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.

It's again been a while since my previous post. First, it was a feeling that there was nothing worthwhile to write about, at least without having to spend hours thinking about it first. Then I had a biking accident and fractured my left wrist, leaving me rather handicapped as far as computers are concerned. Thanks to Helsinki's Rakennusvirasto for that - it would be nice if the few bike lanes weren't mined with road construction asphalt gravel.

I even entertained the idea of switching to a Mac in order to get decent speech recognition software, given that my laptop blew a gasket (well, busted its fan, at least) the day before. No, that won't happen though - an experiment with one proved that Macs are still, despite their aesthetic appeal, really excellent at infuriating me with their UI. I'm sure that's all fault of my own idiosyncrasies, so no comments of that, please.

A few other things of note have happened. We're closing the end of the latest Habbo update rollout, with this version bringing various usability improvements all around, from password retrieval and friend invites, to a more scalable web store interface. In Finland we're already pilot testing the next version, which has more noticeable new features: tagging and related search functionality and music player on the home pages to mention two. However, since I'm such a metrics-driven incremental improvement freak, to me the most significant events are the rollout of Google Analytics measuring (it's such a nice tool, even if with our traffic it becomes a bit sluggish), and how we're (once again) speeding up our update cycle to twice its previous velocity. I think this is now the third time we do it, and likely the trend will continue at least until we've reached a daily upgrade frequency.

Speaking of Analytics, the updated "social networking" version of the Habbo UK front page showed interesting changes in behavior, with some key metrics producing double-digit improvement. Something must be done about those ads, though... Comments on that vs the other Habbo sites' front pages welcome.

Finally, the corporate Sulake site was also updated last week. I may join the group posting notes in its blog as well, but that will happen after the holidays. Fractured wrist or not, I am looking forward to a few weeks offline. Too bad this forces our vacation plans to a more passive mode - but I suppose that will finally let me catch up on a lot of reading.