You can't compare which is better by analysis of peak users - one system might have more regular users spread out over time. You should find another metric for comparison.

Does MS include Silver membership to the Live number, because that then includes everyone signed up for free too. Also, do MS count all the Windows Live accounts which are effectively Silver membership? If so then that 23 million is not that impressive. What would be interesting would be the number of Silver vs Gold accounts.

Also, PSN includes PSP accounts as well.

pointless comparison imo.

live has better comms features and thats about it, but there is a charge for that usage, so id say even stevens as psn is free.

bottom line is you can boot up a game and play online on psn as you can do on live, i cant see why xbox fans cant accept that.

With PSP and PS3 plus free nature of PSN it's very likely to have more people signed up vs Live, then of course on Live it's only really the smaller number of Gold subscribers who really get all the social stuff anyway.

I think Live still gives the slightly better service overall, but it's pretty close now and certainly neither is leaps and bounds ahead anymore.

Once Live spreads out over Zune, etc. the situation may change, but if you add PSP/PS3 install base you can see the advantage from a pure users point of view PSN has.

I'm sure that the quoted 23 million includes silver memberships. Gold subscribers is probably closer to the facinity of 12 million. Microsoft has also said in the past that their numbers are only 'active' memberships, whereas Sony includes memberships for the PSN website.

Still ~600 million in steadily increasing revenue + games on demand + avatar marketplace + zune movies etc = a motza.

pSn

Its the little things that everyone forgets to recognize with Live that make it the superior service. Here is a good example of one:
My friend had a launch 360, he decided to sell it on Ebay because he wanted to pick up one of the new elites. What he thought, and what I thought as well, was that all his saved games and progress would be lost once he sold his old 360 with the hard drive. When he plugged his Elite in and signed in on his gamertag not only did it recognize his achievement score (which I knew would happen) but it recognized what level, titles, emblems, weapons, etc he had in MW2. No need to transfer anything from his old HD. Everything is linked to your gamertag and Live does an amazing job of doing this. I also know he will be able to redownload all his previously downloaded and paid for arcade games at no cost (since its linked to his gamertag).
Live is definately the better service.

Well I've played cod mw2 on both systems quite often and xbox has usually at least 2x the amount of players. Psn has at the most around 500k people while xbox at the most I've seen around 1.2 million.

Your analysis is flawed in that you're looking at a single game that has sold about twice as much on 360 as it has on PS3. The numbers are bound to be in favor of 360 in this case. We really need numbers for all games at all times.

At it's core there both pretty much the same. with minor cosmetic differences.