Winter Usage Rates in SL

The Dwell On It blog provides lots of great statistical information about Second Life and what residents are doing. Today Tateru has an article about whether or not there are more users in Winter than in Summer, which is the intuitive idea most Americans, I think, have about SL residents. I certainly thought so. Here is Tateru’s chart of the data. I’ve added my coloring and year numbers.

Modified Chart
Second Life Usage Stats - See Dwell On It

I’ve added the light blue line and the red stuff. The blue vertical bars are the usage numbers. The red shows the LACK of users in the winters of 2006, 2007, and 2008. They pretty much shoot down the idea that Summer has fewer users.

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SL Market Place – Direct Delivery

Everyone has had trouble with the Market Place’s delivery system failing. Plus the in-world magic boxes have been an annoying pain. Moving them is a pain. Having a place for them is a drag. Well, things are going to change.

Direct Delivery Beta
Direct Delivery Beta

You may have heard that our inventory starts to have problems when we exceed more than 250 or so items in a folder. As the inventory API changes that soft limit is changing to something like 10,000 items per folder. That could be part of the change to support Direct Delivery.

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Server Update Week 15

Tuesday saw the usual rolling restarts and new software. Again it is bug fixes and a few new features.

Users are unlikely to see any changes. With a stop watch one might… might… notice a speed up in inventory download speed. Parts of the gzip feature have made it to the main grid and some parts are still in testing in Release Channel areas only. However, only the related project viewer uses the feature. It will be some time (a couple of weeks?) before we see this feature used in viewers.

No word on XMPP chat changes. As far as I know now, that is still in testing on the ADITI grid. I know group chat really sucks right now. A large percentage of my chats in groups return a can’t connect. Very annoying.

 

 

 

Second Life Concurrency

Well… everyone is talking about the decrease in the number of concurrent users. I have certainly noticed the currently online numbers displayed at login decreasing. In 2009 I was seeing 80,000 and climbing. Now it is rare to see 70,000 and common to see around 40,000 to 65,000 with the median generally reported to be about 52,000. So, is SL dying? Is the sky falling?

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Dolphin Viewer 2.5.6.15005 Review

Second Life
Dancing at Neveriven

A new version of the Dolphin 2 Viewer is out. The released planned for this slot was to be a 2.6 version. But, things change. Bug fixes, features, and the load of changes coming out of the Lab seems to have pushed this release out the door. It may be several weeks before we see the next release. There is lots to upgrade going into 2.6. The Development viewers are coming out in 2.7 versions.

 

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Second Life Regions Closing

I see today that AM Radio’s regions are going to close in 6 months. (See: AM Radio Regions Closing Down In 6 Months – by Daniel Voyager)  It seems every week or so some region is closing. I have to wonder how many regions are closing and if the closings are a Second Problem or just the natural evolution of the grid.

Second Life
Live Regions in SL Grid - Statistics @ Metaverse

Metaverse publishes stats on the number of live regions available on SL. Since December 2010 the number is static. Growth can be said to have reached plateau… or stopped depending on how one wants to spin it.

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