[sldev] Rapidly Growing? Someone needs to stop drinking the Kool-Aid

[Daniel]

> Lo Linden has the details below:
>...Second Life has a rapidly growing  
> population of Residents from 100+ countries, and it's the largest  
> growing virtual world where Residents create and inhabit a world of  
> their own design.

Someone hiring for QA ought to be at least technically accurate.  The following references
show SL to be static or shrinking for many measures:

Tateru Nino's statistics graphs:

http://taterunino.net/statistical%20graphs.html

(new accounts and average concurrency definitely down)

Tyche Shepherd's Region count survey:

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/virtual-business/8523-new-second-life-sims-past-20.html

(growing slightly, but still below the peak of a year ago)

LL's own Economy data:

https://secure-web5.secondlife.com/my/lindex/market.php (show:all for Lindex Trading Volume)
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2009/11/02/the-second-life-economy--third-quarter-2009-in-detail

(both peaks in user to user transactions can be attributed to gambling, which pumps up
transactions without real economic meaning.  Other measure are some up, some down)

How this relates to this list?  Aside from correcting the inaccurate marketing-speak,
knowing when peak and low concurrency happens is useful for deciding when to test
(Tateru's graphs).  Other user trends (like population mix by country) informs what
kinds of code improvements might be needed (set of internationalization languages or
translator design)

Daniel