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

Does that include me? Cuz Dude, I'd love to sit and have a real nice, "transparent and open" chat with you. Maybe we could make it an event, so everyone can see us "chat" together? I could raze my role as Host of Inside Second Life, just for you. If things go well, perhaps M, Robin, Blue, Philip, Katt, and others would like to "chat" with me in front of an audience?

What say you? Shall we have a "chat"?

That's right. This is a very complicated problem. I was just in a meeting where our Datawarehouse team talked about bot detection and alt detection. There are things we can do. There are things we should do. Real money transactions are generally bot free - especially where we charge a fee - so growth in the LindeX is a key thing to look at. But as I've mentioned that's not perfect either.

That's what I love about Second Life & Linden Lab - there's a lot of meaty data to play with and interpret. I have a very fun job.

Numbers are numbers. Just because there is better numbers (debatable) doesn't mean SL is better because of it. Linden Lab was establish in 1999. 10 years of development and this is what we got.

All good questions. Would you like to join my team? My analyst moved into another department recently. We have more questions than answers & your post here is a great example of that.

Are you serious?

ONE of the many problems is OpenSpace. The other of the MANY problems is you reporting numbers that YOU KNOW are false.

You have even admitted that BOTS make up some of your numbers, yet you continue to post them as a PLUS for you; that's just ethically wrong!

The other problem, is you lost MORE then just 1200 OS sims, you know it, yet everyone at LL continues to deny it. I can't believe you guys. Here's another on my list of what I'd do to change LL, I'd have someone come in and do a complete audit and report it publicly so people would know I'm a person that deals in the truth, NOT company spin.

This is the BIGGEST problem of them all. NO ONE at Linden Lab has the balls to do the RIGHT THING. You say you do, then show us, you are the CFO, you got pull, why not grandfather the OS users, and let them keep their OS's as they had them? Show us you got a pair!

Hi Bob - I'm definitely not blaming you. I'm asking to learn more about your business - not to say that you "should have" launched new products. What kind of business do you have?

I do want to know a lot more of what's going on. And to be fair, we don't claim to publish to the public blog everything that we know.

There has certainly been a decline in certain kinds of economic activity since the hype of the fall of 2006 and the spring of 2007. And there was a big drop when we cut out gambling. Since then we've seen slower steady growth generally.

Would love to hear more.

Why no one at Linden Lab offers me a job is amazing.

Look at my posts! I'm constantly offering improvements and suggestions!

Sheesh, you'd think you guys are all afraid of me

Absolutely they could be higher! That's why I'm so optimistic. We've got a lot of low hanging fruit to pick up. And you all know lots of examples of little things we could do that would make a big difference. We have a (relatively) small team. We've hired some great leaders especially since M Linden came on as CEO. Our teams across the company are coming together and I expect real progress in 2009 across a number of initiatives. Will we solve everything in 2009? Absolutely not. Are we on the right path? I think so.

Green dot surfing was a lot of fun when we were smaller. I enjoyed that when I first started. Its harder now that's true. The new http://slurl.com/ has a great new map - check it out. No green dots there though. That would be great. And it would be great if the green dots indicated real interesting activity. There's lots we could do around that. We'll make progress - but not as fast as either you or I can think of things to improve.

And another 10 years and imagine what we will have!

Another point of not knowing your Community. I've been here since April 2003, you'd think you'd know your most loyal customers

I run a Texture Business in Second Life for Builders. Builders Choice Premier Textures, THE BEST Textures in SL (sorry Drift).

I have three stores, Kissling, Sunset Arts and Garman. All three have shown bad bad sales for most of 2008; even when I lowered prices 30%, no customers. I have sales, up to 75% off, no customers.

What more can I tell you?

We did lose more than 1200 open space sims. Another 2500 combined 4:1 into full regions. So we lost a total of 3700 openspace sims. I'm not sure how to respond to the rest of this. I report the same numbers I would report if we were a public company - as if we were under that same level of scrutiny. I always say the best qualification I have for being a CFO is that I'm an eagle scout. Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

Would be nice if you would tell us WHY you won't argue to grandfather the people that had OS's before Jan. 5 and had to give them up?

It's one thing to say you care about your customers, it's another to actually DO something about it.

Words aren't worth anything. Show me what you mean, don't tell me what you mean.

Thanks for the offer, but I think Bob is the one more interested in a job.

I'm a tech geek. Software/game development/etc. I'm just your average technical customer, which means I am probably more of a pain in the tail than the users who are simply torn up over which kind of shoes they want to buy today.

I'm happy to throw out questions and critiques, and I realize that it tends to be rather pointed, but I want you to understand it comes from a general weariness and irritability in dealing with "the stinky end" of LL/SL for a year or so now, as a customer. It's not your fault, really; it's probably just a sore spot with a lot of folks right now. So few Lindens actually attempt to communicate with the customers at all, let alone without spin and ridiculous levels of hubris, that we tend to latch on to the ones who do try, with them becoming lightning rods for the massive amount of storm clouds brewing out here. In your case, it is even harder, because you're publishing and analyzing metrics, so your "lightning rod" reaches up high enough to poke the clouds directly.

