Omega Point

Verified Accounts and Trust Metrics — Part 1

Part 1: Inter­na­tional Users

Two months ago, Sec­ond Life cre­ator Lin­den Lab removed the credit card require­ment from the account cre­ation process, allow­ing users with­out a credit card to join SL for the first time. While the move was met with alarm and oppo­si­tion among many mem­bers of the SL com­mu­nity, it was part of an ongo­ing plan to open access to Sec­ond Life, a plan which has been opposed by many vocal res­i­dents at nearly every step of the way, their out­rage then for­got­ten as the next phase has been unveiled.

In a blog post shortly after the ini­tial announce­ment, Com­mu­nity VP Robin Lin­den attempted to explain Lin­den Lab’s posi­tion, ratio­nale and intended secu­rity mea­sures, address­ing the gen­eral opin­ion among the Sec­ond Life forums’ users. Forums being what they are, she was likely only partly suc­cess­ful in get­ting this mes­sage across to Sec­ond Life’s vocal minority.

Regard­less of res­i­dent oppo­si­tion, the pol­icy was changed, and reg­is­tra­tion was opened up to every­one. With broad­band. And a fast com­puter. And ade­quate man­ual dex­ter­ity. And who could com­mu­ni­cate in Eng­lish to some degree. So while per­haps not the vast major­ity that the most opti­mistic peo­ple pre­dicted, it was cer­tainly about to become more acces­si­ble to users out­side Canada, the US, Aus­tralia and the UK, thus fit­ting in with Linden’s plans to expand Sec­ond Life’s user base into Asia and Europe.

So, after two months of open reg­is­tra­tion, has Lin­den Lab’s plan been suc­cess­ful? Obvi­ously, with Japan­ese and Korean job post­ings on Lin­den Lab’s employ­ment page, and the recent move to an XML-based client UI –allow­ing for the sim­ple pro­duc­tion of trans­lated clients– we can assume that the “Open SL” mas­ter plan is not yet completed.

But what has tran­spired in the interim? Accord­ing to Chro­mal Brodsky’s Sec­ond Life Pop­u­la­tion Sta­tis­tics site, the num­ber of total accounts has jumped sharply since reg­is­tra­tions were made free in April, and manda­tory account ver­i­fi­ca­tion was removed in June, with over 370,000 accounts reg­is­tered as of this writ­ing. How­ever, as Chromal’s site indi­cates, the growth of peak con­cur­rent logins over the last year is barely even per­cep­ti­ble as a curve.

We can inter­pret this dis­crep­ancy in sev­eral ways, all of which are likely involved to vary­ing degrees:

• That far more alt accounts are being made and not used con­cur­rently with the exist­ing resident’s main account.
• That peak con­cur­rent logins have been largely unchanged, due to the demo­graph­ics of Sec­ond Life’s user base. This means the num­ber only reflects peak logins for North Amer­i­cans. While anec­do­tal obser­va­tions indi­cate Euro­peans and South Amer­i­cans are now join­ing SL in vastly increased num­bers, Chromal’s graphs don’t cur­rently indi­cate whether or not there are more unique logins per day, nor whether logins are higher at typ­i­cally peak hours for users from other time zones.
• More users are cre­at­ing accounts, but are not able to run the client.
• More users are suc­cess­fully cre­at­ing accounts, but do not use SL as fre­quently as typ­i­cal active users do. This may be due to sev­eral factors:
• Users who may not oth­er­wise have cared enough to try SL are join­ing, but use SL more casually.
• Non-English-speaking users cre­ate accounts, but do not find enough peo­ple that speak their lan­guage to inter­act with to make them want to stay as long.
• New res­i­dents per­cieve SL’s value as being lower. If some­one pays $10 for an account, they will likely think of it dif­fer­ently than if they give a credit card num­ber, or than if they do nei­ther. This behav­ior may also be due to the sunk cost fal­lacy: if the $10 reg­is­tra­tion cost can be viewed as an invest­ment, some­one may still want to use SL to “get their money’s worth”. They may be less will­ing to do this if the account hasn’t actu­ally cost them anything.

Hard data aside, what anec­do­tal evi­dence is there to sup­port an increase in the num­ber of inter­na­tional users?

As a long­time mem­ber of the Sec­ond Life Men­tor group, I’ve taught classes, answered ques­tions, mostly about script­ing, and gen­er­ally been sub­ject to much Men­tor group IM spam. Since the removal of credit card ver­i­fi­ca­tion, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the num­ber of requests for assis­tance on Help Island, the “wad­ing pool” SL new­bies can use to get their bear­ings for a few min­utes or a few days before tak­ing the plunge to the big kid pool of the main­land. These are now mostly requests for trans­la­tors who speak Span­ish, Turk­ish, Russ­ian, or a dozen other languages.

While obvi­ously I’m not privy to the spe­cific num­bers, the fact that the bulk of Men­tor IM seems now to be requests for mul­ti­lin­gual men­tors effec­tively demon­strates that the removal of credit card ver­i­fi­ca­tion has suc­ceeded in at least one of its goals, and one I whole­heart­edly support.

Update, August 7, 6:15 PM: Chro­mal has gra­ciously pro­vided all avail­able data from the past 13 months, and notes that while the peak con­cur­rency rate has risen from 2127 in June 2005 to 8357 in August 2006, the min­i­mum con­cur­rency rate has risen from 647 to 3671 in that same period.

The max­i­mum num­ber of con­cur­rent logins is 3.93 times higher than it was 13 months ago, while the min­i­mum is now 5.67 times higher. Inter­est­ing stuff.

Next…
Ver­i­fied Accounts and Trust Met­rics Part 2: What Went Wrong?