Maybe a million

According to the numbers, SL hit a million signups between 2006-10-18T16:00UTC and 2006-10-18T23:07UTC.

Umm. That's 38,402 signups in seven hours (or 5,486 signups per hour, up from the last two week's 400 signups per hour). Something's feeling a little implausible there.

Either we have the largest rush of new residents ever (which could be explained by the psychology of the magic million) or something's cockeyed with the numbers, or maybe there's some media event that's caught everyone's attention. If it's the former, we can hardly expect this rate of growth to slow down any time soon.

UPDATE:
Okay, there was coverage on the front page of Yahoo. So, a 24 hour period gave us an unprecedented 46,344 new signups.

Not unnaturally, this has rather biased the inworld balance of population. Several residents I spoke to said that I was the first person they'd seen who had not signed up fresh today.

EXTRA UPDATE:
That's more signups yesterday than we had total population at approximately this time last year. There were 42,000 when I joined SL 14 months ago.