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

We did consider grandfathering as we did with the original regions with $195 maintenance fees. We found that while grandfathering works well in the short term that it creates some odd distortions in the land market over time. So we decided not to do it this time. Was it the right call? I'm not sure. Time will tell and we'll learn more this way.

Thanks Talarus. That's good feedback about hubris - I hope that's not too widespread. I'll pass on your message to the team. Personally, I'm humbled by lot of things I see around Linden Lab. I'm humbled by the passion of the Residents and my coworkers for improving Second Life and making virtual worlds be all they can be. I'm humbled by the amount of work that went into Second Life by residents and Lindens in the 7 years before I got here. I'm humbled by the amount of downtime and crashes that are residents have put up with for a long time. I'm humbled by the recent progress we've made on stability & crash rate and then by the amount of work we need to do to make it as good as we all want it to be.

Anyway, its a humbling experience for a lot of folks here. Its a big challenge & its a lot of fun - even when you have to get hit by lightning every once in a while.

There's a note about an issue with those particular statistics on that page. Sorry for the confusion. The numbers that I'm quoting come directly from our billing system & take into account numbers through about last Monday. Because they come from the billing system they only count regions that are active and being billed/paid. I don't think the stats page pulls them that way.

Nice post here: http://your2ndplace.com/node/1415

I've never been told I'm good at spin - so this is a new one for me. Thanks! ?

I think we do some of this but its not perfect.



Mint is great. We totally need this.


Definitely controversial but I see your point. This was definitely more of an issue before gambling was officially banned.



This would be big & would enable the L$ to be used for lots of good transactions outside of Second Life and on other sites as well. This is something I push on all the time here.


I forget the technical name for this one but I know that there is a project like this one that folks have worked on. I'm not sure where it stands now.


Not an expert on these types of things, but what you say looks like it makes a lot of sense.

Overall, we have no shortage of good ideas for things to work on. The problem right now is that we have too many things to work on and not enough resources to get everything done. Our development team continues to grow & we're making lots of progress, but prioritizing against an infinite list of potential improvements to Second Life is one of our biggest challenges right now. Its obvious you get that & I appreciate your suggestions.

Definitely a correction. Well said. I believe we have held the mainland supply quite constant for some time and we do watch that price per sqm before releasing it. We've tested different approaches at times, but I think we've figured out (by trial and error) that your suggest is very close to what we do now.

I can see why you think it was disingenuous. As one of the people who helped to make the decision, I can tell you it wasn't done intentionally, but I know that sounds thin. I learned a lot and I know others on the team would say the same thing.

Great question. As I mentioned in an early comment, I was here when our peak concurrency was less than 10,000 (I think it was all bots back then too - KIDDING ) Along the way from 10k to 80k we've hit a number of technical limits. Some of which we could foresee and some of which we couldn't. I think FJ mentioned 3 main systems that we need to make some improvements to for the next level of scaling: our network, our asset server & our database system. We have projects in each of these areas that will give us significant headroom.

I also have reviewed the longer term designs for much broader scalability. In looking at our growth in peak concurrency - its been surprisingly linear. Its been relatively easy to predict where it will be in a few months, just by laying a piece of paper across our daily concurrency chart and continuing the trend. Because of that trend, I don't think we need to be ready for 10x the number of residents in the next few months. That will give us time to implement all near term improvements and longer term architectural required to scale.

I'm even more optimistic with the new technical leaders we have on board. Its a pleasure to sit in the executive team meetings with them and to hear how they're thinking about improving the system and building their teams.

At the end of the day, I think that's the main reason. We've been able to attract some great people including M & all the new leaders he's added to the team.

Fair points. We often bite off more than we can chew. But we have come a long way. I'll tell you now so you're not surprised - 2009 won't grow as quickly as 2008. (January is looking pretty good on a number of metrics I've seen though - Q1 is always pretty strong). Hopefully we'll set ourselves up to grow faster and get more done as the year progresses. I think we're well positioned to continue to build momentum as our team keeps coming together. I'm a believer & thanks for your hope as well!

I need a bear that looks like a beagle. L$ 5000 to the best Beagle Bear.

