Second Life Is Alive And Well

Hamlet has a post with quotes from Stat Goddess Tyche Shepherd, showing that private estates are being shed from the grid. Tyche reported these losses on her excellent grid survey thread over at SLUniverse, the particular post in question has details of Tyche’s private estate survey, you can read the post here.

Tyche’s comment that raises eyebrows, or causes gasps is:

” Taking these figures a good estimate of private estate tier due each month is US$4,920,000 +/- US$58,000 . (Calculated using known grandfathering rates but excludes any academic reductions and is rounded to the closest US$1000), this figure is down on last month’s estimate of US$5,006,000 by $86,000 , a significant fall of about 1.8%. This is the first time the monthly tier figure has fallen below US$5 Million since I began the private estate surveys and the margin of error indicates this is a significant finding. ”

I’m not going to say Linden Lab shouldn’t worry about this, they absolutely should, but it’s certainly not time to man the lifeboats, just under USD$5 million per month in tier for private estates, is still a healthy figure, especially in these tough economic times. I do think tier is too expensive these days, but to lower it Linden Lab need to boost other income streams, slashing tier now would more than likely give a short term boost, but Linden Lab need to play the long game.

Tyche’s survey shows that some people are downsizing, whereas other estates such as Zoho Islands and Dreamseeker Estate have increased their holdings since last month by 3.0% and 2.3% respectively. Whilst estates are still growing, the heart of Second Life beats strongly.

However as I said, that’s not to say Linden Lab should be complacent, they may know why there’s a drop in Islands, they may be able to do things to turn that round throughout the year, doing nothing will be a recipe for disaster but Hamlet hints in his blog post that a big announcement is due.

Linden Lab are working on products beyond Second Life, which is good for the company, they are also working on improvements to Second Life, technically it’s advancing. However what really makes Second Life is people, without people Second Life sinks. Linden Lab alone can’t attract people, but they could talk to us all a bit more. They could also consider a Google + presence, they’re on Facebook, Twitter and I believe Plurk. Whereas many aspects of social networking sites make me queasy, it is a low cost way of gaining eyeballs on your product.

There’s also the issue of the blog, flickr pictures of the day are all well and good but where’s the talk of what you can do in Second Life on the blog? Where’s the talk of the improvements to the client? The new camera snapshot tools where you can send pictures to your profile stream? The new scripting functions? Talk of storytelling, Artists, Poetry, Roleplaying, socialising.These won’t all appeal to everyone, but they are again a way of getting eyeballs on your product, Linden Lab really need to give their blog a lift and talk up their product.

Linden Lab have in the past had some good dieas for the blog that never fully materialised, Blue Linden’s Eureka blog that was a voyage of discovery, Hamlet himself used to write for Linden Lab, time constraints make these difficult to add to the workload of someone in a full time post at Linden Lab, but a little bit of effort in this area to raise awareness would be extremely helpful. They have made some efforts with the guest blogger series but it really needs someone with a wider focus to make this all come together nicely.