bows

Who knows where you will end up?, but I can say this you are the people that genuinely put Home into the public consciousness. I couldn’t Imagine Home without you guys. Yeah, sure, maybe there were a few people out there that thought of you as a kind of gimmick. But you have proven everybody wrong on that score, you are no gimmick, but a genuine image of Home.

I have always loved meeting you and talking to you all and i wish you the best of luck on your successes.

I do want to say something about membership numbers. As Norse stated above, there are two kinds of user-created groups in Home — the social groups, and the media groups. Media groups may have in-Home events, but they are based primarily on the web. They host forums and chat rooms, and exist to provide a place for discussions.

Social groups may have a web presence, but they exist primarily on Home. They exist to provide real-time events and companionship among people using their Home avatars. The peers of the Homeling Collective are not media groups like AZ4 and YourPSHome, but social groups, such as Hamsters Freedom and the Grey Gamers. Among the world of Home-based social groups, the Homelings are enormous — probably the largest such group on Home, by a very wide margin.

That said, it’s difficult to state actual numbers. We point to the 600+ members of Fluidic Space and our 34 clubhouse MotherShips, because these are things we can quantify. We purge known ex-members from the website, so the web-site membership may be a fairly reasonable estimate of our actual current numbers. And, despite our urging, many Homelings don’t make an account on Fluidic Space, usually because they don’t have access to computers. Our MotherShip Commanders are requested to keep up-to-date logs of their MotherShip’s membership — some do, and some don’t. (This is one of the hazards of being an all-volunteer group.) So, I need to fall back on my training in biology to make a reasonable guess.

For some time, I have noticed that if I see two or three Homelings from my Friend List in a space, there will be ten or twelve Echo-clad beings there when I arrive. Similarly, during our mega-events, when we max out public spaces with 60+ Homelings, about ten of them will be on my Friend List. By this, I estimate that the number of currently-active Homelings is probably about six times the number of Homelings I have personally befriended. Since my FL is maxed, and most of my friend are Homelings, I think it’s reasonable to assume there are currently between 400 and 500 active Homelings.

As to how many beings have passed through the Collective since it started, this would have to be a very rough estimate. But, judging by the turn-over rate in my own MotherShip, and the number of names I see on older meeting minutes that represent ex-Homelings, it’s reasonable to assume that the full historical membership of the Collective runs to several thousand. If nothing else, this gives us huge name-recognition. I often meet people in Home who say, “I used to be one of you guys!”

Since I started researching this article, I have become a lot more aware of the trademark status of various groups and products. Among Home-based groups, PSTalent has gone the full distance, and now has the (R) symbol of a registered trademark. (Congratulations, DOD!) On the other hand, some major developers, such as LOOT, are still in the TM phase of the process. As I noted in the article, it takes a considerable time to get fully registered.

Funny how things jump out at you if you’ve been thinking about them. I was brought to a stop the other morning, when I realized that the B-29 “Enola Gay” (which I pass every weekday on the way to and from my office) has an enormous (R) symbol on its tail. “I know we don’t want people to copy it,” I remarked to my companion. “But did we really have to trademark it?” He laughed — it’s an old joke in the aircraft-historical field.

A note to Gideon — a trademark is not the same as a copyright. You can talk about us all you want. You just can’t say that you ARE us. But you knew that.

But onto the article, very interesting decision. I wish you the best of luck with your commerce.

I think a more “public” presence of the Homeling collective would make it so that they can be more than a group but subculture. Some would say steampunk is a narrower demographic than the general public (not by much though) and we continue to see releases for that subculture. Same goes for goth, sports, formal wear… the list just goes on. If a Homeling Klenting space was released would more than just Homelings buy it? For sure.

Without a doubt the Homelings have achieved far and beyond what no other group in Home has. Some-day I hope to be able to tell someone who is speaking of the Homelings that they started on PlayStation Home and their response will be one of surprise.

That said, the question of how many regular Home users there are is an interesting one. Second Life had 21M registered accounts, but only about 50,000 active users. While there are significant differences between Second Life and Home, I suspect the number of *consistently* active users in Home, worldwide, doesn’t exceed more than 200,000 to 300,000 (and I may be a bit on the high side).

Contrasting a group like the Homelings to a community media project is a bit of a mismatch, though. Media projects generally want to have broad audience appeal. Specialized groups such as the Homelings, the Hammies, etc. will by their very nature usually appeal to a narrower demographic. When contrasting the Homelings to other comparable groups, though, there’s no question that they’re a highly-organized group with an unusually large member base.

Is that important to a Home developer? Well, any group that constitutes a sufficiently large economic bloc is worth reaching out to when there’s a commodity that might appeal to them. When LOOT developed the Space Apartment, for instance, it was easy to see that this fit the Homeling aesthetic; if even twenty percent of the Collective purchased the estate, that represents $1200. To say nothing of the expanded visibility the estate would have received to people on their friend lists.

When contrasted against the development costs to build such an estate, that may not seem like much — but when stacked atop similar efforts elsewhere, the cumulative effect can make a difference.

Granted, we’re looking at this from a commercial standpoint. If we view it simply as an achievement unto itself, it’s pretty cool. Outside of media projects — which are an altogether different animal — I can’t think of any group in Home which is as large or well-organized as the Homelings. Particularly in light of the adversity they’ve faced in the past, it’s quite a success story — and, like you, I’m curious to see what they do next.

Using the stats of the aforementioned groups: AZ4 has 1600+ members, yourpshome.net has 4,700+ members, PSTalent has close to 1000 active members. Those are all quite a bit larger than the current Homeling collective. I wonder if it would be profitable for a 3rd party dev to support the Homelings. Of course, Homeling items would serve as a recruitment tool like none other.

I wonder how many current and regular users are in Home and what percentage are Homelings? If there are 60K regular users , that would make the collective 1% of the population. If the numbers are closer to the report from a couple years ago with 85% of 12 million users returning to Home and we have use the generous s.w.a.g. that about half of those actually return time and time again, we get about 5 million regular users. If THAT’S the case, Homelings are 0.012% of the Home population.

No matter what the stats are, what the Homelings have achieved is impressive and I can’t wait to see what they do in the future.