Open Forum: How Many Monthly Active Second Life Users Will There Be In 2009?

I'm going to create an Open Forum for general predictions on the future of Second Life in 2009 later this week, but to me, here's the question that matters most:

Second Life's current monthly active user base is about 500,000, a number that's remained flat since 2007; at the end of 2009, how many monthly active Second Life users will there be?

As a bonus side question: at the end of 2009, how many monthly active OpenSim users will there be? Extra bonus: explain what assumptions cause you to arrive at that number(s)? Prediction numbers to be compiled and voted on next week!

Image: JeanRicard Broek.

Comments

[Loki Eliot]

Well i'd like to think us residents are now in a position to bring in more users to our happy communities on our own grounds. I'd like 2009 to be the year the residents took back SL from the Lab, with our own Direct SLurl sites, our own fringe celebrations of what we love about SL and working together to make the most of the restrictions in place :-p as well as maybe making things easier to cross between SL grid and Opengrids. Oh i maybe dreaming, but thats where things start.
Sorry if my rant went compleeettttly off topic :-p

[Ann Otoole]

People have given up and are making bots for parcels. It is necessary to survive in business. The entire concept of the concurrency number is laughable as is anyone that thinks it is an indication of popularity.

By 2010 90% of Sl will be non graphical bot clients. So even if they manage to make 1 million concurrency it will be meaningless.

Unless of course Linden Lab adopts ethics and disconnects traffic from search thus resulting in less load on the system and more accurate search results.

[Hiri Nurmi]

"People have given up and are making bots for parcels. It is necessary to survive in business."

I don't use bots and I'm doing just fine. Haven't used any for at least 6 months and before that just used a couple as clothes models - but they're too much hassle and I use avie shaped sculpties now where necessary. Indeed only used the model bots for a 4 or 5 month period - and saw no difference in sales from traffic. I occassionaly use *one* when when releasing a new design, but that's the exception.

The 'Designers' who use bot at their stores are failures who simply are not good enough or inventive enough to make any impact by their own skills. Show me a 'Designer' using bots to inflate traffic in their store and I'll show you a kid who hasn't mastered the exit from a paper bag yet. Hell, let's be provocative: there's not a single designer on the whole of SL who uses traffic bots who's wares are anything above the level of unimaginative crap.