What is this new "Join a Community" Crap?

I started SLNameWatch after witnessing a 6 month dry spell. It hasn't been that bad since.
TY VVVM for the tip about Language Lab. I poked around for regapi's yesterday (that's why i have all this info) but i didn't find any with exclusive names. I will check that out right away and add them if what you say is true.
... hmmm i hope they have a public portal that doesn't require you to subscribe to another service. If not, then I can't really index that...

WEB-704 It is time to release new last names
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-704

I could have been more polite, in my wording. I have a problem with mornings. Sorry for the snarky, presumptive wording, LL.

Enjoy.

Some of the alternative OI's are very good, I was exploring the map and found a Brazillian OI group NE somewhere there were 6 OI sims and ech had 3 staff welcoming people and helping them.

I wonder how many people are too naive to realise that TV stations are corporate links.............

Corporate or otherwise, if there's a better OI experience to be had through an alternative to the standard (broken) SL OI, it's a good thing for the users who otherwise arrive fairly unprepared on the mainland. Particularly in the case of new non-English-speakers (a much larger percentage of SL than I think a lot realize), this is a good thing.

Let's face it, community is why a lot of people stay on SL. How many of us stayed because we made friends here? Having ready-made friends of similar interests who come through a common OI experience together is likely to boost the really low retention rate. So i think we'll see "communities" come to the fore more and more for new users. It makes sense.

It would do, except that many of the "communities" offered aren't really communities. The most notorious bad example was the Ben and Jerry's "community", which sent you to a greatly simplified OI and then linked directly to the Ben and Jerry's sim, where you could walk around a model of their ice cream factory learning how Ben and Jerry's made ice cream, and play a very simple "game" (which involved - and, I swear, I'm not joking - picking up cowpats and loading them into the ice cream machine!)

There isn't really any sense of community there (a group of people who like ice cream IRL, perhaps?) and moreover, people were getting stranded because although the OI mentioned being able to use Search to teleport out, it didn't give anyone any clues as to what to search for, or link to a standard WA or anything like that.

Moreover.. I think most of the genuine communities on SL are probably too big to have a single individual or group represent them via an OI without causing internal conflict.. but that's only a theory. Add to that the problem that you have to pay for the OI (a full island, and since it's an OI, you can't have any commercial content there) and it's kinda tricky for actual communities to meet the requirements.

An OI can be built on a OpenSpace sim. And commercial content is certainly allowed. Some of the OIs are island-wide commercials. Others (like Orientation Station) have commercial content from sponsors.

I'm almost sure (and am surprised nobody mentioned this) that somehow getting your OI especially one listed on the signup page involves paying LL a lot of money and selling your first born child to them.

Linden Lab isn't in a position to charge a lot of money.

Here's the scenario:

Linden Lab: Paying us for a link on the "Join a Community" page is a great way to funnel new residents to your company and increase your profits!

Corporate Sponsor: That sounds great in theory. Now, just as a formality before I drop a lot of money, I am sure you can provide data that shows how profitable these "Join a Community" links have been for your other customers.

Linden Lab: Ummm...

It is news if you don't visit the SecondLife site every day, so, thanks for the link. I would never have found that in a search. (Too bad LL doesn't send us information, instead of hoping we'll visit the web site. I'd sign up for a little email once a month. Or was there a blog posting about a signup sheet for the email and I missed that too?) I now understand what they tried to do. Again, if they had been clearer in the wording on that registration page I would have understood that the communities were really alternate orientation experiences. That's not what it says.

The fact that they "invited" certain businesses like Ms. Chung's is not my business unless I have a competing real estate business. Then this smacks of collusion to me, but then I don't know the legalities of offering something to one company and not another, so don't hang me out to dry for using that word, too. Maybe they got around it by calling it "an experiment." If AC becomes unhappy and bolts, LL is up a virtual creek, so I understand the cowtowing to her in particular.

Too bad they didn't invite non-profits to offer OIs. Maybe after the experiment is complete they will. The blog said it would be a 5-6 week experiment, so we'll see.

I understand Isabelle. The thing is, she and a few others have a host of sims that could very well make up a small mainland continent. In some ways it is a community. In others, it's not. But if it does a better job at orienting new players into the game, where they are more than free to make their own choices thereafter, then good on them!

ETA: LL has an RSS feed and you can have the blogs delivered to you using a service that delivers news to you, or a news reading client.