Old Population Statistics?

Does anyone out there know where I could find old SL population statistics? I know data from the last 60 days or so can be found in the economy stats page on the base SecondLife.com website, but I'm looking for considerably older data. Ideally, I'd like to find something that would tell me the estimated population each month since SL opened. Any ideas?

I can tell ya when I first started playing in Dec 04 the population then was less then 30,000. This past week i have been watching the population grow. In just a week the population grew by 128,000. One telehub had 40+ peeps on it at one time.. They r dropping like flies.

October 2005 was around 85,000, by December 2005 it had passed the 100,000 figure as far as I can recall

AFAIK, there is no official way to tell.

When I joined in Dec. 2005, there were about 108,000 resis.

This is a best remember guess, but right before the open registration, I believe the numbers were around 180,000-200,000.

Note also that until very recently the "total population" number that was posted on the front page was some nebulous "weighted average" between the total number of registered and unique accounts that had logged in over the past 60 days. Not reliable in an absolute sense.

For recent numbers, I recommend this page. It contains population information from the time total registrations and 60-day uniques were decoupled.

If that page is correct, I see lots of things that worry me.

The night of the 17th:

At: 23:00, 963,206 accounts with 8,871 online.

Just one hour later:

983,621 accounts with 7,560 online.

All the while, for hours before and after, with 396,616 unique accounts logging on.

20,415 new accounts within one hour, and never logging on? A rate of 340+ per min or 5+ per second?

At best, typing 135 wpm with no verification, simply creating an accout takes a minimum of 2 minutes, not even attempting to think of the heavy site load of all these creations, would mean that only 1 person, in a span of 1 hour, can create 30 accounts, if they are flying with no breaks. That would mean at least 680 people, for an hour straight, signing up account after account.

Same with when we hit 1 million accounts:

18/10/2006 At 09:00, 983,621 accounts, with 396,616 individual log ons, with a current online of 8,247.

18/10/2006 At 10:46, 1,005,088 accounts ever, with 396,616 log ons and current 10,238.

An hour and 45 minutes, 22,000+ accounts, with not one single one logging on?

Either this page is quite incorrect, or there's some way weird padding going on somewhere on LL's side.

P.S. Looking at some overall numbers, there are spans where more than 30,000 accounts were created without 1 single individual account logging on.

For 50,000 accounts created, the number of active 60 day log ons stayed at 396,616. Within one single hour, Zero new accounts created, however the new 60 day was 405,931.

An increase over an hour of 9315 accounts, no new ones created, and the online totals:

From 10,870 to 11,764.

Even using the disclaimer and using the old data, there are multi thousands of jumps in users randomly.

Seeing that, I get the impression that the 60-day uniques number is updated periodically through a cron job or something, rather than in real-time.

Having said that, you can see a definite disconnect between the number of new registrations and the number of unique accounts logging in.

Ah, I was afraid of that. It would be nice to at least be able to confidently say "There were only 35,000 residents when I joined." Nice bit of early adopter cred to tell the grandkids about when they hop a shuttle to visit me in the Lunar old folks home. Anyone have any info on number of residents as of New Year's Day (Jan. 1), 2005? I'm assuming it was something around 35k, based on Matilda's memories.

Either way though, the amount of new accounts that sprang up in those times (assuming, since each number surrounding them was up or down) and seeing it lax within a few thousand over a week, if this info is true...

*tin foil hat*

Linden is padding their numbers somehow.