That said, I'd be delighted to help however I can.

I think the main issue is that you need to be finding answers in addition to questions. Adding more questions without answers isn't going to help the situation a whole bunch.

Where are you getting this statistic from? The economic stats show it as 4,600 lost, if you add the 675 new islands to that, that suggests you're down 5,200 openspaces, whereas if you subtract 675 from 4,600 that brings you to around 3,900, which is the figure you're citing.

The problem with dealing with the inherent inaccuracies to minimize duplicate figures is that you'd have to totally redo the system of transactions. This of course would be costly, time consuming and my suggested idea would mean you'd have to have a robust set of systems to handle the new load and calculations caused by each transaction but would not only allow for more information and statistics to be given to residents about their transactions but also allow more accurate numbers. I will try to parse these better and post them to a wiki page and/or a JIRA later.

1) I generally don't really care about how many alts a person has or who's an alt of who but the first thing to do is to keep track of this information and automatically remove transactions solely to and from characters by one person

2) For [insert diety you believe in here]'s sake track all transactions and translate this to a web system where a person can pull up their transaction history in full as well as statistics such as amount incoming/outgoing for a selected period, graphed date on spending/recieving, categorization of expenses and transactions recieved. If you don't know what I mean see something like http://mint.com. This would take bandwith and processing power galore but it would go far in making business and even casual record keeping and data gathering possible.

3) This is the controversial one, set a throttle on how many transactions between any two given residents and/or the rate and/or amounts of money exchanged are counted towards the statistics, currently only LL has the data to make this determination and like the proposals for doing this with traffic numbers and bots it will cause a lot of strife and controversy but blatant fraud aside (avatar A -> avatar B -> A -> B -> etc...) there are situations where many micro transactions occur in fairly quick succession, such as freeplay games which require 1L to play then immediately send it back to you, where there is no real transaction taking place. This threshold would have to be constantly updated and would probably have to be several different thresholds for rate (speed), amount, and avatars involved (not always 2). This would also have to apply not just to A -> B transactions but also if A were exceeding the rate limit for example the freeplay example where A could be sending 1L back and forth hundreds of times an hour in each direction if A owned a popular freeplay destination.

4. Create a system to do avatar to avatar transactions directly from the website and has been a feature request for quite some time. It would not only allow commerce at times and places where people are unable to access SL proper but properly implemented I believe it would also cause less load on the SL proper system and have less of a chance of dropped transactions during times of high load on SL proper (see #5).

5. This is another please for the love of [insert deity here], use a three party handshake or similar system for transactions to ensure that even if all the above are not implemented or fail to work in times of high load and/or server instability then even if transactions fail there will be no risk of L$'s either being stuck in limbo until a ticket can be filed and they can be manually found or lost entirely during a transaction. This would also go along well with #6 towards making sure that the destination of the transaction always recieves the L$ that has been sent and can always recognize that they have recieved them.

6. Implement much needed LSL calls. I don't think I really need to clarify this one, there is a very short list of calls that have been requested forever to give scripts access to more much needed financial information.

6b. Give LSL calls to allow access to needed financial information for the owner or a given avatar who has given permission. Currently the way that a transaction is checked is through a workaround call to the person's transaction log, this is a hack that while semi effective causes excessive load for the script and for the web server as well as being potentially slow and/or inaccurate. My suggestion is to add calls to get selected information on a given transaction by transaction number if nothing else. Either through the permission system or preferably through a limited access key system, similar to what EVE Online does, allow access to certain information for an account such as the L$ balance, the USD balance, the transaction limits for that account, and any number of useful points of data. The way I envision doing this securely is possibly direct LSL calls for the owner of a script to be able to do this and for others a way of generating an unique key by selecting parameters of what that key would be able to give access to which could be then put into a script and call read access to the allowed information. These keys would of course be able to be managed through the web interface and possibly in world and would not only show who accessed what information and when using that key but would also be instantly revocable by the owner of the key.

The above suggestions, as I said, would be labor and coding intensive to implement and would be server intensive to maintain and use however they are all feasible and part or all of these ideas are in use around the world in any number of situations. None have been brought together in a system such as SL which brings it's own unique challenges however this is unarguably doable if you're willing to spend the time and money to do so.

I have not talked about benefits because I would be on thin ice to do so without being able to see the future as there are too many other factors however not only do I believe that these changes could make SL more stable I also believe that they would be a PR coup and would make SL a more effective business platform as well as a more effective system in general.

Zee, I know that no one Linden can even seriously consider this on their own however I ask you to please pass this around as a suggestion to any other Lindens who may be able/interested in working on this and to anyone else who may be interested.

I give full permission for any of the above to be fully copied, pasted, printed, distributed, read, doodled on, or eaten by giant spider moneys as long as my name is attributed so please by all means if you agree, disagree, want to comment, want to flame me then quote this at will.

LL as a company is just exposing numbers just as any other company would indeed.

