Today I started a quest finding out where our Second Life avatars can meet, if not in-world. There seem to be a lot of possibilities, especially if I count the services that were originally meant for first life people, but who are now also used by SL avatars. Each of them have their pro’s and there con’s, although some have a lot more con’s then pro’s.

If there are any other Second Life oriented Networking Sites that you know of and I don’t: pretty please, let me know. I’ll try to keep this overview up to date.

Make your pick:

Second Life Profiles: slprofiles.com (my profile there)

Second Life Profile titles itself ‘The fastest growing second life community’ and resembles MySpace a lot. What is most unique to this social networking site, is that it gives you a lot of options as it comes to sharing your first life information too. Not something I’m willing to do, but some of my fellow avatars seem very willing at that.

SLProfiles has expanded functionality as it comes to Second Life snapshots and First Life photographs and some blogging options too. For adding friends, commenting on profiles and the abilities to pimp your profile, they copycatted MySpace. That’s not really a drawback, as most people are used to the MySpace interface, so SLProfiles is easy to use for them.

When signing up, SLProfiles tells me I can later on add multiple Second Life accounts to my profile. Until now I haven’t found out how to do that. Not that I have multiple accounts, but for some this could be handy. As I don’t want to post stupid questions in their forums, I decided to read their FAQ, only to find that they don’t have any. Hmmm. Serious drawback!

• (-) Limited search functionality. (Users / 1sth Life Name / 2nd Life Name)
• (+) The ability to mail your snapshots directly to SLprofiles.
• (+) Blog functionality.
• (+) Event calendar where events can be added by the users.
• (+) The ability to rate user’s 1st and 2nd life pictures.
• (+) Second Life jobs with job offers.
• (+) Pimp your profile.
• (+) The Mini Profile option: you profile and profile pictures are automatically (and decently!) resized to fit the Second Life browser.
• (+) SL Gadget v1.9 that connects you to your SLprofiles account even if you are in-world. (The bookmark function is handy too.)
• (+) Unlimited(?) amount of photographs you can upload and the shots you upload are divided into 1st life/2th life. En plus you can create separate photo albums.
• (-) No FAQ file to be found!!! (When googling SLprofiles.com I only found a FAQ specifically about the usage of their forums.)

No user statistics to be found, but I am able to see all member profiles in search. That gives me 42 pages with 30 profiles/page, which makes 1260 members. If we assume you should have changed your profile at least once in the last 2 months to be counted as an active member, 1080 of them are active members.

Second Life Network - A place for AVies! : SecondLifeNetwork.com (my profile there)

SecondLifeNetwork.com is also an obvious MySpace clone, but with some great extra features. The most important one is that you need to activate your account by clicking an in-world box, so there’s no possibility to falsely claim someone else’s avatar.

There seems to be a lot to do around dating on this site. There are many options to be chosen from as it comes to your dating status: Do me now!, Confused, Hurt, Horny and ready, Desperate, Divorced, In love, … As I wasn’t sure if they mean my 1st or 2nd life dating status, I decided to go with ‘Unfaitful’. Also in the search functions, we see all the search options we normally see on first life dating sites: Sex, Dating Status, Smoke, Drink, Location, Occupation, Religion, State, ZipCode, City and keywords. So if your 2nd life avatar hasn’t found the love of it’s life yet, and you have trouble meeting that right one in-world, maybe secondlifenetwork.com isn’t a bad place to start looking. ;)

Again I search for a FAQ or something that tells me more about the possibilities on this second life social networking site, but - just as with SLProfiles.com - I can’t find any. Pressing ‘Help’ only brings up an overview of tags you can use on the site. This is getting frustrating.

My account type says ’standard’, but checking the FAQ for what the other options are, is no option. :d

• (-) No FAQ!
• (+) Good profile search functionality.
• (+) You need to register your avatar with secondlifenetworks.com in-world.
• (+) Picture functionality, although less then SLProfiles.com. Unlimited picture space, but max. 300kb and only accepts .jpg and .gif files. (Does allow converting to .bmp.)
• (+) Blog functionality
• (+) Pimp your profile.
• (+) Picture rating and battle system. Especially the battle system is original.
• (-) No ability to mail snapshots directly to secondlifenetworks.com
• (+) Event calendar.

Members: 133 pages with 12 members/page makes 1596 members.
Active members: I shall look into that later, the site’s a bit slow at the moment.

Flickr : flickr.com (my account there)

Most people that frequent the world wide web already know about Flickr. It’s a photo sharing site that allows you to easily share pictures with friends, groups and makes it easy to comment upon them. Now more and more Secondlivers start to use Flickr’s services too. Some of them with a paid for account, a whole lot of others are using a free account. The drawbacks of a free account are that only the latest 200 pictures you have posted are visible to others and that you have a monthly upload limit.

