But even that is misleading, as Clay Shirky at Valleywag put it, “Second Life doesn't have two million users. They have had two million users over the life of the service, and they've lost most of them. Of those users, the majority -- something like 5 out of 6 -- bailed in the first month.” 

The article continues with John Zdanowski, the Linden employee who posted the figures, writing, "Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours or more."  As Shirky says, “The plain meaning of that sentence is that fewer than 200,000 people have given Second Life even a cumulative work week of their time, over the history of the platform.”

The truth about Second Life’s user rate and population should come as little surprise to anyone who has tried it.  For one, it requires enormous First Life free time and because the content is user generated, the virtual world is exceedingly slow.  And the opportunity to make money?  Sure, it’s possible, but it would be naïve to think it’s a guarantee (because again, having a First Life seriously impedes your progress to a productive Second Life). 

I think population metrics in all forms of online social media – MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, etc. – needs to be reevaluated.  There are countless stories of people who logged on to a service, created an account, tried it for a few days, and never used it again.  Yet those people are included in a site’s “population” and its “unique users,” which is deceiving.  We need to see measurements that include dormant accounts over three and six-month periods.  It’s fine if a company wants to brag about the number of people who have given their site a look, but the important figure is the number of people who make that service a daily part of their lives.  Until that information is more readily available, it’s all just hype and fluff.

Scott Goldberg