Is the "Transactions Today" counter real?

It's about 9am, Tuesday, Aug. 30th, 2005. The grid is down as the new build is getting installed. On the SL home page, the indicator shows 23 people in-world. I assume these are Linden staff involved in the upgrades.

On the other hand, the "Transactions Today" counter continues to increment by 5 cents every 5 seconds. Am I to assume that those 23 people are doing a significant amount of shopping during the upgrade? And they are buying exactly the same amount of stuff every 5 seconds?

Just....curious.

Short answer - No
Long answer. I'm told it's an extrapolation of sorts, so it sorta matches the average SL behavior?

I've been grabbing and storing the front page data since they unveiled it. I havn't looked at it in a while, but last time I did, the exact same "Transactions Today" numbers were reported at the same time everyday. Weekends didn't even do better than weekdays.

So throw those numbers in the marketing bag.

Related, how much latency is there on the "Inworld" counter? In other words, if you login, how long will the system take before it tallies you on there?

I think a better question is this.

As Philip stated:

"In the last month, there have been about 22,600 different people in Second Life who have bought something in-world."

What do you think that means for the total population numbers? How many of you have not purchased anything in world in the last month?

And furthermore, does that include even small transactions like buying L$1 "freebies" or paying little amounts into casino machines?

(I'm not going to raise the alt issue because that's redundant.)