Fishpool

News hit the Internet this week that our favorite social play phenomenon, Habbo has reached a milestone of 100 million registered characters. Several places in the blogosphere have also pointed out the weaknesses of that figure, such as the fact that yes, most of those characters are "alts", abandoned accounts, or otherwise not very meaningful. I'd be the last person to argue against that particular point.

Still, it's a figure that has some comparison basis. MySpace didn't have 100 million registrations when News Corp acquired it, reaching that milestone a year later, and MySpace regs are arguably just as likely to be abandoned as virtual world avatars.

Overall though, we don't really put much weight to that metric compared to many others. The 20 million new registrations made in the last six months is pretty nice, but nicer still is 1.5 million logins per day and over a million hours per day spent in Habbo by users. Those are hard to discredit, never mind whether you think that free-to-play is less sticky than subscribed games or not. I tend to give more attention to that than to the 9.4 million unique monthly visitors, because ubiquitous as the UB/UV measurement style is, it, too is horribly inaccurate due to all kinds of errors from cookie washing to shared computers.

If you're interested in hearing about how we measure Habbo and decide what to do based on what we learn from those measurements, you might want to consider attending Leipzig GCDC this August, where I'll give an updated and more in-depth version of the talk the slides of which are in my earlier posting.

While there's lots to like about my current laptop, one thing that had been quite annoying was the wireless indicator led. For a long time, it didn't function at all, because iwl4965 didn't contain support for driving it. Recently (effectively starting with Fedora 9 for me), that support came in, but now it's not annoying because you can't tell whether wireless is enabled, rather because the led is blinking all the time, which is a distraction.

I liked the behavior of my old laptop's ipw2200 much better: blink while searching/associating with a network, and then stay on constantly. Happily, Erich Schubert just pointed out how to fix the iwl4965 blinking behavior. That script is (I think) for Debian/Ubuntu, and a slightly different kind is needed on Fedora. I'm not sure this is the best way to go about it, but at least it works for me: put the following in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/iwl-no-blink

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$0" = "wlan0" ]; then
    for dir in /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy*X; do
        echo none > $dir/trigger
    done
fi


I'm leaving early tomorrow morning to Seattle for the ION 2008 online games conference. I'm looking forward to this trip quite a lot - I haven't been to this conference before, but I've heard good things about it. It's also the first time I'm doing a one-hour presentation in an American conference in front of an audience that I expect to be pretty much experts in the same field as I am. That's for sure going to be interesting, I hope the turnout is good. Been working to finalize the content of the session for a while, but I'm still to start compiling the slide deck; that's going to be a job in itself since I certainly don't want to be left second compared to Sulka's 160-slide rapid-fire session in GDC San Francisco that I now notice he never blogged about.

Last week saw MySQL User Conference 2008 in Santa Clara, but I was not able to make time for it this year either. However, in the wake of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, it was very interesting to follow what was going on. A few things that caught my attention:

MySQL 5.1 is nearing General Availability and an interesting storage engine plugin ecosystem starts to emerge. It's this latter, but related event that I see as the first real sign of validation for MySQL's long-ago chosen path of pluggable storage systems instead of focused effort on making one good general-use engine.

Oracle/Innobase announced InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1, which much-awaited features which promise a great deal of help for daily management headaches. More than that, InnoDB Plugin's release under GPL lifts quite a lot of the concern I'm sure many users like us have had about the future viability of InnoDB as MySQL storage engine.

A couple of data warehousing solutions are launched, also based on MySQL 5.1 -- Infobright is one I've already researched somewhat (looks very interesting, as soon as a few current limitations are lifted), Kickfire I know nothing about right now but would love to learn more of.

There's a huge amount of coverage graciously provided by Baron Schwartz that I have yet to fully browse through.

A few remarks by Mårten Mickos regarding MySQL's business model seem to have kicked up a bit of a sandstorm. I don't really understand why; I read these to just verify that the direction MySQL took last year is to continue this year as well. I don't see any major changes here regarding the licensing structure, software availability, or support models. Frankly, it seems like yet another case of Slashdot readers not reading, let alone understanding, what they're protesting against, and press following up on the noise.

I do understand the critique made against MySQL's chosen model, though. In fact, I went on record last September to say that I understand that critique. I still see the same issues here. I believe we represent a fairly common profile of a MySQL Enterprise customer in that what we want from it is not the bleeding-edge functionality but a stable, well-tested product that we can expect to get help for if something does go wrong. We don't see great value in having access to a version of software that isn't generally available to "less advanced" or more adventurous users for free in a community version. In fact, we see it as a negative that such functionality exists, because it hasn't received the community testing, feedback and improvements that makes great open source software as good as it is. While new functionality is interesting, and we're trying to spend time getting familiar with new stuff in order to use it in production later, it simply isn't prudent to put business-critical data in a system that hasn't received real-world testing by as large a community as possible (unless you have no other alternative, and then you takes your chances).

Yet it seems to me that this is essentially what Sun/MySQL continue to propose for the Enterprise customers by delivering "value add" functionality in a special version of the server or plugins to it, possibly in a closed-source form that further reduces transparency and introduces risk. Mårten, I'd prefer it to be otherwise. How can I help you change your mind about this?

We just released the results of our second global Habbo youth survey. For this 2007 edition, over 58,000 people contacted via the Habbo sites in 31 countries answered a survey the results of which have been painstakingly analyzed for weeks, nay, months by our in house analytics team.

Among the findings is tha majority of teens are now using their phones as mp3 players, that being almost twice as popular at 71 percent of the surveyed. Sure sign of convergence there. Sony Ericsson has enjoyed a rise in popularity thanks to this trend, and while Nokia is still the global leader in the teen segment as well as overall, it has lost some ground among teens.

This and a lot more, 250 pages worth of brilliant insight, can be found in the book we released in Virtual Worlds Conference today. We're selling this for €475 a piece, a real bargain for the content, because we figured it'll be more useful widely distributed rather than if sold at the typical market research prices. Check out the links above for more info.