Yeah isn't that cool? I think we "soft launched" that today. Interesting how that came together. I won't steal the thunder of that story in case its soon to be posted about. The rendering of the images look great don't they?

http://slurl.com

Signing off for the night. Thanks for your comments and questions. I'll be back online in the morning. And likely inworld as well. See you tomorrow.

We already had a product that met our needs in the previous Open Space definition i have had one for going on 2 years now before and after you doubled prim levels and opened up the flood gates by making them oh so tempting.. Then suddenly over use was "unexpected" but anyway weve all been over this many many times and its become clear LL simply are not listening no matter how many times they claim they are.

I still have my "homestead" and after putting months of work into building it id like to be able to justify keeping it please. Converting to Open Space is not an option this is a ridiculous product and even though its at the lowest end price wise i think it is considered a luxury item in hard economic terms as the resources you get for your money is so pitiful.

So now im paying the slightly higher rate for my Homestead and actually i think this new price introduced in January is a fair one for me and for LL.

Its this extra price jump looming in July i believe? or June that has me worried when this time comes around it will be a lot harder for me to justify keeping my Homestead as again in hard economic terms it makes no sense to me.

I am ofcourse always looking to maximise prim count / costs this is how the majority of residents percieve value in SL.
Currently the new Open Space SIM no longer works within this context and come the summer your Homestead product will be yet another that simply falls off the radar of all but the few that can afford such a "luxury".
So what would make me comfortable and happy would be that the next price rise in tier levels on Homesteads does not come to pass. If you think you have seen SIMs being abandoned currently wait for then because i think youll see an even greater number of yet again dissapointed customers left with no choice but to leave the Homesteads and ofcourse the knock on effect to the landlords.

This sort of trend in any economy is nothing but bad. Downsizing and or the upheavel caused for many residents will yet again put a dampener on real growth. Also about growth id like to add that wether or not your stats are accurate etc i do believe SL is growing but that this growth has and will be stunted by poor decisions.

Now i use my Homestead as a Mainstore for my shop id like to add that at no point over the 2 years that i have had this SIM has my script usage been anything much over 0.05ms and visitors to my store have numbered maybe 10 at 1 time at the most. I did hold an occasional event sure but that was very rarely anyway i digress.

Id like to help you help me by explaining to you how the price hike in July (or june) will affect my activities in SL. It wont be just be a hit to my profits making all my economic activity in SL that bit less if i chose to stay. If i feel i must leave then its like a step backwards possibly to 1/4 of a SIM thus damaging my overall momentum towards growth.
Upsizing to a Full SIM i doubt would be an option but i will admit its a possiblity but again it will make my activities so much the harder to justify carrying on. Ofcourse moving yet again means my energies are pointed toward developing and building yet another Mainstore and not on new products and content or other economic activity id rather be involved in.

So in short the next price jump is going to leave with no options that actually encourage me to grow and motivate me to keep putting in the time and effort to the platform although i am stubborn and motivated in general theres only so much we can all take before wondering when LL will actually make a REAL move to encourage and nurture the micro business that breath so much life into SL.

Work with us not against us and we will all reap the rewards.

I dont envy you Zee all alone dealing with us lot but we do it because we care and we want SL to succeed and we believe it will.

ps. Plz stop the marketing spin its insulting.

I think it's a little harsh of people to complain about spin. It's only natural for the employees to be proud of what they've achieved and want to brag about it. Besides I imagine you need a positive attitude to be able to put up with responding to comments on the forums.

I have a couple of questions though:

What happened with the LindeX over Christmas where it crashed to 200L$/$?

Can you give more details on this "lower priced full region offering along with a premium full region for higher load situations." it seems very intriguing. Perhaps just an ETA on when details will be available if nothing else.

See this: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p9UvVVpXKcynkZrFANzphLw Do you think that the reduced LindeX volume and user to user transactions were largely because of the reduced value of land in Q4? Or does mainland trading constitute only a small part of the LindeX data? Perhaps it's impossible to tell.