Lately Flickr is tagging all Second Life residents’ accounts (be it a paid or free account) as NIPSA (Not In Public Site Areas) because they look at Second Life snapshots as just ordinary screenshots. The drawbacks of that are that they don’t show up in group pools, in tag-search or on secondlife.com’s media page.

In an email CodeBastard RedGrave tells me she thinks it’s time someone starts a SecondLife Flickr clone, but I’d rather see Flickr looking at our avatars as real people too (especially if we pay for the account!) and starting to accept our snapshots as real photographs, or Flickr giving us our own SecondLife subdivision. They should realize that most of us spend real world money converted to Linden Dollars in-world, so we have credit cards and are willing to pay 25USD/year for a decent snapshot photo hosting service.

Despite this handicap, a steady Second Life community is developing on Flickr and groups like SecondLife, SecondLife [Mature] and Flickrites of Second Life are building a steady base of active members. I assume there must be a TeenGrid group too.

You can upload your snapshots directly from Second Life to your Flickr account by using the ’send a snapshot’ option. That and they have an impressive detailed FAQ. ;)

• (-) The focus is mainly on photographs, not on the person behind the photograph. (Which figures, as they are a photo hosting site after all. ;))
• (-) Limited profile editing options
• (-) Second Life snapshots are regarded ‘NIPSA’
• (+) Great photo functionality
• (+) Works well together with Wordpress and other blogging CMS and blogging services.
• (+) It’s possible to mail snapshots directly to you Flickr account.
• (-) Limited search function as it comes to persons.
• (+) Advanced search function for photographs using the photograph’s tags. (If you ignore the NIPSA-idiocy.)
• (——————————————) NIPSA

Numbers for the Second Life group:
Members: 1068
Total photographs: 16916
Total non-NIPSA-tagged photographs: 6724

Despite the stupid-NIPSA rules, I think Flickr has great things to offer to Secondlivers. You can for instance use a group to collect all the party pictures of a club (let’s call it the Paradise Lost) in one pool, despite which member took it. All the members just need to send their pictures to that pool. Example given: group Paradise Lost Club on Flickr. ;)

Second Life Universe / Snapzilla : SLUnivers.com/pics/ (my profile there)

Snapzilla is trying to be the Second Life’s Flickr. They are doing a good job at that, but not a great. They must realize that as they allow you to automatically send your snapshots to Flickr too, if you mail them to Snapzilla. But Snapzilla is still in beta faze - for how long is nowhere stated - so we’ll wait and see. It has some good potential, although I miss Flickr’s good looking and intuitive user interface, awesome group functionality and tagging system.

• (+) Just must send a snapshot from in-world to snapzilla to activate your account.
• (+) Mail snapshots directly to your Snapzilla and Flickr account using ’send a postcard’.
• (+/-) Pictures automatically become linked to the SIM they were taking in.
• …

A more decent review will follow when they realize that I did send that snapshot and that they don’t need to refer me to unlinked.aspx anymore. ;)

Just found out that they don’t allow you to upload snapshots that you saved to your hard drive first. Which makes me qualify them as non-interesting.

Snapzilla’s numbers:
Members: 2565 (1312 registered/linked)
Snapshots: 135 200

MySpace.com : MySpace.com (my profile there)

This is probably the most famous and most used first life social networking site. I don’t like it for first life, neither do I like it for Second Life. All the features it has - blogging, pimping your profile, adding photographs, adding video, etc. - won’t help me get over the fact that I have about 20 annoying ‘my band has a myspace profile and will now soon be rich and famous’ friend requests each day. Let alone the over-pimped profiles some have, the popularity contests ‘lookie, I have more friends then you do’, the stupid comments just to comment, etc.

Although I have an account of my own there, I strongly advise against using MySpace.com

Numbers: No way to find out which users are Second Life avatars and which users aren’t.

CherryTAP : CherryTAP.com

Someone suggested this, as it has a lot of users too. Well, beside that it’s just like MySpace but worse, they succeeded at tagging my profile photograph NSFW. So f*ck you, CherryTAP!

Local Second Life Fora/Forums

Mostly found at www dot SLforum dot ‘country extension’.

Examples: SLforum.be, SLforum.nl, SLforum.de, …

I don’t know who’s responsible for those local communities, but I can’t find any adds, so I assume it’s either a local Second Life adept, or local Linden folks. Each country/community differs in looks, functionality, … .

I think it can be interesting if you life in a country that has a thriving Second Life community. I shall be wise and not comment upon mine. :d

Tags: flickr, links, web resources

• Second Life web resources for June 15th 2007 through June 19th 2007
• Second Life web resources for June 14th 2007
• Second Life web resources for June 12th 2007