Top 20 Largest Second Life Groups Now -- No. 1's for Open Source BDSM Collars, Only a Handful From 2009's Top Remain, & None Larger Than Facebook's Second Life Group

Here's the current top 20 largest groups in Second Life, courtesy of Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, an SL-oriented company that gathers publicly accessible in-world data with bots for its clients. Listed by group name, number of Residents in the group. The "*" indicates a group that was also in the top 20 when we ran that list from February 2009:

• OpenCollar: 79946
• FlashBacks - Club Lounge: 42054
• DANCE ISLAND: 39787*
• ALady Bodies Fans: 36343
• ((GOLD GAME)): 34514
• Alady: 29270
• TOP SKIN: 23554
• Escort Oasis: 23040
• Lesbian Paradise VIP: 22856
• Henmations: 22629*
• Stiletto Moody Shoes: 21207
• CLOUD NINE VIP: 20516*
• *~*freebies world*~*: 20443
• Sweethearts Jazz: 19867*
• FREE BDSM SEX CLUB!: 19597
• Naturist Resort - The Wild Coast: 19368
• Bootyliciouz Club VIP: 18241
• Fierce Designs: 17773
• FRANCE3D: 17327
• SecondMax: 15095

As you'll notice, only a handful were also in the top 20 in 2009, and about 25% are explicitly sexual in nature. The very largest by far, OpenCollar, seems to be a support group for an open source BDSM collar for submissive avatars (link possibly NSFW.) Overwhelmingly the top groups are for social gamers (nightclubs, nude beaches, etc.), few are general interest, and none are larger than the official general interest Second Life group/page on Facebook, currently with 114,000 members.

Image credit: open-collar.blogspot.com. Thanks to MarcelEdward DutchX for suggesting this post!  (Updated at 5:55AM to correct a couple listings.)

Comments

[Komuso Tokugawa]

I guess now that Blue Mars is floating belly up in the desktop vw deadpool you are trying to pitch your ,um, "Konsultancy Soifaces" to Facebook?

[Lili]

Wal-Mart is still, by far, the largest retailer in the world. France’s Carrefour is #2. Are you going to be surprised I don’t go to Wal-Mart? I think it’s a question of quantity versus quality. There are bazillions of muslims and christians in the world, but I don’t choose to be one. Chinese is spoken by more people than any other language, followed by Spanish, I don’t plan to speak either. Meth is taking over the U.S. like a wildfire and I really doubt there’s a chance of me ever using it.
Premium members (the ones who pay to keep Second Life going) are apparently a small percentage of the users of that virtual world, and it’s also fairly apparent no one cares what they think. Strangely, most of the people I talk to seem really hate facebook, even though some of them have accounts. I’ve noticed something of a correlation about facebook users though; the more low-brow the place you visit, the more you hear about facebook, myspace, friendster, farmville, mafia-wars and getting drunk. I think it’s a herd kinda thing.
Sometimes, no matter how much you really really really want something, and no matter how the numbers look, you just are not going to convince some people to want it too.

[Alvi Halderman]

And most of them have something to do with sex...

also, kudos at French SLers that stay networked like that

[Rin Tae]

With adult activites so prominently present in a list of largest groups I don't think there is anythign to wonder about why so many people reject the idea to have an connection between SL and Facebook and it's insitence on all RL data. on one side, I guess 'those more kinky things' are far more common then one would suspect, but society would still react badly if those ever comes out into light.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Dean: So, professor, from that, what's it called? RSS feed I read what this Mr. Au said about that Second World thing.

Prof: It's "Second Life," you know.

Dean: Right. This popularity list contains a great deal of content that would be broadly offensive if some clever student journalist ran it in the campus paper.

Prof: Despite the loss of some educators from the platform, there is still worthwhile content in SL...um, Second Life.

Dean: What's this "Open Collar"?

Prof: Ah. It's about virtual pets.

Dean: Oh, really? Like dogs and cats?

Prof: (crossing fingers) More or less.

Dean: How can I get an account? My daughter really loves virtual pets.

Prof: Oh, you'd best wait for the client for the iPad....she'd find the current version slow on her computer...

[Opensource Obscure]

I couldn't see much value in the sheer number of members in a group.
It's an indicator, sure, and admittely we don't have many other metrics about groups, so it's hard to judge them unless we join them.