It's awesome that you publish this data but my thirst for information remains unquenched! Is there any hope of improving this page http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php to contain finer grained information? For a start, all the historic data from past months would be interesting. I'd love to see more detail on the land for sale section and would especially like to see "Land that actually sold already". It would also be extremely interesting to see the results of resident surveys on economic matters. Did you make profit this month? Is your business a success? What category is your business in?

Yes, and something like SL should be able to actually take advantage of that. What do people do in times of crisis? They turn to "cheap entertainment", and SL is exactly that (I don't mean it bad, lol, just compared to lets say a trip to Hawaii, recreating your very own Hawaiian beach in SL *is* cheap). In times of a crisis, people tend to move into fantasy worlds, to dream about things they can't really do anymore. What better place than SL for that? But people just *won't* turn to a company they don't trust.

Especially in the light of the RL economy crisis I expected more people to start owning land, and I expected more people who already owned to land to expand. My partner and I planned to add another OS region in december for private fun, building projects and so on. Nothing outside of the "light usage" those regions were meant for. Of course, this all went down the drain. And in my case it isn't even because of not being able to afford the higher price, it simply is a question of trust and feeling not the slightest bit of respect for the customers from LL.

About the amount of landmass loss: I think there isn't much more to compare than the number of regions running at any given time. Right now, without the fiasco, there would be some 2,500 more regions than at the end of october - but we are more in the range of 5,000 less regions. Sure, there were conversions, still it is a giant landmass loss. Before the fiasco, LL boasted about "look how many regions were added each and every month!", using exactly that number of total running regions. Now you have to live with us saying "look how many regions were lost!", using the same number.

LL had a chance to be a big winner of the RL economic crisis. With the OS debacle, an amok running g-team, a CEO that promisses to talk to and with the customers regulary but never again shows up and generally showing the customers how little they are worth in the "big picture" LL didn't only miss this chance, it actually turned into another loser.

Zee,

I'll tell you why our business is running at a loss.

LL co-opted it, so we diversified, then LL took it away from us and gave it to the land bot monopoly, so we diversified one more time, then LL co-opted us yet again. You give us no reason whatsover, to try again a fourth time.

Why LL turns a blind eye to the monopolism of landbots and misuse of traffic or camping bots is a mystery to me. My guess is, so Lindens can pull the wool over investor and resident eyes, for the purpose of false impression. This thread is tantamount to the assertion.

Since 2004, we have spent thousands of unpaid hours trading parcels and managing customer service issues with our neighboring residents. NEVER ONCE has our group been disciplined for a single TOS infraction and we have gone to great lengths to return mistakes, resolve land/group issues, report bugs and exploits. Yet LL sees fit, simply take our business and innovations for it's own profit, while undoing every community effort we implimented.

We warned LL more than three years ago about the threat of ad cutting and extortion and had automated systems to thwart it, yet it fell on deaf ears when LL co-opted us the first time around.

Zee.... diversification, re-invention and innovation are no match for LL's flaky and selfish policies.

Kicking that ball back into our court, is insulting at best.

Before long, our group will be abandoning two thousand plots to the governor. We can't even notify the neighbors of our intention to sell locally, because apparently LL has been banning that as "spam". There is no possible way we are willing to spend 100's of more wasted hours, setting them for sale, at any price. Meanwhile, the invites from groups, unsolicited IM spam from others, and notecards pile up, with no action whatsoever.

Double standards are a way of life at LL.

LL itself, is our greatest threat. EVERY DAY, we have to run our records against LL records to be sure LL has not wrongfully reclaimed our land. And when it happens, we have to fight tooth and nail to prove it's rightfully ours, dodging outrageous accusations of "ostentatious advertising", denial or whatever. Some incidents took WEEKS to resolve.

The business-in-a-box model has removed the profitability from respected creators and shifted it to scoundrels and IP thieves, so again, your figures are skewed. Robbing Peter to pay Paul might look good on paper, but the list of disenfranchised residents grows longer every day.

In my other business, I have created and sold radios since streaming audio was implimented, but sales are less than 30% of what they used to be when SL had less than 40,000 residents. Sales barely cover half my tier, when it used to pay the rent, bills, food and the occasional movie.

