Linden Lab today announced that there’ll be some more work done on determining what is truly a popular location in Second Life. Determining true traffic / engagement in Second Life is one of those holy grails that has remained elusive.
We ran our own traffic measurements for a couple of months but the administrative burden became prohibitive. The Project Factory provide a weekly update on the most popular corporate presences and Tateru Nino’s Mixed Reality Headcount was the most comprehensive attempt I’ve seen but it ceased at the end of 2007.
If you’ve got thoughts on how traffic should be measured, here’s how to get involved:
We are opening up the discussion about the future of Traffic: anyone from our community who is interested is invited to join the “LL Traffic Future†group for further updates and info about inworld brainstorming sessions to come. To find it in Second Life:
Click Search button on the toolbar at the bottom of your screen, then click All tab (on the left).
Search for “LL Traffic Futureâ€.
Click the match that comes up in results, then click “View Full Profileâ€.
Click the “(Join L$0)†button and you’re in!
I’d like to hear your thoughts – for you what makes a presence in Second Life popular?
(Disclosure: The Project Factory are an advertiser on this site)
Linden already have sophisticated ways to measure traffic, they came inside the ‘GoogleBox’ they bought to do the new Search system. One metric Google pioneered was ‘dwell’ which measured how long each user spent on a website before coming back to the Google results page and clicking another link – the thinking was that the less time you spent on a page the less relevant the info there was to your original query – and so Google down-rated that site slightly against similar queries. Obviously it worked in reverse for ‘good’ sites.
Altho it’s limited to resident’s use of the Search system the advantage of prioritising that kind of measurement in SL is that it would pretty much filter out spam-bot-searches and camping, rendering them useless and leaving a much more accurate set of figures.
They can do all sorts of smart things to measure inworld activity, the current traffic head-count is certainly an outdated blunt instrument. Depends which Google features they paid for and intend to switch on i guess… 🙂
Ermm.. Actually not today. That was the 28th of April.
Yeah this is a month old, but still a great thing to talk about!
We have RealXtend and OpenSim alongside Second Life now, which all share a similar architecture in common. We should try to find a traffic solution that incorporates them into the equation too. My suggestion was to build the traffic monitoring into the viewer (which all these worlds share) and then have the viewer send along all of the required data to an external DB for analytics etc. See my blog post at http://www.wammyshouse.com/?p=23 for the nitty gritty of what could be a nice all-inclusive solution.
It wouldn’t really be a good solution though unless it was pre-built into the viewer, otherwise it would suffer the same opt-in problem that Alexa has for web statistics. So maybe a non-profit oversee’s the db and provides nice stats for the public to access?
Any comments / questions / rude remarks? :O)
Cheers,
Lee
Ahhh you’ve got to love the WordPress scheduling feature – I wrote this story on 28th April and set it to appear later that day but I must have selected the fifth month on the time stamp – hence its appearance overnight. Sorry for the confusion 🙂
Well, it took us the whole month to get some questions about it all answered. Others, we’re still waiting on.