Why did you just cut and paste the press releases from CSI and the Electric Sheep? There aren’t “some reports” saying there would be “a million” — just those companies saying that lol.

Inworld, we watched very carefully. I actually saw the concommittant log-on numbers on the front page go down in 3 hours, possibly because regulars feared the influx would bring lag and didn’t come and a lot of the newcomers bounced due to load-balancing difficulties.

There were 420 sims (islands), and except for 3 Orientation Islands with perhaps 70-100 newbies, the rest had between 0-6 people. I generously estimated no more than 4,000 on all sims at any one time, and like other observers, saw these included a lot of staff and rubber-neckers from existing SL residents. Others who actually physically counted every green dot on the map found no more than 900 on these sims. That means the real log-ons were no “million,” but 900-12,000.

That is, CSI NY watchers may have followed the usual SL pattern — tried to download the client, found it wouldn’t work on their existing set-up, or found they could load it, but then couldn’t stay logged on, or logged on, but found it too hard to learn.

The Sheep attempted to simplify the user experience with a lighter client that lagged and confused less and had some nice features (like the “backspace” of where you had been).

But they dumbed down the SEARCH by defaulting to a SEARCH ALL interface that turns up lots of jumbled junk in SL, and covered up the interface most people use to immediately get a return to CLASSIFIEDS and PLACES. That meant existing inworld merchants at first enthusiastic about an influx of people, whether 12,000 or 1,000,000,000, suddenly realized that nobody would easily find their ads — instead they’d be driven to the Sheep’s SHOP button on the interface, that included only their properties and friends — about a dozen lucky connected stores they put on the CSI NY itself.

So this model of enabling one metaversal consulting company to take over the viewer to offer to their big client, CBS, could prove disastrous for the existing customer base and vibrant economy that are part of what even draws something like CBS in the first place to follow their customers who fled boring push TV into interactive user-generated content spaces.

It means that the TV-VW mash-up will turn a former user-generated world into a corporate company town that will simply see churn.

The hope is that the couch potatoes — who continue to trickle in, and may eventually in 6 months reach that million you’re talking about — will fly out of TV-land and integrate with the rest of the world, and start making, buying, selling in the inworld economy at large. But with other TV stations and large entertainment corporations greedy to follow this model to sell to the people they lost from TV and newspapers, the virtual world itself may be destroyed, or become merely a hollowed-out 3-D TV screen.

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