# of residents by the end of 2006?

With SL growing at such a large rate in the past several months, I've begun to wonder how large will it be by the end of this year. Can SL handle the large numbers of users potentially? I know a lot of users are alts, but still it is an incredible number. I used to go onto Cybertown and remembering seeing at most 200 people online at one given time.

I predict that Second Life will be a dead duck, either stagnating in the number of users or declining. There will be some growth before then, but as the feeling is that there is competition on the horizon (even from LL themselves) I don't think Second Life will continue to cut the mustard once this arrives.

I haven't voted because a lot depends on at what point in the year this supposed competition arrives.

On the flip side, if there's a sudden boom in the number of residents, the system will implode under it's own inability to cope. Ben Linden said as much in his blog.

I can't even take a stab at a guess, not my bag, but I do remember when we had a Log-A-Thon 5000 to get 5000 concurrent Resis on. We fell short of that mark; I think only 3500 or so showed up. However, now, we commonly exceed 5000 at busy times.

A straight-line projection of SL's current 15% growth (stat from the Google talk) gives 5x as many resis in 12 months, around 500,000. However, I think there'll be some levelling off as LL will have teething problems with that many new users, so I voted 300,000.

World of Warcrack's insane growth is a warning of how not to handle things. Several of my friends play WoW, and often have to wait for hours in queue before they can get in.

20,000 active users, rest are bunch of pie eating campers sitting on their butts logged in over night as their owners are sleeping and dreaming of pixel sex while their avatar is getting $5 per 20 minutes.

i've been making my own specualtions on this since early this year and still hold to my predictions.

i voted for "Over 300,000", but i think it may be significantly more.. possibly more than 500,000.

we have to remember that there is a levelling off coming into play soon, plus the slack of the summer months where we see a drop off of new Resis. however, we also have to account for exponential growth due to word of mouth of the growing number of new accounts.

if we go by the current rate, we're looking at approximately 25,000 new accounts a month. this would mean 250,00 new accounts from the beginning of this month. this puts us firmly above 300,000 accounts by years end.

but, taking into account that it took a few years to reach 100,00, but only two months to add another 50,00 on top of that, we HAVE to account for exponential growth.

with all of this in mind, i certainly wouldn't be surprised if we top 500,000 by the end of 2006.

granted, as has been mentioned, the strain on SL could very well be detrimental to its existance. LL REALLY needs to streamline SL, decrease lag issues and generally just needs to beef up SL capabilities by a huge margin to be able to handle this influx of new accounts.

not to mention that means we're looking at well over 1 MILLION active accounts by the end of 2007.. possibly 1.5 - 2 million. depends on how far SL evolves in both in-world functions as well as back end capability.