Like many people, I’m curious but also skeptical about Second Life and wonder if the hype is justified. Reports of raw numbers downloading the software and registering user accounts do not indicate how many people are regular users, and analysis of the statistics varies. Some excellent analysis and data mining is provided here.

Linden’s raw data indicates that by April 2007 there were 5,973,301 ‘residents’ (user accounts), and the active Australian population is 2.59% of the total, or approximately 154,708 residents.

Linden’s raw data for May 2007 is 6,860,473 registrations and of those 1.93% or 9779 Australian avatars are active. The method of measuring has changed between April and May, making it difficult to make a straightforward comparison.

1.93% of 6,860,473 equals approximately 132,407 residents (not necessarily active). Can we really believe that Second Life has lost over 20,000 Australian account registrations in a month? Skepticism is healthy. Web analytics is becoming an issue of significant debate and uncertainty.

We’re still waiting for a widely agreed definition of the ‘active user’. Linden says:

An Active User is defined as a Resident who has logged into the system for longer than 1 Hour for the reported time period.

This does not sound like much time to me. I think I would meet this criterion and I’m far from active - I drop in sometimes with a fairly low level of commitment. You could say I’m a Second Life slacker.

One blogger writes that:

If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.

Perhaps we can more modestly say that the revolution is forthcoming. After all, I remember using the internet via the text browser Lynx before the creation of the graphical ‘world wide web’ and the arrival of the Mosaic browser. Compare this to the platform I’m writing in now. This suggests almost anything is possible, including doing business.

BlipTV has released a video about doing business in Second Life that is definitely worth watching, and Swinburne University’s Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) has published Business in Second Life: an introduction (26 page, 274kb PDF) by researcher Mandy Salomon.

If you’re planning to do business in Second Life, it’s important to know who you will be doing business with. And determining that is proving difficult. Studies of how people actively engage with new and interactive media are very new. We have much to learn.

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