But remember that a huge part of SL accounts isn't even active.
A group may have thousands of members because they daily invite/spam new users, who being clueless accept with no hesitation - but then just stop using Second Life.

Sheer numbers aren't an effective way to measure how interesting something in SL is.

I would love reports about the main SL groups, where more interesting factors were mentioned - as the quality of group chat, the usefulness of group notices, and frequency/quality of group events.

[Claude Dawes]

if you wish to take an opencollar item, even just to try it, you need to join the group.
i think this is the main reason that makes that group having almost double members of the second one

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

I'd wonder how much the counts would be reduced if you filtered for accounts that have at least logged in within a month ago. Some of these groups don't do enough garbage collection and have accounts which haven't logged in for years in their list. Probably still high, but, I'm sure some other groups would slip into the list. (^_^)

Namely, NCI, Oxbridge, and Builder's Brewery. These Q&A groups remain quite packed even with monthly cleanups. (^_^)y

[Molly Montale]

A few months ago a friend spoke at length about her desire to build a sim for a Myst type adventure game using RLV. The RLV would provide temporary traps or limitations an explorer wearing a RLV relay might encounter. An explorer might have to deal with such possible things as vampires, ghouls, potions, spells, sickness or hallucinations in a dark, Cthulhu/film noir type setting.
This sounded very interesting. Apparently there is this large group of people who have tried using RLV but I am not aware of RLV being used in this sort of way. I encouraged her but unfortunately I think she is spending her time in World of Warcraft rather than developing her idea.

[Ciaran Laval]

If you add up those group numbers, they come out at way more than the one time like click on the Second Life page on Facebook.

However that's statistics for you.

Facebook does not welcome Second Life avatars Hamlet, you know this, you've reported on the accounts being deleted.

[Ananda]

*nods* see what I was telling you? There are actual *group* groups in SL itself that are in the same size range as the Facebook "like" page. C'mon, huh? Can we stop comparing apples and walnuts now? Facebook "like" pages were never groups to begin with.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

oh gawd here come the net nanny snake handling griefers for sure.

[Robustus Hax]

I can just imagine the spam and scrolling group chat of an 80,000 member group in SL.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

OK - let's have a few facts about Second life groups and pages on Facebook.

The Official Second Life Page (the largest by far) has 115,000 people who have 'liked' it. This means that it has half the number of likes as the 'Where the hell do all my pencils and pens go?!' page. People just 'Like' pages on a whim - and it does not equate to Second Life Groups or even interest in Second Life.

The largest Second Life group on Facebook has 15,000 members - and none of the others there come close to that.

Facebook is an important market for Second Life - but do you think we might have a week on NWN without it being pushed so much?!

[Foneco Zuzu]

Im a user of Open collar and Rlv enabled viewer since my beggining on Sl.
Not only its a free product, but open collar support is by far the best on Sl.
And to connect open Collar or Rlv strictly and directly to any sort of kinky, pornographic content, its a typical view of those who still try to ignore the simple fact that:
SL leaves due to its sexual nature, no other product can deliver such sexual enjoyment online as it.
If that shocks the conservative Moral, well, they should be reminded that, not only internet florishs due to Adult content but that, luckly, the majority of Sl users come from Countries where Sex is not a tabu word!
And as All know, Sex sells!

So why the admiration for being the top groups, Adult oriented sex ones?

[Carter]

Seeing the list does make me wonder when the last time was the owners of these groups purged the (likely) thousands of folks who haven't logged in for a year or two. Based on some experience with "popular" groups such as these, a purge of the inactive would drop numbers in some groups quite dramatically.

I'm just sayin'

[Ann Otoole InSL]

@Carter: Because there is no way to do that other than trying to use the horrid SLv2 UI one by one.

[Pat Powers]

And of course group memberships really are not an indication of real interests. By all indications, tens of thousands play Second Life Gor every day. There is not single group for them, or even a group that has a particularly large percentage of them ... but I daresay they have much more cohesive impact as a group that somebody who took two seconds and punched a "like" button on Facebook.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Oh my goodness. What a dreary and depressing list, despite a few bright spots!

My world. My extremely limited imagination.