life cycle.

I am a total newbie (not worthy, etc.) but I have been jumping around, exploring, trespassing, shopping. My main impression is astonishment, followed by the question: where is everybody? Fantastic job of building, but tremendously overbuilt. I live in a city, and I'm looking for some mass of humanity. But it's like a neutron bomb hit. How do you turn this wave of creativity into community? Someone want to point me to downtown?

Who stole Baba's password?

Now what would really screw with the data server, would be to add in the ability to use the IM client networks. Ugh.. That wouldn't be a good thing.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

The easiest place to find "the people" is to click the "Search" button and select the "Popular Places" tab. You then have a list of the most highly visited places the previous day. Click any of the locations and choose "teleport" to just visit, or "Show on Map" to bring up the Second Life map and view the green dots. Hovering your mouse over a region will indicate the number of people currently there.

Besides this method, the "Search" and "Map" features are your best methods to find where everyone is. The "Events" tab of "Search" will show you announced things such as discussions, contests, live music and more, again with the options of teleporting or viewing the map. Pay attention to the listed time, as events can run for up to three hours there will be listings from earlier than the current SL time as well as after. You also have the choice to limit which kind of events you are looking for using the combo-box to the right of the search parameters.

Just opening the "Map" can be the beginning of a search. Click and drag the map and watch the regions come into view. If you see a pack of green dots maybe it's worth exploring, either for the people or just maybe to see what's there.

Finally, many new people get a good start and meet up in "Sandboxes", open areas where anyone is allowed to build. The Lindens run a number of them as do private people. Doing a search using the "Places" tab for "sandbox" will give you a list.

You are also more than welcome to visit my sandbox in "Jizo" which you can find many ways: open the "Map" and type in "Jizo"; open "Search" and check "Popular Places" (I'm normally there along with the Linden-hosted "Sandbox Island"; open "Search" and click the "People" tab and search for my name. Click on it and check my "Picks" tab; and of course you can search simply for the name in "Places" using either "sandbox" or "clubside" or the full name, "Clubside's FunZone Sandbox".

Good luck! If you check the secondlife.com home page you will see the current number of accounts logged it, and I can assure you they are busy having their own brand of fun, be it building, socializing, playing games or who knows what. Hopefully these tips will help you find some new friends and you can continue the exploration you enjoyed together.

So.. where do i find these plugins at?

They're hidden!

Figures!

Clubside, upon reading the majority of this post (while SL was down :| ) it seems to me that Usu was actually talking about SL's lack of having hundreds of avatars in any one place. In that respect, I believe SL *is* overbuilt, in the sense that there is way more space (and built things in it) than it seems like you'd actually need to support a chatroom of hundreds or even thousands of people.

I think some of it has to do with the fact that there are landowners, who perhaps want to try their hand at building something, or starting some sort of business, and as time goes on (landowners with businesses and homes increase) and computer processing power doesn't increase, you see the same sort of sprawl that affects any society that has a tenet of manifest destiny, oddly enough.

Regarding the original post -- it sounds like Baba is talking about a two tiered client, similar to what another poster suggests -- would it be worth it to have a "developer" version of the client that had those extras that the normal version of the client wouldn't need?

Rather than a two tiered client, I suggest a plugin system that allows for a client that will fit the user's tastes. Along with modding th XUI to customize the look and feel. ;0 Sort of like Firefox's extensions can be used to add what you need without having to worry about the things you do not.