Ok, now this is just getting silly. Second Life’s front page now shows them as having 243,671 residents. As opposed to the 256,336 residents shown proudly on their site yesterday.
Clearly all the hub-bub on NWN, the SL Forums, Clickable Culture, and www.raphkoster.com about the fishy statistics have caused the Lindens to start purging old accounts.
Either that, or aliens just abducted 13,000 SL residents.
It did seem curious to me that there was no press release coming out of Linden Labs when they reached the quarter million figure. This from the same company that bragged that is was going to have a million residents by year’s end. Curiouser and curiouser.
so what?
The numbers always fluctuated slightly since that value first appeared at the home page. It was just more “visible” when you reach a certain threshold. It’s back on 257,000+ as of today, since every day, around a thousand new users log in, sometimes more.