Second Life Residents logged nearly 400 million hours in 2008, growing 61% over 2007

Well more to the point, after the Openspace fiasco who is going to trust Linden Lab on a new land product? How long before they stitch people up on tier for that, especially when you see how they spin the changes to try and say the feedback over the fiasco was positive.

A lot of work needs to be done at Linden Lab and the spin in this blog post really isn't encouraging.

Yeah, I would like to know how LL makes any sense of these metrics.

They may be valid numbers, sure, but what do they really mean?

If you can't account for camping bots, how can you point to that graph and say "user hours are up 60% from last year"? Bots are not users, and no amount of spin on that simple fact will make them so.

Yes, LL is great with publishing numbers, but even you, LL, don't have a clue what the numbers REALLY mean, so why speculate? Worse, why present speculation as real analysis?

These reports are so superficial, a high school graduate could generate them. I presume Linden Lab pays you all a bit more than summer wages for fast food employees, right?

I'm no economist or statistician, but I can see through the sheer folly presented in this report.

Eh well, I guess that's what a business does best; throws out numbers and spins them in every positive way to make people think they are the shiznit.

I can feel the love.

Mister Zee, you can fool some of the people some of the time...but really, who is this daydream spin job for? We LIVE here.

I wont even bother to point out the various tangled web of BS you call your data.

I don't think there will be any room for lindens in the future. We'll be standing around some virtual space in 10 years going... "LOLZ!1 remember SL and the lindens? rofmao!1"

Carry on.

I write them, get input from everyone in the company and then I post them. Dishonest is a stretch. The numbers are the numbers. I try to hold ourselves to the same standard that a public company would for what we report. I do answer more detailed questions in the forums.

As I've said in the forums before, bots do impact these numbers. But we have seen evidence in the data that bot usage has not grown as a percentage of total use over time. making trending relevant.

Certainly the the 1200 openspaces that were canceled to represent unhappy customers and I am sorry that we didn't have a product that met their needs. I'd love to have a better product at the $75 price point and I believe that we will be able to do that. As I said in last quarter's post, I'm sorry we launched the openspaces the way we did originally. Homesteads are a start and hopefully we'll see a better balance of usage of grid resources and our costs.

I agree with you that Homesteads are a better product for Openspaces. Openspaces are designed for extremely limited use. As I mentioned we're looking for ways to offer a high quality product with a lower monthly maintenance fee. Homesteads are our first shot at that & I'm hoping for more.

What business were you in? What new products did you launch? Second Life experienced a great deal of hype in 2007. In 2008, we saw declines in that hype but we saw an increase in engaged users. Our two highest months of active unique users were November and December of 2008. We're working on a few things to help merchants. So I'd like to learn more about your experience. Is it fewer new residents? More competition? or are some of your goods being copied? To what do you account the decline in your success?

Oh please! Zee, that wasn't what I was saying at all, The Openspace product is rubbish, it's overpriced, it is not really fit for purpose, it needs to go the way of the dodo and be replaced by a better quality product.

Are you familiar with the Monty Python Spam song? Change the word Spam to Spin and sing away

Then you should have done the *only* right thing to do: grandfathering existing OS regions. You could have put in stuff like the avatar limit, and the announced script limit "that would only impact very few regions that really abuse ressources" - and keep them at the same price. A "new" product with a lots higher price AND added limits? And you rob thousands and thousands of people who took your earlier offer in good faith of their investment in money, time and creativity? Disgusting.

Oh and your costs? Well I think you are doing fine. Like charging old OS owners who because of YOUR unfair policy change in order of trying to survive have to move and/or rename "Homesteads" $50, $150, heck $200 (!!!!!) for a work done in minutes? Oh I get it, you don't charge for the minutes of work done, but for the 18 days tickets nowadays are waiting in the queue.

Nope, no volunteer moderators. Just me.

Would you please publish growth of user hours without the bot hours online,
and growth of real person accounts so that multi accounts are not counted in the statistics.

I am very sure you can do that.

