15-20% of Second Life Activity is for Work or Education

When Philip Rosedale stepped down as CEO of Linden Lab, he noted that Second Life was seeing a shift towards more use for collaboration. His replacement, Mark Kingdon, has since noted that in-world collaboration is going to be Second Life's killer app. It seems like a large portion of Second Life's users already agree, with 15-20% using the virtual world for work and education. And, says Rosedale, that's organic, though Linden is also looking at how to "aggressively" pitch Second Life to small and medium businesses and "working on that quietly right now."

"Our estimate is it's in the 15 to 20 percent range right now of overall usage," Rosedale told FastCompany. "But it's very hard to say because the world is this very open environment and it's difficult for us to survey it. Second Life right now is just a little under a million hours of use per day and a little bit more than 200,000 different people using it. When we talk about those percentages, I guess that means tens of thousands of people using it for business and education."

Comments

[Pops]

That 15 to 20% population and the log in increases Phillip R. is referring to is nothing more than zombie farms. These are being used to increase traffic stats for inworld business owners and some corporations and education orgs. Dont believe me, go see for yourself. The Zombie farms are easy enough to find. Lindens posted stats are so bogus! The BS is so deep one has to wear high top boots to go there.

[Dedric Mauriac]

I would agree that there is a large focus on education/business use. However, I haven't seen a large shift. It seems they have always been there. I mostly see corporate librarians on info island and related sims from the tech soup days.

After they get URL on a prim working, the next hurdle would be to make a "remote desktop on a prim" feature so that everyone can control or view a computer, give power point presentations, edit word documents, browse websites real-time, have multiple people draw with a paint program at once, etc.

@Pops - I would like to see stats of alternative agents. How many are logged each day? Let's see how big of an offset it is compared to regular users. I'm guessing it is very small. What are the top 10 popular agents that people use other then the main SL viewer and release candidates? What is the average login time for 'bots' vs real users.