SUNSET BEACH -- It happened quietly sometime on October 11th.  While many other Second Life citizens might have been snarling about lag or crashed sims, the 10 millionth SL citizen materialized on Orientation Island.  Growing pains aside, there is no underestimating both the statistical and symbolic importance of SL having achieved this 10M milestone.

Remarkably, SL’s 10M feat occurred less than one year after passing the 1 million mark on October 18th of last year.  And while growth may have slowed from the exponential “doubling every two months” a year ago, nobody can disparage SL’s continued brisk growth.

Through some e-mail correspondence, SLNN got input on SL’s brisk growth from Logan Linden, assistant to the CEO at Linden Lab.  “This is a great place to be,” says Linden.  Nevertheless, Linden stressed that active residents – which range from 1 million to 1.5 million over 60 days – and usage hours are really the most important metrics for LL: “[These are metrics] we are very proud of,” said Linden.  

To Linden’s point, the usage figures for SL do stand out.  For the month of August, 2007, LL estimated that each user spent an average of 23.6 hours in-world.  This figure was based on the fact that 23 million user hours were spent in-world that month by over 974,000 distinct user logins.

Linden also called attention to the fact that a huge segment of the SL population is international: approximately 70 percent hail from outside the United States.  Linden pointed out the important successes of the Global Provider program, which has allowed legions of international users to access SL in their own language, with localized content.  
 
Among the technical achievements of the past year highlighted by Linden was the move to open source.  According to Linden, this move enabled a trebling of support from the developer community, and has also facilitated strategic advances like the slimmer Windlight viewer and other third-party viewers.  

Indeed, the technical challenges to such growth are currently eclipsing the cultural and sociological ones.  While LL has traditionally downplayed the challenges of scaling its infrastructure, Catherine Linden, Marketing Director at Linden Lab, admitted a key nuance to LL’s growth predicament in a separate correspondence with SLNN.

“As Second Life continues to grow, naturally, many of the processes that existed in the company’s early days will have to be re-thought and better engineered to scale to growing demand.”  Linden went on to cite the stipend processing system as being one of those systems needing revision.  

Despite the growth in overall numbers, some SL citizens point to the fact that premium account growth in SL has slowed considerably.  Many premium residents see themselves as being a key creative and committed force behind the success of SL.  Yet the SL forums are of full of entries where existing premium customers question the value of premium membership.  “Premiums are… a temperature gauge of SL… an indicator of happiness with SL overall,” asserts Cristalle Karami.