Before I get to the numbers, here’s a neat thing: a company called Comverse apparently made a utility that snapshots the SL client constantly and sends the snapshots of the screen down to cellphones — and lets you send commands to that SL client remotely. At least that’s my interpretation of how the tech works, since it requires an SL client running somewhere to work. Basically, a passthru to get SL running on a cellphone. That’s kinda neat. This same approach could probably be used for, well, just about any virtual world client. One wonders why they didn’t start with WoW instead. 🙂

More interesting to the stats junkies might be the key metrics spreadsheet than Linden Labs has posted for SL usage. Still monthly uniques (alas) but we do get an all-time uniques, which reveals that slightly over 1/3 of the 3.1m registrations are alts (leaving 1.9m unique people registering). That’s based on a calculation that “excludes Alt’s matching users by payment information and/or email address”… these days, I hear the average household has 7 credit cards, and email addresses are easy to get too (I use three regularly). So that is probably undercounting. Looking at the percentages of unique registered to registered over time, what we see is the incidence of alts increasing, which isn’t really surprising. Edit: an email from Cory Ondrejka reveals that the 1/3 figure is actually a mix of alts, and those who simply don’t manage to log in (because of not meeting hardware requriements, UI confusion, etc — and that in fact there’s more of these than there are alts).

Other stats that caught my eye:

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