Reuters Second Life News Center recently reported that, for the first time, there had been 50,000 concurrent users inside the game. That’s a notable milestone, but it’s not really what interested me.
Lower down in the article, Reuters references these fascinating graphs by Tateru Nino (she of the mop-like hair, sexy glasses and transparent chest). They display a bunch of usage statistics for Second Life. They only go back six months, I loves me a chart, don’t you?
The most interesting charts are the first two. The one on the left shows the dramatic increase in registrations over the past, with the total more than doubling to about 9.3 million. However, the chart on the right shows the number of ‘active residents’ (I think that’s users who have logged in in the last month). It’s pretty much flat. Assuming these charts are accurate, those new users are remarkably, uh, unsticky.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I have data going back more than a year, but trying to present all of it in the same graph diminishes the resolution, and makes it harder to read.
Working on solutions for that.
Perhaps I’m not the only one who created an avatar in late Spring and logged in only a few times to see what the hype was all about. While I never intended to add Second Life to my, um, daily life, I didn’t find anything that persuaded me to change my mind.
I know many people who, against the rules, have created several avatars but continue to only use one main avatar. This may be the reason for these graphs being as such. Second life doesnt really do much advertising so the only real way for thier numbers to spike would be due to massive referals. It seems to be good this way though, because it takes time to set up servers and mantain them and if they started advertising they would face a faster growing user population than they can add servers to accomodate. Similar to myspace, which is annoyingly slow between the hours of 7 and 10 central time.