To Clay Shirky
OK, I promise this’ll be the last of these posts about the #’s. Posted also at Terranova.
Clay,
I’ve been watching this debate progress for a while and thought I’d weigh in.
Your core accusations are both serious and presumably easily addressed:
1. Define exactly what #’s you want explained by LL. They’ve always been pretty obsessively transparent and my guess is that they’ll continue to do so.
2. Keep chastising the press
What I’m observing however is that you’ve thrown down a serious gauntlet by calling their competence and credibility into question. Hence they’re probably not falling all over themselves to answer your questions. Additionally, it’s incited a debate/discussion amongst a legion of us, none of whom is really equipped with the data needed to settle the matter. Most irritating, the target keeps shifting because the core question of “What are the real #’s and how are they calculated?” has not been squared away.
In this secondary realm, you’ve speculated that the #‚Äôs are inflated by lots of Looky-Loo‚Äôs and are not in-line with industry standard reporting metrics. This may or may not be true, but it raises a really interesting question: ‚ÄúWhat Industry Standard Metrics Should Be Used?‚Äù.
Second Life lies at the union of web-based social sites and MMOG’s but the metrics for each of these don’t quite work for it. The implication being made is that there is some sort of deliberate sleight of hand being performed on the #’s. The truth, I think, is that it’s just plain hard to figure out what #’s/standards to apply. Second Life is NOT an advertising supported website and therefore Commscore #’s and the like are not particularly relevant. On the other end of the spectrum, the #’s typically reported by makers of MMOG’s radically undervalue Second Life’s population because they only reflect paying users. While this appears to be level-headed, it’s also offbase because the small percentage of paying “landowners” in Second Life are able to pay very high monthly fees because those fees are offset by their sales of virtual goods to “non-paying” users.
For those of us who have been really into SL for the last few years, it all seems a little moot. That is to say, we don’t believe there’s any deliberate manipulation going on but would certainly appreciate clarification/definition of the #’s from Linden Lab. But whether they are clarified, revised or unchanged, my feeling is that the core question is really a different one.
It’s that SL lies at the intersection of two seperate fields: gaming and social software. For the past few years, the game crowd has looked at it funny for reasons ranging from bad graphics to lack of a goal or originality or mainstream appeal. Now the social software folks are weighing in with a seperate set of concerns.
This #’s thing will work itself out and then we’ll move to the larger implied set of questions which will probably focus on whether SL will have mainstream appeal.
December 31st, 2006 at 10:06 am
…It’s not like Linden Lab’s numbers are any better or worse than any other company.
Even Blizzard counts trial accounts and Beta players; and they don’t say 7 million logged in last month.
January 2nd, 2007 at 5:34 am
If a hard drive holds a billion bytes it is going to be called a GB even though it is 74 MB short. A DVR will be called an 80 hour unit even if it holds only 20 hours at the reasonably good quality setting. SL marketeers will report X new residents even if 10% are alts, 30% only logged in once and 15% only did the registration and never logged in at all. So what? Most people understand and process these things intuitively.
What kills me about the whiners is their naiveté. Are they not old enough to have been through the experience of being sold their first car?
And regarding, “…how Linden has managed to disable the fact-checking apparatus of much of the US business press, turning them into a zombie army of unpaid flacks…”, when has the business press been anything else? Sounds to me like someone who has been brainwashed into thinking that journalism has some kind of tenured seat in a revered ivory tower somewhere. Journalists are selling that shit all the time - looks like this guy swallowed it. Get the ipecac quick.
But the scary thing is the gall of the whiners. They come off as so vehement and righteous about the injustice of it all. But on what basis? Are they, or anyone, suffering any kind of damage? Are they complaining that this information has falsely lead them into committing to the $0 for their basic membership? Or maybe it is the difference between their $9.95 a month premium membership and the $7 a month they get back in stipends. Wow, such pain.
Or maybe it comes from some sense of speculative injustice like those advertising fees that they would be falsely lead into paying if advertising existed. Or the shares of stock they would be falsely lead into buying if there were shares of stock that they could buy.