Miguel Rotunno (whom readers of Graphic Dreams also known as RocapC) in addition to own Miramar Studio & Modeling Agency in Second Life has always been a fan of virtual worlds and a great traveler of the same. It is therefore not surprising that he created a group on Facebook dedicated to news about the Opensim Project. A project that despite the numbers still very small when compared to proprietary grids like that of Linden Lab (Second Life) continues to be an important development if only because it stimulates the same Linden Lab to improve its services, still very poor in terms of customer care (as confirmed recently the story of Nunzia Mayo, we've talked about recently and still unresolved), offering a low cost alternative for companies, nonprofit organisations (as Museo del Metaverso of Rosanna Galvani, aka Roxelo Babenco, long been present in Craft and in recent months working on the project Art & Poetry), artists and educators.

The numbers seem to confirm the validity of the Opensim alternative: in an  article of Maria Korolov published on Hypergrid Business and reported by Miguel in his group we read of how the 40 main grids of Opensim in early September have grown to a total of 19.381 regions/sims (883 more than in early August) and at 212.452 registered users. These numbers do not include smaller grids and those privates “behind the firewall”. Between the grids appear to be more active at the time OSGrid, which recorded an increase of 491 sims, the German grid Metropolis (+233 sims) and Kitaly, a grid on demand grew by 113 new regions. And if you look for registered users the greatest success at this time is recorded by Inworldz (1.924 more users in August), Avination (1823 more registered users) and OSGrid (who earned 1370 more users). Note by the way that Inworldz (-19 sims) and Avination (-80 sims) are losing regions, perhaps because they grew too quickly, attracting merchants from Second Life that have had no commercial results and then chose to backtrack. 

Meanwhile, according to data kept in check by Tyche Shepherd (http://gridsurvey.com), yeartoday Second Life has lost 673 sims and now has 31.139 sims of which 24.170 privates (were 24.843 at the end of 2010), which means that the growth of OpenSim depends not only on lower interest for Second Life (i.e. OpenSim is actually attracting new users that did not show the same interest in virtual worlds before). Even in this case is not entirely a surprise: Christopher Jon Barnett (aka Omen Crow in Second Life) recently explained ow he discovered the virtual world almost by chance thanks to some friends who were already usingSecond Life (as a platform for role-playing game), he is passionate about this instrument and has proposed it for a professional use with the clients of the agency he worked for and at the end has opted for Opensim that, explain Christopher, unlike Linden Lab has a pool of people who follow the educational projects. The education sector, which still questions the actual validity of the use of virtual worlds, has in fact been left to itself in recent years by Linden Lab, one of many questionable choices of the Californian company whose competitors are trying to take advantage not only thanks to lower costs but also through a more careful management of relationships with users.