I've learned to take what LL says, with a grain of salt.

Zee,

I'll tell you why our business is running at a loss.

LL co-opted it, so we diversified, then LL took it away from us and gave it to the land bot monopoly, so we diversified one more time, then LL co-opted us yet again. You give us no reason whatsover, to try again a fourth time.

Why LL turns a blind eye to the monopolism of landbots and misuse of traffic or camping bots is a mystery to me. My guess is, so Lindens can pull the wool over investor and resident eyes, for the purpose of false impression. This thread is tantamount to the assertion.

Since 2004, we have spent thousands of unpaid hours trading parcels and managing customer service issues with our neighboring residents. NEVER ONCE has our group been disciplined for a single TOS infraction and we have gone to great lengths to return mistakes, resolve land/group issues, report bugs and exploits. Yet LL sees fit, simply take our business and innovations for it's own profit, while undoing every community effort we implimented.

We warned LL more than three years ago about the threat of ad cutting and extortion and had automated systems to thwart it, yet it fell on deaf ears when LL co-opted us the first time around.

Zee.... diversification, re-invention and innovation are no match for LL's flaky and selfish policies.

Kicking that ball back into our court, is insulting at best.

Before long, our group will be abandoning two thousand plots to the governor. We can't even notify the neighbors of our intention to sell locally, because apparently LL has been banning that as "spam". There is no possible way we are willing to spend 100's of more wasted hours, setting them for sale, at any price. Meanwhile, the invites from groups, unsolicited IM spam from others, and notecards pile up, with no action whatsoever.

Double standards are a way of life at LL.

LL itself, is our greatest threat. EVERY DAY, we have to run our records against LL records to be sure LL has not wrongfully reclaimed our land. And when it happens, we have to fight tooth and nail to prove it's rightfully ours, dodging outrageous accusations of "ostentatious advertising", denial or whatever. Some incidents took WEEKS to resolve.

The business-in-a-box model has removed the profitability from respected creators and shifted it to scoundrels and IP thieves, so again, your figures are skewed. Robbing Peter to pay Paul might look good on paper, but the list of disenfranchised residents grows longer every day.

In my other business, I have created and sold radios since streaming audio was implimented, but sales are less than 30% of what they used to be when SL had less than 40,000 residents. Sales barely cover half my tier, when it used to pay the rent, bills, food and the occasional movie.

I've learned to take what LL says, with a grain of salt.

Interesting numbers, and glad to have them. Just a couple suggestions.
There is a business opportunity for LL between now and July: Offer standalone Homesteads to Premium members--no other Estate ownership necessary--at the US$125/mo fee rate, and retain the US$95/mo rate for Estate owners. This will create more new private island Concierge customers while protecting the existing Estate customers, and will offer an ongoing path for customers to move into Estate ownership with a lower barrier to entry. Many of those new, non-Estate Homestead buyers will like the experience and move on to pay full sim Estate fees. And existing Estate owners will still have a US$30/mo pricing advantage with which to make margin on a product that, at US$125/mo, is nearly unmarketable by Estates.

Continuing with the announced increase will be much less profitable for LL in 2009, and offers no longer-term advantages. I can't guess what LL's internal revenue projections currently assume about the July increase. Realistically, it can't be a pretty picture: most all conversions have already occurred now; in July, Estates will just pull the plug on Homesteads, not try to work conversions, so the lost revenue then could be substantially worse than what's been experienced so far.

It's possible to turn all this into a win. I sure don't see why LL wouldn't do it, and there's no obvious reason not to decide and announce now.

Second suggestion: If there were ever a time when spin just isn't necessary, it's when the world economy is depressed. The next few months would be a great time to start taking the write-offs and mark-downs that set a realistic base for future growth numbers.

One place to do that, and without delay, is removing Traffic from Search rankings. There are good technical reasons why this step is eventually inevitable, but the concurrency numbers will dive at the time it's done. The current economic downturn gives every reason to do it now, when everyone's numbers look bad. Do it now, so future numbers will have some credibility.

