Second Life has now hit 1,000,000 residents. The news of the one millionth person in that virtual world created excitement on the Second Life blog and at Linden Labs.
Congratulations to the whole SL community and all of us at Linden Lab on reaching 1 Million residents signed up!! Second Life is growing because together we are all building content, welcoming new people, expanding the community, and adding new capabilities to the system. It is amazing to be a part of such an experience - I can't possibly imagine any job I'd more love coming to every day. We’re trying hard to find a moment here at the office to celebrate...
Now, on the not-so-mushy side, our performance and experience right now for new users is not good! We’ve been able to handle 10,000 new residents or more every day (which is a mind-altering 10x increase since April of this year), but right now the media coverage we are getting is taking us to unreal levels of new users - we will probably sign up more than 50,000 new people today. The new user system is fairly scalable, but it will take us a few days at least to adapt to this level of load. As a result we’ve got slow website performance, way too many people on the orientation islands, and an overloaded set of new user landing points in the main grid.
The news generated a great deal of press for Second Labs and may slow things down for a while as a the persistent online world is flooded with curious noobs. The Next Net blogs that Second Life is starting to be noticed by the advertisers and retailers as well as gamers.
