50 MILLION FACEBOOK USERS ARE BOTS

A fake Facebook bot that recently tried to friend reporter Hamlet Au

Remember when Facebook had its witch hunt for SL avis!!

Well a report in New World News by Hamlet Au just said that Facebook may have 50 Million fake users.

According to Hamlet, "That's more fake people than the entire population of South Korea, or the populations of Greece, Cuba, Portugal, Sweden, and Israel combined."


It seems to be "Bot Week!"


All of Hamlet's story after the break

Facebook Says Facebook Full of Bots: Frankly, Fifty Million

by Hamlet Au

The New York Times has an interesting story on Facebook bots, those fake social network/Spam/malware accounts you probably get friend requests from every now and then, like Ms. Claire Hart, bisexual graduate of Western Kentucky UniversityLives andAvatar fan who wanted to be friends with me recently and who I totally can't believedoesn't actually exist. According to Facebook, these Facebook bots are more prevalent than you might think:

Facebook has said that 5 to 6 percent of its nearly one billion users could be fake, and it scours the site regularly to get rid of them.

In other words, around 50 million Facebook users are probably fake. That's more fake people than the entire population of South Korea, or the populations of Greece, Cuba, Portugal, Sweden, and Israel combined. So, lots and lots of bots. This is, by the way, some important added context for SL users who worry that Facebook accounts named after SL avatars are being purged -- while some have definitely been caught in sweeps, it's highly unlikely Facebook is devoting any particular attention to Second Life avatars on Facebook (probably less than 100,000), when the company has to contend with tens of millions of genuinely fake (if you know what I mean) accounts. As I often advise people worried about their avatar-named Facebook accounts:

If your avatar name isn't obviously fictitious sounding, and your Facebook account has real photos, and actual interests, and you regularly use it to engage with other genuine Facebook users, you should probably be OK. (No guarantees, but then, legitimate Facebook accounts of users using their real names who have nothing to do with avatars are sometimes blocked for accidental or dubious reasons too.)

The story hook the Times hangs this story about bots on is particularly juicy:

[A] company, called Limited Run, helps bands and record labels sell music and merchandise online. It bought advertisements for itself on Facebook this spring. It wanted to know who was clicking, so it built its own analytics tool. It discovered that only one in five clicks seemed to be from human beings. The rest, it said, came from bots, which, in essence, are bits of software performing automated tasks.

So 4 and 5 Facebook users engaging with Facebook ads were actually fake Facebook users. And you thought SL bots were a problem.

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SECOND LIFE PASSES 2 BILLION HOURS

Linden CEO Phillip Rosedale announced recently that Second Life passed 2 Billion hours in views.

Hamlet Au's New World Notes put those hours into prespective!

• 2 billion total user hours translate to 228,310 total years of Second Life usage.
• About 20 million people have tried Second Life so far. So 2 billion user hours averages out to 100 hours per user -- i.e. 5 days in Second Life.
• SL surpassed 1 billion user hours in September 2009, which took six years from its Summer 2003 launch to reach, so it took only 3 years to add one billion more

I know they got a billion out of me!

All of Hamlet's story after the break.

Philip Rosedale: Second Life Usage Surpasses 2 Billion Hours

By Hamlet Au

After I Tweeted that Second Life was still in Nielsen's Top 10, SL co-founder Philip Rosedale responded with a Tweet of his own: "SL recently passed 2+ Billion hours of use!" Maybe I missed if this milestone was mentioned before, but in any case, it's worth noting here. SL surpassed 1 billion user hours in September 2009, which took six years from its Summer 2003 launch to reach, so it took only 3 years to add one billion more.

From a certain perspective, "2 billion" is such a large number it sort of seems meaningless, so here's some elementary math to put it in perspective:

• 2 billion total user hours translate to 228,310 total years of Second Life usage.
• About 20 million people have tried Second Life so far. So 2 billion user hours averages out to 100 hours per user -- i.e. 5 days in Second Life.
• If you laid those 2 billion hours end to end, they would stretch so far into the cosmos that the ghost of Carl Sagan would appear in front of you and say, "Motherfucker that analogy makes no goddamn sense." And he would be right.

So, 2 billion hours. Monthly active users, to be sure, remain fixed below a million uniques, and probably stand at around 400,000 to 600,000 regular recurring users. But as the hours suggest, those actives are active indeed.

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THE TOP 50 SIMS IN SECOND LIFE FILLED WITH TRAFFIC BOTS?

Very interesting month for the Top 50 Sims.

Aparently the Lindens are cracking down on Traffic Bots.

So it will be interesting to see which of these stay in the Top 50 next month.

So which of these is your favorite? We'd like to know.


Also, for the complete story by Hamlet Au from NEW WORLD NOTES after the break!




Top Second Life Sims by Popularity for June 2012

By Hamlet Au

Courtesy Louis Platini's Metaverse Business, a Second Life/OpenSim analytics company that gathers publicly accessible in-world data for its clients, here's the top 25 most popular SL sims from last month, listed according to their average avatar visitor count at any given period:


Click here to use SL's map function on the web to search and directly teleport to any of these sims. Warning: Despite Linden Lab's prohibition against traffic-gaming bots, several sims are often reported to be full of them. (Somewhat ironically, Metaverse Business' traffic-counting bots cannot detect the world's traffic-gaming bots.)

After the break, the top 26-50 most popular sims:


As I often ask with these reports, anyone been to any of these that are worth the 15-20 minute effort that a visit often requires?

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