What will make Second Life grow again?
Being very interested in Second Life statistics and having some suspicions about a slowdown in growth, I revisited that great statistical overview Tateru Nino yesterday evening. I found out that:
- daily sign-up’s have been decreasing for a couple of weeks
- active residents (60 days) has not increased for a couple of days
- the concurrent logins have been flat for (at least) 14 days in a row
So this morning I left a comment on Tateru’s daily post on SL statistics asking about her view on what is happening right now in Second Life: a snippet:
Given the slowdown in sign-ups, accompanied by the much higher inflow in the months before, I guess you can forecast that outflow (users going away) was bound to get bigger than inflow, which could be a signal that the rise in real active users (core users) is actually very slow now or even zero.
Well it appeared that I was spot on, with Tateru replying she had just provided some nice charts the day before to Wagner James Au of New World Notes for his article (The World at a Plateau) describing the same issue: that the growth of active users has come to a halt.
Something that struck me about the article in NWN is that Tateru Nino linked the current development in core users fully to Second Life’s infrastructural problems (you know: lags, crashes, inventory losses etc.) which makes users turn away or at least make them think twice about the value of their time in-world.
Obviously, good stable infrastructure is a key condition for application attractiveness but to me certainly not the only one! How about linking the potential value of the “Second Life offer” to for example:
- an easier user interface (“freightening” newbies)
- more integration between SL and Internet (less need to switch apps)
- better graphics
- more in-world capabilities (HTML-on-a-prim)
- decreased cost of owning land / islands
- ....any other?
It could very well be that the first shift of (early) adopter has had their experience with Second Life and the dust has settled for now awaiting a new shift attracted by added features, functionality and usefulness, and so value, that will make Second Life a part of their real life.
What would those new features and capabilities need to be according to you?
Related: all my Second Life articles
Technorati tag(s): Second Life, Tarero Nino, Wagner James Au
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posted May 4, 09:20 pm on May 04, 2007 |
category: Second Life
I agree that many users are leaving SL due to the “core problems” and land prices. I believe they are on a downward spiral.
An increaseing user base would naturaly increase the need for support. Instead of making it easier for users to get that support, SL has taken steps to reduce support availability.
Most notably in the recent software release in-world support has been removed from the client. From my perspective, this step is the introduction to the “fat lady sings” part of the show.
— Ludicrosity Newman May 5, 07:42 pm #
Your post about wishes or desired apps made me finally describe what my biggest wish for SL is: (even) more use of the social web and the power of the crowd, especially crowd that i find valuable. Let me explain, I would like to have the ability to give certain ppl the label ‘inspirator’ i.e. not being the same thing as ‘friend’ though a friend can indeed be an inspirator and its very likely a lot will be (thats why they are your friend). I would like the searching for events or locations to be based on 1) my current and past exploring of SL (‘it’ knows what I like and 2) the explorings of my inspirators. Based on these preferences i want the search results to be ranked. And on top of that i want active notifications of events that are interesting for me. So, since i always (1) go to certain interviews, business conferences or art exhibitions (2) visit certain locations and (3) my inpisrators have a certain behavioural pattern > I get notificiations of events that i would be interested in. And it would be nice, if my inspirators help me subconsciously by just there normal visiting pattern in SL, they (and my friends) can also help me consciously by recommending events or locations to me. Woow i do get inspired, I will extend on this idea on our amazingg lo (http://www.amazingg.nl/blog/blog.html)
— Gwendolyn Kronsage May 6, 04:00 pm #
ooh and I was especially wondering about your comment on more integration of RL and SL apps. Don’t you think there is so much possible already? maybe you have time to extend some more on that subject.
— Gwendolyn Kronsage May 6, 04:03 pm #
* Not scaring the older avies away by letting Daniel Linden make company statements.
* Taking care of stability & inventory loss problems.
* In-client browser. (Not necessarily html-on-a prim, but as the help pages are based on a browser, make sure residents can launch that browser to a website they want (limit to html & css to prevent malicious scripts) in-client.)
* Banning casino’s and such from mainland (A lot of land available to residents again, so land prices will automatically drop?).
— Vint Jun 4, 08:54 pm #
Hi Vint,
Thanks for stopping by here and adding such great content to my weblog!
Funny how this came all about by me visiting your tutorial on Photoshop just a few hours ago…
Btw: I added your great blog to my RSS reader!
Best regards,
Marcel Goodfellow
— Marcel Jun 4, 10:35 pm #