From Q1 2006 upto Q4 2008, just to see all facts, most appreciated

Really? Contrast that with Jack Linden's concerns about increased camping bot activity due to the fact that there are more and more "services" to "rent" bots to game the traffic numbers. As a result, he is planning a blog post about a new policy to start clamping down on traffic gaming. Do you all communicate with each other at all there at the Lab? O.o



Dude. Listen up. One MAJOR reason that people cancelled had NOTHING to do with you having "a product that met their needs", but the WAY IT WAS HANDLED. IE, you lost them due to BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE and POLICY HANDLING decisions. If it was handled better, they might have been happy with the "new" product offerings. However, it was beyond clear that subterfuge (at worst) and/or incompetence (at best) was afoot, and they balked, understandably so.

WHY do people at companies continue to believe that their customers are somehow less than human, and can't think and reason through things for themselves? I never got that "height of hubris" thing. Can someone explain it to me?



I'm not even sure what THAT means. If anything, it definitely was "too little, too late", and directed to the wrong people.

I see this as a failure due to perspective.

Zee, maybe run these posts by a few knowledgeable residents before posting them. I could have shared Our Q4 numbers with you....which are sadly quiet the inverse of yours. With some "resident perspective" mixed in, Your stats may be easier to digest.

Absolutely spot on. I mean people had a product that met their needs, it was the way the rug was yanked from underneath it that annoyed people.

Im not the original poster but I can answer some of your questions on my own behalf.

A big factor was the decline of paying customers. The ones who had the OS'es and loved to spend lindens and hours decorating their sims and homes. Every change of season they would be back wanting new creations for their homes and land. These customers have declined by more than half from what I can see.

Another factor even worse than the OS fiascal is the GREYNESS of SL prims. Textures and the texture window has been borked since the first release of 1.21. It not only has adverse effects on shoppers not wanting to wait a half hour to see if the grey mass in front of them is really a grey mass...but it affects the whole SL experience for just about everyone. At least 50% of the fun is gone out of SL without textures.

And I do believe the overall RL economy is having an effect in SL too. I know I am watching my extra spending with a lot more care...as I have seen over 5000 people in our state alone lose their lifelong jobs the past few months.

I have seen a lot of great improvements in SL since I started here a little over 2 years ago. But in my mind...the greyness has made any improvements a waste of time as SL is only good for talking to friends now. And Voice is borked half the time now too in the last few weeks making it impossible to talk to anyone for longer than 5 minutes without one or another avie having to relog.

But on the bright side...I hardly ever crash anymore Only when I am uploading textures and spend a few extra seconds looking for the right one. When I find it and click on it and come back in SL..I hear the all too familiar ding...and up pops the message "Second Life is logging you out. Press cancel to read any IM's or quit to leave Second Life."

I would attribute it to LL employees not actually playing the game the way the rest of us have to do. I cannot blame him; I have lots of trouble playing in SL myself nowdays as the textures loading like molasses makes even simple things impossible inworld. And while I do believe SL grew in 2008 overall, the spin thrown on the recent losses of all the bait and switch sims is insulting. You don't really think we can't see through that, do you?

Here's a quick way to tell if the losses were the overall economy or LL's handling of the voidsims. Compare the number of full sims closed to the number of void sims closed. If they are about equal, then you are correct and the economic downturn is to blame. But if the voidsims canceled outnumber the number of regular islands then LLs misguided approach to fixing the voidsim problem is to blame.

So how many voidsims were cancelled (not upconverted) versus how many full islands? Inquiring minds want to know.

First question is how one should demarcate between bots and real users. If you define it in code and theory too broadly, you can skew the data by including too many real residents. Sometimes I am idle for an hour or more in photoshop or another application. Others will use SL during periods as a sort of instant messaging platform; browsing and doing other things while checking IM's on occasion. However, if you define it too narrowly, and exclude things like camping which have the same effect (traffic and concurrency without real use), or "active" bots such as spiders and land bots you can miss getting relevant data as well.

I think the best bet is to determine _active hours_. This would be the period of time when a unique non-bot user is online and actively doing things (chatting, moving around, interacting etc); this is what is important to the economy and community. So, if someone is chatting for 2 hours, and idle for 1, they would rack up 2 active hours. Bot activity such as spiders and land bots would be excluded.

