« Web 2.0 Watch | Main | This might be my year-end summary » December 28, 2006How many Second Lifers can dance on the head of a pixel?This is like a joke that starts, "two avatars walk into a bar..." Clay Shirky, who happens to be a human being (though I'm sure his avatar is out there somewhere), exposes funny numbers in media reports on Second Life, a graphical online community that's pretty hot at the moment, or seems to be. If you look at Second Life's web page, you see that it has over two million residents; Clay thinks that figure overestimates the number of actual participants, and he explains why. I've wandered into Second Life several times, and it appears to me, based on the numbers of avatars I see standing around, that there are only handfuls of people logged in, yet that trusty SL home page says there are over 18,000 logged in right now. I suppose that means they're on many different islands... I assume an island is a server, and each server has a limited capacity... we know that graphical virtual realities are constrained, especially when served over networks and carrying a lot of traffic. A lot of people really like Second Life. I know several people who seem to spend a lot of time there, especially my friend Wagner James Au, who's become the official blogger for the Second Life community. He doesn't get into the funny numbers controversy, though an unofficial SL blog, Second Life Insider, is all over what Tateru Nino calls "a new media firestorm." In fact, I suspect only a very small group of people know that Second Life even exists, and a tinier number still will know about Clay's complaint (which is really more about the press playing fast and loose with numbers, than about Second Life). I only know about the controversy because Xeni blogged it at bOING bOING, which I seldom have time to read, though I read it more often than I read Clay's stuff. (Lamentably, because Clay's always a great read.) So who has time to follow all the various tempests and all the many teapots? And how do 18,000 people (let alone two million) find time to hang out at Second Life? Shouldn't these people be in a lab somewhere, curing cancer?
jon posted this at 3:51 PM |
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