Clay Shirky questions the user numbers on Second Life, and general silliness of the Virtual World meme. I Commented on usage metrics. We know from the startup screen that the advertised churn of Second Life is over 60% (as I write this, it's 690,800 recent users to 1,901,173 signups, or 63%.) That's not stellar but it's not terrible either. However, their definition of "recently logged in" includes everyone in the last 60 days, even though the industry standard for reporting unique users is 30 days, so we don't actually know what the apples to apples churn rate is... If we think of a user as someone who has returned to a site after trying it once, I doubt that the number of simultaneous Second Life users breaks 10,000 regularly. If we raise the bar to people who come back for a second month, I wonder if the site breaks 10,000 simultaneous return visitors outside highly promoted events.

Danah Boyd is also skeptical of this approach.

Dec26: Clay rants more about bogus numbers, and their blind acceptance by supposedly-Profession Al Journal Ist-s. The prize bit of [P Reporting] so far, though, has to be [Elizabeth Corcoran]'s piece for Forbes called "A Walk on the Virtual Side", where she claimed that Second Life had recently passed "a million unique customers." This is three lies in four words.

Jan8'2007: Clay Shirky gets some real numbers.

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