Article: Second Life Economic Report

Metaverse is offering an analysis of the economic situation at Second Life Q1 2010, in particular, critiquing Linden Lab's adoption of pure money transfer (without actual virtual goods) as a measure of economic activity. I'm not an economist, but the related analysis looks informed and reasonable to me.

I think the interesting point to note however, is that Second Life has put in a solid quarter by a number of metrics. This result can only be good for the virtual world industry as a whole. But, I find myself still not that desirous of purchasing virtual goods, not unless they influence my Real Life, and only music and video comes to mind in this regards.

Ross

Kzero Metaverse Analysis Information

Kzero have released their analysis of population and marketing statistics for virtual worlds. This is represented as a Universe Graph. Note the position of Second Life in the 30 plus age bracket. Others are larger, but have a younger demographic.
Possibly suggesting more scope for serious use of the technology, than other fields.

I would argue that this is due to the configurability of SL, and its ability to garner information from other sources on the internet, and produce visualisations as such in situ, as we have shown with business processes at QUT.

BTW, the graph is a nice intuitive visualisation of Age Demographic with Age of World using a Polar Coordinate approach.

Ross