This one's for the older folks in the audience. Folks who have been around since 2006, 2005, 2004.... earlier. The only constant thing in the world is change, and Second Life changes faster than most.

If you're an old-timer and reading this, then the odds are you happily stuck around (or didn't, but have some sort of morbid fascination). So, tell me, if you were a newbie starting fresh today... would you stay in Second Life, or become part of the churn?

"Everything changes, but some things never change." -- anon

It's a pretty old concept for most of us, harking back to the days of early childhood, when we would bring our favorite toy/parent/mishandled frog to the front of the class and make some pertinent remarks regarding them.



New Citizens Incorporated (NCI) has been running Show and Tell for new folk for ... well, just about as long as it's been around. Now, however, it's time for all those of us 91 days and older to polish up our skills and have a bash at "Oldbie Show and Tell"!

Any sort of facelift to the log-in screen is a welcome one, though the new one we got is a far cry from what I've read people suggesting. There's no animation, no buildings, no avatars, just a landscape, though now we get stats and news from LL's blog. This is all well and good as far as it goes. However, in the upper right-hand corner, we also get some stats that kind of made me cringe just a little: Total Residents, Logged in Last 60 Days, and Online Now.

There's a large disparity between those three measurements, and it's very telling ... of what exactly, I'm not sure, but it doesn't look terribly good when only half the number of the over one million residents registered have logged in over the past two months. Over the past few days, I've also noticed that the residents online at any given time are a small fraction of the total number as well.

I'm sure this has always been the case to a certain degree, and any oldbie will be able to tell you stories about the Good Old Days (you know, 2003), but with all the extra attention SL's been getting, it sure doesn't seem like we're keeping many of the people who create an account to check out what SL's like. Will this trend continue? Will we see over 2 million registered users in a year's time (or sooner) and only 1/4 of those Online Now?