Second Life Registrations, Searches, Visits Spike

Ah, the joys of word-of-mouth referrals and frequent press mentions.
Hitwise writes that:

last week the share of US Internet searches for 'second life' shot up 73% compared to the previous week (week ending 10/21/06 vs. week ending 10/14/06), and visits to the Second Life website more than doubled in the two weeks between the weeks ending 10/7/06 and 10/21/06.

On the surface this sounds pretty positive for the future prospects of SL, but the blog goes on to quote anectodal mention that there seem to be more business and newbies prospecting for business opportunities. If this is true, I wonder whether the added interest might not serve to upset the existing Second Life community.

The blog also mentions that the age of new users has moved upward in recent weeks. While this seems to agree with the statements in the previous paragraph I'd take it with a grain of salt as one of the benefits of these 'virtual worlds' is that users can be whoever they care to be. As there is no identify verification of registrants there is nothing to stop a 20-something user from declaring an age of 67 while registering... not to mention the older users who in the past may have pretended to be younger than they are (for innocent or not-so-innocent purposes)... a practice that may be changing as the media recognize and publicize the abuses carried out by some of these individuals in communities like Second Life and MySpace.

As mentioned in a previous post, I wouldn't get too hung up in registration numbers for a free community like this one. Curiosity and active participation are two very different things... with the second being the measure more interesting to me as a guage of the product's present and future prospects. Let me also slip in a quick note of concern around accounts potentially being created in this high growth period for later malicious purpose... there, I'll end my conspiracy talk now :)

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.