Lately, my Web Analytics work has not focused so much on Second Life as it did when I was working at IBM, but I still am involved in Virtual World Metrics and follow what is going on in the field, including Code4Software.com.

In fact, news that Code4Software Parts Ways from Simuality and Slippcat was not entirely unexpected.  According to Virtual World Weekly:

… Jared Freeman announced over the weekend that his Code4Software had severed all ties with Simuality and their joint project Slippcat "Due to substantial and irreconcilable differences in business philosophy." Simuality and Code4Software joined together in March, using Code4Software's virtual worlds metrics package, V-Tracker, to build a pull-based system to advertising in Second Life. Freeman notes that Code4Software will retain all rights for the Promotional Object Marketing Platform, V-Tracker, AdSoft, and The Advertisers Guild affiliate based Virtual World display advertising network. Slippcat will no longer use V-Tracker services.

I've used V-Tracker quite often when I worked on IBM's Virtual Business Center in Second Life - pulling metrics, creating new metrics, in fact, perhaps the best analytics created in Virtual World, to date, was done via my work with Code4Software.com. 

Linden Labs releases May 2007 Key Metrics for Second Life and here's what I see:

1. Total Hours spend in Second Life doubled between January 2007 and May 2007!  (Jan=10,817,668   May=20,767,557)
2. Mainland Land use has doubled in the last 7 months (Oct 31,2006 = 83.97 while on 5/31/07 = 160.06).  Island Growth tripled to from 134.28 to 491.32 in the same period!
3. Money being spent in world has grown 2.5 times since November 2006 - from 1,161,573,009 Linden to  2,831,517,265.
4. Population has more than doubled since January 2007 to 6,860,473 registered Avatars to 4,370,810 individuals.
5. Germany now leads France as the second most active country based on Avatar count.
6. Woman are beginning to get more interested but Second Life is still dominated by men with 57% - but it's not as far part (Woman have 43%) so maybe it will get to be equal down the line.

A friend sent me this link - Apples and Oranges - to an article on Second Life metrics - it's the best one I've read, so far.  Read a bit of the post but need to go back again when I'm less tired and have more time to spend.

Also briefly looked at Top 25 Brands Measured By Traffic? which I also need to read much more closely; I'll write in depth about both articles, perhaps later next week.

Much thanks to http://www.ugotrade.com/ (Tish Shute) for bringing both articles to my attention today.

Another batch of Second Life key metrics were released by Linden Labs this week; I'm struck by how different this Second Life report is from a recent ComScore report about Second Life population.

The yellow columns show the difference between Linden Lab's own data and what ComScore says Second Life got in traffic from the countries listed above, in March 07.

Makes me wonder why we trust ComScore at all!  The actual population of Second Life (in Uniques) is more than double what ComScore says it was - plus Europe and America are much more evenly split in traffic according to Linden while ComScore is weighed towards European visitors by a factor of 2:1.

But what could be more accurate than Linden Lab's own registration data?   Why is ComScore even bothering to to estimate traffic numbers based on Panels when the real data can be had by just asking Linden Labs for it?

If ComScore's data, overall, is this far off from the actual numbers of residents and the locations they reside in - can the rest of the data from ComScore be that much better?

Just a thought.