Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>]

>
>I didn't think much of it until I heard the other day that Sweden is opening
>an Embassy in Second Life:
>
>http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/05/30/sweden.secondlife.reut/index.html

Metrics on Second Life are here:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/05/10/april-2007-key-metrics-released/

Hours used and unique residents (people who signed up for accounts, which are 
free) are showing exponential trends -- from 2,876,823 unique residents and 
155,474 hours online in April 2006 to 18,135,548 unique residents and 
3,768,092 hours online in April 2007.

There is a lot of tourism, though, I think, with people just checking it out 
briefly but not becoming regular users. For instance, hours in-world per 
unique residents is trending steadily down. That makes sense given the surge 
in press coverage.

The in-world economy is showing strong growth as well, but there are some 
things in the data that don't make sense to me. The money supply growth looks 
exponential. When using Linden Dollar sales per hour online as an economic 
indicator, it is trending strongly up over the past 20 months, but it doesn't 
look exponential to me and there is a lot of variance in recent months. My 
hunch is that it is either logrithmic or that there just isn't enough data 
given some inherent variance, but it's certainly possible that it is about to 
hit a peak. But then, the raw data in this spreadsheet for judging the Second 
Life economy isn't that great.