Second Life May Not Work On Your Shiny New Computer

This is interesting news. It sounds as though some Second Life users may have issues with Microsoft's new Vista operating system. I seem to recall that there was an event in Second Life for the Vista release... good thing they had it BEFORE the release rather than once the machines had shipped!

Now, given the complexity of any Microsoft OS, and what I assume to be the complexity of Second Life and its underpinnings it doesn't surprise me that there were some kinks to work out, but it sounds like the issues are a bit more severe than 'kinks.' In this case it seems to be issues with graphics drivers, which is pretty odd. As the blog linked below points out you'd think that some of Vista's beta testers would also have been Second Life users... unless Vista's beta program was tiny, or... unless Second Life's user base isn't quite as large as we're lead to believe.

You can read some more on the subject here on the weeseepeople blog as well as over at CNET.

When You Think Virtual Worlds...

When you think virtual worlds who do you picture spending their time in them? Surprisingly Second Life doesn't map to the photo below.

The average age of users is 32, and the median age of users is 36.
Median age is 36.
43% of users are female, 50% are female "by use."

Make of that what you will.
The rest of the report can be found here.

Lots Of Users Means Lots Of Opportunity - For All

Another question that comes up when a company registers millions (or even hundreds of thousands) of users is, when will the spammers arrive en masse. When an online effort reaches a registration tipping point where the new users move away from tech savvy early adopter and tend more toward Aunt Mabel they become ideal targets for the spammers/fraudsters. You can bet than any spam/fraud artist worth his or her salt has a number of accounts on SL and other virtual communities as you read this and is testing the hell out of every one of them. Further you can bet that on average these individuals are smarter, more driven and better incented in their pursuit than the gamers they're preparing to target.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's spent time looking for these individuals in SL, or any other virtual world for that matter. Surely some of the asian games that have been around for a while are experiencing some of this (I mean come on, Cyworld claims that one third of South Koreans are residents of that world) - if you've heard about it please share!

Hang on, cause its only a matter of time before they stop testing and start hunting.

When 1 Million Isn't Always 1 Million.

Clearly as Second Life recently topped 1 million registered users and is still growing strong. At this point in a registration cycle I always get curious re: what percentage of those are legitimate users vs. not. Of the 1 million, how many are active in any 3 month period? That's a stat I'd be more interested to know.