Zee Linden made one of his semi-regular appearances at Meta Linden's office hours today, and spoke a lot about payment fraud in the Linden Dollar exchange, and gave the usual boilerplate password-health-and-safety and anti-phishing spiel.
Zee was evasive as to the magnitude of the problem, but pointed to May as a period where fraud made operation of the Lindex unprofitable for Linden Lab, though it is not clear if the whole month (or more, or only part) was actually unprofitable.
One of the highlights of Meta Linden's office hours today was the confirmation from Zee and Meta that -- as we suspected -- parcel traffic figures would likely remain. Traffic would no longer be considered as a factor in ranking search results, but the figure will remain in some form to parcel owners.
Meta went on to poll attendees about whether the traffic figure per parcel should be visible only to the owner/group or to anyone who checked. The answer for those present was overwhelmingly in favor of retaining it as visible to all who wanted to check it.
The redesign and rewrite of the search system apparently is ongoing and expected to take several more weeks before it is rolled out.
The Total Residents figure on the Second Life homepage, and in Linden Lab's published statistical data feeds has been frozen now, for 37 hours, as of the time of this writing; Essentially stuck on 6,240,591. There's no clear sign as to what is wrong.
We contacted three Linden staffers to find out what was wrong with it. One thought the feed updated daily, and that data warehousing issues were delaying that update slightly. Of course, it has been updated at the top of the hour for quite some time now...until yesterday morning. At Meta Linden's office hours at 10am, we were able to bring it to the attention of Meta and Zee Linden, who said they would look into it.
Meta Linden and Zee Linden have belatedly released the overall monthly metrics and statistics for March 2007. In it, we appear to have a fairly healthy picture of growth. While the growth rate of premium accounts fell slightly (from 15% in February 2007) to 13%, frankly companies in many industries would drool over growth rates like this, especially this far along into Second Life's ... well, life. Most especially since Jeska Linden dropped the surprise in a recently published interview that Linden Lab is now (at last) a profitable business.
Meta Linden, the new statistics/metrics Linden has released the statistics for the month of February (in a week, we'll be looking for the stats for March). In a very useful move, the statistics are available in OpenDocument format, making them much easier to deal with and process.
The chart above (linked to other charts of my devising) shows the percentage monthly growth of premium accounts each month since February 2005. February 2007 saw flat growth in line with January: 15% (now at 66,800 premium accounts). If the growth of premium accounts remains flat, we should tip over 100,000 premium accounts in May.
Zee Linden has pushed out a bundle of figures for us to chew on. It covers a broader range of figures than previously.
November's anomalous growth in premium accounts (30%), has stabilized to an average 16.5% per month so far this year, which is more in keeping with Second Life's normal premium account growth. Second Life's average user age continues to creep upwards, now up one year to 33.
Overall land area grew 22.8% in January, compared to 15.2% in the previous month, and Lindex activity continued to rise; by 28.5% through January.
From 8AM SLT today to 11AM, Linden Lab's published population statistics were offline due to periodic database load issues, however. The last reported figure for total signups at 7AM was 2,978,748. When the data feed returned at 11AM, the new figure being reported was 3,018,934, well into 3 million. This beats my flat-growth prediction by about a week and a half.
It is to be noted, that this reflects signups, not paying subscribers (approximately 55 thousand on the 24th of January [Thanks, Zee Linden]), and Second Life's retention rate at last report was 10 percent at 90 days. Indeed, many people sign up for a Second Life account and do not log in within 60 days (back of the envelope calculations based on Linden Lab's published statistical data say around 8,500 per day sign up but don't log in).
"The Show with zefrank" today talks about a list of related things. The Renaissance, Leonardo DaVinci, beaver testicles, unicorns, Second Life, Anshe Chung, virtual real estate and (inevitably) penises, in his own distinctive style.
Zefrank has a unique way of putting all these things together into one deliciously incoherent, yet logical whole. Might not be safe for work.
(The yellow plastic duck logo is ironic, yet entirely coincidental)
The source code to 1.13.2(11) was released, along with an internal version from the Linden Lab release trunk to ease future integration. They're both available in the usual place.
Today, Zee Linden talked a bit about the Risk API. If you spend much time on secondlife.com, you'll have seen it appear in the sidebar more than once. You might have poked at it to find out what it was all about. Basically it's a system for monitoring account activity, conditions and funds transfers that indicates fraud. Why should you care? After all, you don't commit fraud.
Because Zee Linden says that griefers are using the Risk API as a form of techno-social judo to have the accounts of innocent people mass-suspended. In fact, it's even better than goo attacks. Zee's initial message is "Be smart, don't get scammed", but by the end, there's obviously no way to prevent it, since your consent is not required.
With a little prompting, Zee Linden has updated the economic charts/graphs on the second life website to include the figures for December, 2006.
At the present time, the page does not contain the link to the spreadsheet numbers as it did last month, so we've got to estimate by eye. However, there's no sign of any backlash to the end of December.
This data includes premium user accounts (which grew by an impressive 30.4% in November, to 42,400), user hours (7,464,000 in November, up from 5,722,000 the previous month), land area (254.7 square kilometers) and an interesting set of data about the economy.
For those of us that don't read the raw numbers well, there's some colorful graphs that illustrate the rates and trends, and are well worth the look if you're interested in the growth and health of Second Life as a going economic concern.
There's some interesting lumps and bumps in the data that bears further analysis. While the trends are generally upwards, there's obviously something more complex going on under the surface of these figures.
Zee Linden made one of his semi-regular appearances at Meta Linden's office hours today, and spoke a lot about payment fraud in the Linden Dollar exchange, and gave the usual boilerplate password-health-and-safety and anti-phishing spiel.
One of the highlights of Meta Linden's office hours today was the confirmation from Zee and Meta that -- as we suspected -- parcel traffic figures would likely remain. Traffic would no longer be considered as a factor in ranking search results, but the figure will remain in some form to parcel owners.
The Total Residents figure on the Second Life homepage, and in Linden Lab's published statistical data feeds has been frozen now, for 37 hours, as of the time of this writing; Essentially stuck on 6,240,591. There's no clear sign as to what is wrong.
Today in Second Life we had:
Zee Linden has pushed out a bundle of figures for us to chew on. It covers a broader range of figures than previously.
From 8AM SLT today to 11AM, Linden Lab's published population statistics were offline due to periodic database load issues, however. The last reported figure for total signups at 7AM was 2,978,748. When the data feed returned at 11AM, the new figure being reported was 3,018,934, well into 3 million. This beats my flat-growth prediction by about a week and a half.
Zefrank has a unique way of putting all these things together into one deliciously incoherent, yet logical whole. Might not be safe for work.
Today, Zee Linden talked a bit about the Risk API. If you spend much time on secondlife.com, you'll have seen it appear in the sidebar more than once. You might have poked at it to find out what it was all about. Basically it's a system for monitoring account activity, conditions and funds transfers that indicates fraud. Why should you care? After all, you don't commit fraud.
With a little prompting, Zee Linden has updated the economic charts/graphs on the second life website to include the figures for December, 2006.
Zee Linden announced the posting of five new economic graphs and some supporting data today. Data that we've been hungry for, for quite some time.
