50 million in virtual worlds by 2011?

Sounds optimistic?

South Korea’s Cyworld has 20 million, World of Warcraft 8 million subscribers, and Habbo Hotel has 7 million. That’s 35 million for three products.

The research comes from tech research group Gartner’s.

Gartner’s describes a these virtual worlds and still mainly PC based, but also accessible by PDA’s and phones etc…

Shame, because there’s another 3-6 million people of Xbox Live to add in. There’s around 3 mill already, and Microsoft aims to top six million by the end of June. So our total is already up to 41 million, ignoring cross overs. Add in Everquest, Lineage, and a few of the others, and I’d say 50 million is probably a target for the end of 2008, rather than 2011.

How about 100 million by 2011? I’d be pretty safe to say China and South Korea will be the largest populations. And, speaking from experience, I’d rather move house virtually than in real life…

More on this at Giga-Om.

Possible service disruption

I move house this week, so there may be some disruption as I try and transfer both phone and Broadband. Plus I’m also desperately trying to fit everything in cardboard boxes.

So far both my provider, Zen Broadband, and British Telecom, have been pretty helpful, so I’m fairly confident things should go smoothly.

(I shouldn’t have typed that, should I?)

I will endeavour to keep updating as often as possible, and hopefully the disruption should be kept to a minimum. Plus I’ll be moving for 3.3km away from the telephone exchange to 300 metres away! So my connection speed and reliability should increase!

Having used Zen for about 6 months now, I can see why they’ve won awards. Their customer service has been really good, with quick replies to emails whenever I’ve had a query, easy to understand information, and so far, their estimates for connection times etc have been spot on. Highly recommended after my experiences with V21/Biskit, despite Zen being a little pricier than most competitors. It does mean, as well, they offer a realistic download limit on their 2-8Mb package of 20Gb, rather than 1 or 2Gb for most suppliers.

How’s this for invention

It hasn’t been long since I blogged about Twittervision.

And now it’s available in 3-D! To take a look, click here

That’s the joy of giving out your API’s..who knows what it will be used for next, and how much coverage that next mash-up could get?

Two great mash-ups…Flickrvision and Twittervision

If you’re looking for a fascinating way to spend five minutes, you can do worse than www.twittervision.com and www.flickrvision.com.

Both work on the same principle. Whenever someone uploads a picture to Flickr, or a Twitters a new post, it’s immediately displayed on a Google map of the world. There’s something fascinating about watching the random photos being uploaded and seeing one appear from China of an office, followed by a half naked man in Scotland and a Christmas tree in Sweden. The Flickr version is probably more entertaining as a diversion than Twitter, but they’re both worth checking out.