As for openspaces, I see that my comments on the obvious semantics switching were ignored. The "new" policy is exactly the same as the initial openspace policy except for one thing: the price increase was tiered, and full increase delayed for an additional six months. That is the only practical difference; the new "openspace" product has such limited and niche use (represented by the amount of people actually converting and using it) that it is a non-product.

The entire openspace fiasco could have been avoided, and prices increased as LL needs, if refunds of openspace setup fees for openspaces were offered for those who desired them. There would have been no huge masses of discontent; one could simply take the refund and _reinvest_ in another land product. Instead, we have $600,000 worth of _customer losses_ from returned openspaces so far.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned specifically in this thread what's been brought up before about the resident transaction numbers being completely unreliable because they count "non real" transactions such as transferring too and from bank alts and instantly returned transactions such as the 1L you send to start a freeplay machine and then is instantly sent back, according to the LL number that is 2L in transactions.

Apology accepted, although I don't hold you responsible for that really. There's other birds and felines running around loose that bear more responsibility.

I'm wondering what kind of product you might switch to if it were available? What could meet your needs better?

We certainly have a lot of work to do. This post wasn't meant to list all of the things that I would like to fix. That list is long. There are many ways I think we could improve Second Life. Is everything perfect? Absolutely not. Are things better than they were in 2007? In many ways yes - the grid is more stable, we have more active users, the economy is as large as it was before we banned gambling. In some ways things aren't as good because in 2007 we had an unbelievable amount of hype. That hype poured in users probably faster than we could handle them. Am I personally confident about our long term direction? Absolutely. Linden Lab is strong, Second Life is strong & we'll be able to weather an economic downturn in the real world that I'm not sure all companies will be able to weather.

I'm not sure that type of stuff belongs in a general audience blog post though. The future is going to be better in Second Life.

From 12.28.08 to today, every single day there has been at least ONE blog notice of log-ins being disabled. So please, tell me. As a consumer ( aka I give you money for a product), how is the future going to be better in Second Life? And how is that stability initiative coming?

Over the years I have went from ML ownership to a island when they first came out, had two premium accts. Went to both island ownership and ML.
Grew more and more distrustful of LL. I love SL and hate seeing what LL is turning it into. I now have got rid of all my land, dropped my premiums, I feel now Im paying what its worth. Nothing.
Until LL can convince a lot of people that they really care about SL and not just another overpriced gimmick, SL will fail.
The numbers I read are mostly meaningless, as has been said.... a simple 'feel good' for LL.

LOL After what you guys at LL did to all of us in SL with the open space fiasco..do you all REALLY belive that you could gain the trust back of all the thousands of people that you "robbed" with your bait and switch and then tell us in a post how it was a GREAT quarter for YOU all financialy by coming out with a "NEW" product???

You all at LL seem to live in some other world than alot of us do in here.
I cancelled my premium account and dumped my OS sim. I will NEVER invest 1 cent to LL ever again. I dont care what new product you all come out with. I have absoulty NO TRUST what so ever in you guys at this point. I do enjoy coming into SL and have made tons of life long friends in here but as far as investing in anything again? Forget it!

Thanks. My eyes are wide open too. Bots do affect the hours. But we still see a consistent revenue per hour - so that tells me that we're seeing a similar percentage of bots to live activity. Openspaces did cause a surge in land sold - and there is a lot of reconfiguration going on. There will still be some reconfiguration in Q1.

Credibility took a hit because of the way we launched openspaces then had to change it. It will take time for us to restore that. I've apologized for that many times. We're not perfect, but we're getting better.

Winter was less of a high season than September. September user to user transactions were near $37m compared to $35m in December. LindeX volume did not grow as rapidly as some of the other numbers & I've always said that's the strictest measure of the economy. We've got a few tricks up our sleeves that we think can get things moving in the right direction over time. I think its obvious I'm excited about the future & I thank you for your eyes wide open commitment. Things can and will get better.

Actually, most private businesses don't throw out any numbers! Sometimes I think I understand why! Seriously, we make a lot of sense with these numbers when we tie them to our detailed financial results. They tie together. Hours growth has been faster, particularly in 2007 and so has our revenue growth. There are no perfect metrics. I report on the same metrics in the same way each quarter.

And yes, I did graduate from high school.