At least, it clearly explains and validates the virtual real estate bubble that has taken place, as well as the reason why LL has done so well because of it in Q2, Q3 and Q4 of 2008

In a normal healthy market, the mass of land should have been 1,600 million sqm in Q4.
The terrible decision to shift the openspace price offering in April 2008 without a comprehensive plan or any long term strategy seem to be the sole contributor for this bubble. I would rather call the contraction of approximately 10% a "correction" as a result.

The question forward for 2009 is whether the land market will continue to grow as well as in 2007, once corrected to a normal market level in Q1 of 2009.

I want to seriously caution LL for 2009 and ask that no further mainland auction supply be released unless all factors justifying it are met. That is: Land value going back above L$7/sqm, amount of overall land for sale down, and peak concurrent users increasing in a way that the market can absorb it.

In a ironic way it might serve LL to sit on this extra cash for a possible downturn or lack of revenue growth in 2009. It's just sad that it was gained in a such a disingenuous way on the back of part of the residents who are being thanked for here.

I guess we can consider this a success for having replicated a real life crisis in a virtual environment on a smaller scale and make us learn from it.

You are a numbers man. Tell me how the asset server is going to handle unlimited content creation for the next 10 years and still operate. Tell me how if SL can't handle 70K reliably now how it will handle the growth every year for 10 years in order to maintain profitability. LL had 10 years to figure this out and hasn't. What gives you the optimism to think they can? The numbers do not add up.

Decouple traffic from the search system relevance and see what happens.

Just as LL cannot do anything about content theft except wring hands as an act to look like LL cares, LL cannot tell who is a bot and who is not. Maybe a few bots running old bot apps that have to use the --channel parameter to get on. Those are in decline. In addition people just park avatars on parcels with anti away on when they go to bed. Traffic is a bogus metric because it is gamed. And then there are the services that send in the bots that walk around and jabber via gestures on timers. And the list goes on and on. The bot arms race as it were.

Just decouple traffic from search. The whole "bad bots" issue will evaporate. Sure there will still be some dorks that refuse to believe bots are a waste of resources. And eventually they will leave SL because nobody will go near their parcels.

You guys should look at what Daden Research is doing with bots. Actually let's call them NPC units. It won't be too long before it will take more than a few minutes to spot the NPC units.

And why do you guys act like you are working on something when people are upset and then drop it? The Rosedale promise to deal with content theft that should really not have been promised at all due to the obvious technical reasons rofl. The whole traffic futures thing was a farce. All those meetings. And nothing was done about the traffic fraud. Absolutely nothing. There was the big promise to deliver estate control of windlight environment settings and user shareable windlight settings. Poof. Not even on the radar to deliver. And most recently the premium thing. All those meetings, surveys and such. Yet we see nothing. No progress report. Zilch. So naturally we toss it off as another one of those fakes in LL's play book. The play action fakes need to be torn out of the play book lol. We see them coming right away. Right now you guys need to be focused on the texture reloading issue before the ISPs start filtering Second Life out at the hubs to get rid of the massive bandwidth transfer issue. And the offlining of "old stuff". What happens to "old stuff" in boxes that are vend prims? Will stuff be offlined and then not delivered with the transactions? Have you tested this? How could you have tested it? etc etc.

I hope 2009 is a banner year. January is not looking so good.

/me lets Zee off easy and just asks for a bear.

thats exactly what i am thinking too!

Terrific improvement. While it took me some time to find Nautilus City on it, that was worthwhile. The green texture is soooo much better than the brown.

Thanks! I enjoy it! The tougher the better. I answer what I can and refer the rest of the questions and suggestions to the right people. Glad its appreciated. I'm a few pages behind because I had to go to dinner, but I'll catch up a bit now and again in the morning pacific time.

Thanks Bob. I was talking about improvements to Openspaces, but this is an interesting list nonetheless. You'll have to convince the board to hire you as CEO which might be a bit tough because they usually give new guys a little longer than 6 months to get some traction - so they might be holding out more hope for what M is able to do than you are just now.

Having worked for a lot of CEOs, I can tell you that M is doing a lot of great things and has really been able to bring in a great team. We do have a long way to go and lots of improvements to make, and its not going to happen overnight. Far from blaming our customers, I again, sincerely thank them for their patience with us and with Second Life. I'm certain that we will have made a lot of progress by this time next year. Day to day sometimes that's hard to see.

When I was interviewing at the company in the summer of 2006 peak concurrency would maybe hit 8,000. We just recently broke through 80,000. Its taken a lot of tough technical progress to get from 8k to 80k. And it hasn't been the smoothest of journeys as you know. I remain very optimistic about the future of virtual worlds in general and the future of Second Life and Linden Lab.

Certainly not afraid of you by any stretch of the imagination. As you can see, I'm responding to all your posts. And I'd be happy to meet you in world and have you show me around. Post a slurl on the new map & I'll stop by. Just don't be mean to my Beagle.

Good point Bob. I'm sure our concierge team does know who you are & I'm sure I should too. I certainly do now! Drop a landmark on me and I'll check out the stores. Probably textures sell when more new land sells. All the uncertainty in the land market this year coupled with hype driven growth in 2007 would make 2008 worse. I can understand that. Hang in there & we should see an uptick in 2009. I'm excited about a few things that we have in our pipeline for merchants. Stay tuned.