Since it could be very improbable that bots impact on Premium accounts (and Premium accounts are deleted when the resident close the account), I have looked for Premium figures.
Nothing.
Could you please add a graph with Premium accounts in the same way than the others (2006 - 2007 - 200?

Cordially

Garmin

I don't envy you your job Zee, I'm awful when it comes to numbers.

I'm one of the people hurt by the OS price raise, especially since I'm recently unemployed in RL. But there are people who fared much worse than me, so I'm just going to keep my little homestead and "beard the season" as it were.

I have noticed improvements, and have actually seen some results where LL has promised them. The new online map is SO NICE! Zooms so smoothly, and with such great detail!

I've recently done some extensive exploring on the mainland and noticed a great improvement in the scenery since ad farms have been reduced.

I've had over 20 years experience in advertising, so I can appreciate spin. If you show me 2 identical shiny new nickels, I'll give you 20 very good reasons why my shiny nickel is better than yours. I can see that you're not as versed in spin as I am, so I trust that you're doing your job to the best of your ability, and are not maliciously trying to deceive. Statistics are a tough sell to tough customers, and can be interpreted in many ways - SL is a good example of how tough true metrics can be to measure accurately when there are such immeasurable factors and unknowables. It's a great case study for those interested in that field.

I often find myself shaking my fist at the (virtual) sky and cussing Linden Labs when strange things happen to ruin my day, but we work with what we've got, right? I understand that improvements on such a vast scale as SL involve a lot of experimentation, trial and error, testing and fail, before implementation. In my life experience I've learned that practically everybody on earth thinks they can do my job better than me, so I try to avoid telling anybody how to do their job.

SL is easy to take for granted when things are going well, and easy to complain about when things are not so well. When economic downturns affect my business, I increase and diversify my advertising to get the word out - SL is a huge place, and with so many people scattered about with countless differing interests, you can't afford to rest on your laurels. Personally, I'm enjoying a slight increase in sales lately. Not a GREAT increase, but at least not a decrease.

We can only trust that the people who are employed by LL were hired because they are good at their job, and have no incentive to run the ship aground. Thanks for posting what you can.

Concerning the new Homestead offering, has the lab yet considered running just two of them per processor? Is there any hope that the price increase will result in that effort to provide some better performance for us?

Zee, I rarely post here in these forums...but I DO read them. As the ORIGINAL purchaser of the Open Space product I would say that I always used them as they were intended to be used... then got gored with the price increase. I can tolerate the 95$ tier. I am NOT sure that the Real World economy will support the planned increase in July to $125. PLEASE think long and hard about that. I will be having to make decisions then about what I do with my Homesteads. My sims are part of the USS (currently moving to the Blake Sea next to Nautilus). [ /me ducks to keep from getting hit ] That does help me... but might not help in July. Linden Lab should think long and hard about going ahead with that price increase.

So now that you're officially rife with cash, how about making the user experience better by taking care of overburdened servers and hiring some staff to fix some of your outstanding bugs and get us a little more performance. We all love SL, but it's absurd that its average memory footprint when you correct the <2gb allocation space issue is almost 3x that of crysis, at a lower framerate.

Also, 64-bit viewer '09!

I don't think they should. People violated the contract issued for openspaces on a large scale. Simply because a percentage didn't doesn't mean you should reward those who did.

You could go in world and bring up people search (wait for it to load) then pop in Bob's name and click search (wait wait wait). Then Bob's profile will come up but you will have to wait a while for it to load up... (go get a cup of coffee) when it eventually loads you can read about Bob's business there.

All of these waits are are longer than they were before the last viewer update.

Also... if you were standing next to Bob you could just right click his avatar and choose "profile" from the pie menu. Oh but you might have to do it 6 or 7 times before it actually works.

I'm referring to the new Homestead offering, not the newly revised Openspace product. The original Openspace "contract" has been voided by the lab and is no longer available for discussion in the context of future enhancement or enforcement.

Had to lulz about this on second read:

"It’s possible that the decline in Q4 was driven by uncertainty in the land market created by the pricing and configuration changes or simply that the economy overheated slightly in September when we saw significant growth in volume."

Or perhaps... the massive global economic recession? Living under rock much?