Linden Lab has just provided realistic statistics on how many people are actually using the service, and takes effort to debunk claims that the Linden Dollar tokens used in SL are a kind of real currency. Their State of the Virtual World – Key Metrics, January 2007 is a great read, going even as far as uploading the original xls file with the raw data.This transparant way of communicating is a bold but honest way to move forward - even if it would mean that it bursts someone's PR or marketing bubble.
But the most interesting part is how Linden Lab manages to have statistics on “Unique Users”. At first, mainstream media jumping on the SL hype bandwagon, were confusing "User Accounts" and "Unique Users" - which started the whole "millions of users in SL (is just a hype)" meme. The real reason why virtual community services would want to "identify" unique users is not to accomodate the marketeers who love fluff their presentations on SL with huge user numbers, but because of service abuse. Linden Labs needs to be able to successfully permaban griefers and other abusers. They can only do that after they have some kind of ID handle to ban: by IP and/or by nickname and/or by e-mail address. But we all know one IP (e.g. an IP from a corporate network) can host many users. And that some users switch IP numbers easily - because it's the nature of their ISP's network, or because they want to. And to switch nicknames and e-mail adresses is even easier.
So I'm wondering: how do the Lindens claim to be able to track a user to a machine ID? They won't tell us - since it would undermine their efforts to keep griefers out - but I'm mighty curious. I'm pretty sure it's something a lot more intelligent then they way e.g. MySpace plans to ban "child predators" (aka pedophiles) by nickname (DUH). Maybe how Linden is handling it is something we all can learn from. Or maybe it's something really spooky.
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