Thanks for a wonderful post. I’ve checked out a few of those and have also become very enamored with RealXtend. Set up my own local grid in less than 15 minutes and started fiddling around – amazing. No one there, because it was just, well, me, but I might toss it up on our servers as well and invite some friends.

I’m going to link your comment from the home page, I think it’s worth a wider audience.

As far as the branding thing…well, long story and I’m too exhausted to talk about it anymore…gave too many column inches to it already. But the easiest way to follow what happened is to read the SL blog, and the bloggers’ blog…

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/24/introducing-the-second-life-brand-center/

http://secondlifebloggers.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2021825%3ATopic%3A5068

Basically I went pretty much through the grid-list on the opensimulator site, some very small standalone-single-region “grids” like “Metropolis”, or the French one (with no one but me in it at the time) and some larger ones, “large” in relation to opensimulator grids. Of course, compared to the sheer might of SL, at least in terms of busy avatars, all other grids are still very small.

There are two commercial ones, the biggest being

OpenLifeGrid ( -loginuri http://logingrid.net:8002 )
create Avatar here:
http://www.openlifegrid.com/Home/tabid/36/ctl/Register/Default.aspx?returnurl=/default.aspx

which is run by an and in Australia/n. This is a very sympathetic project and much has been done in terms of stability and functionality. Opensimulator-Grids are still a bit rough around the edges but nothing which would cause gray hair. It’s not a Windows 98 situation or anything that drastic. At the moment, it’s mostly just the pioneer builders busy being creative, but things are picking up and more and more Second Lifers are coming in to have a peek, not without derogatory remarks of course.

OpenLifeGrid only sells regions, membership is free, you can’t however hook up your standalone to their grid.

The second commercial one is called Central Grid ( -loginuri http://maingrid.centralgrid.com:8002 )
create account here:
http://members.centralgrid.com/membersignup.cfm
(avatar creation one step behind initial signup)

, these guys are Americans, and the owners of the grid are busy right now to build stuff, I’ve seen streets today and other interesting things. Don’t be scared away by the incredibly ugly, very NON-2.0 front webpage which will make you puke, and by the fact that the loginuri is hidden behind initial registration. It’s definitely worth checking out this one as well. What they offer seems to be a combination and/or of selling regions and also allowing you to hook up your standalone to their grid, but I haven’t looked deep enough into it what variation, that is mainly because I’m not a builder or region owner, I just wander around and bless unsuspecting strangers with my sweet personality.

The third one is an opensource Grid, aptly called
OSGrid ( -loginuri http://osgrid.org:8002 )
http://www.osgrid.org/
Avatar: http://www.osgrid.org/index.php?page=create

I checked it out yesterday and this is the one where I will most likely end up because here you can hook up your standalone server for no charge. (Donations are welcome, I presume, nevertheless.) I’m not sure how this one is connected directly to the sweet people of Opensimulator, there seems to be a connection but I haven’t figured out yet how and who. But I’ve already made a friend who offered me to just build stuff on his regions. Wow. I like to build houses, and I do have a newly discovered architectural talent, but being unemployed means I cannot afford to buy a region, not even in OpenLifeGrid which is considerably cheaper than SecondLife.

I do crash a lot in OSGrid, some regions run different simulators, some regions are just badly configured, but the price is right so I’m not complaining. OSGrid is more anarchistic than the others, please add the positive meaning of anarchistic here. Essentially this is hackers (again positive meaning please), freaks (..), fiddlers and aspiring techies throwing their home-brewn standalone server-regions into the grid. Very eclectic and I really hope they will work out the stability issues, which of course is more difficult inside a sack of cats.

To do justice to the small ones, please allow me to mention both Metropolis, a single region “grid” intended for speakers of German, but to be looked into by everyone, and a French Grid with some pretty interesting terraforming.

Their info you can, as the others, find lower on the Gridlist from the opensimulator project right about here:
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/OpenSim:Grids

To make gridhopping easy, I’m going to advise something I would normally not, which is to just use the same password and avatar name for all the other grids, not necessarily your SL one though. This way you can create shortcuts on your desktop and mark the “remember password” in your SL client. This way, going into a different grid becomes like going to a different webpage, all that differs is the loginuri.

Users of Linux such as myself and who are too lazy to create launchers, can basically just keep a textfile with the different loginuris and just open a console and copypaste the command for the client, with the route of which folder the client lives and the loginuri.

For the OS Grid it would look like this:

/home/lucy/slclient/./secondlife -loginuri http://osgrid.org:8002

“lucy” would be replaced by the name you are using. Your path to which folder you’ve saved the Second Life client of course may differ from mine…

Once you’ve figured out which grids you plan to visit regularly, you can then go ahead and create launchers on the desktop.

If you’re using a bizarr operating system like Microsoft Windows, you’d just copypaste your launcher for SL and change the loginuri in the new launcher.

(second sending, delete this if first did arrive)

So eventually I did become increasingly unhappy with the selected family name, being reminded of it every time I logged in. I sort of became fixated on that, and it started to seriously dampen my enthusiasm whenever I was inworld, I could not fully let my personality stream into the avatar who has a name that was only semi-chosen by me.

Another thing I became increasingly anal about was the self title “senator” by the Lindens. Hum. Senators are usually voted into office, but the Lindens are effectually feudalistic lords. I think calling themselves Emperor or Duke or King would have been even more apt, since that would have been so over the top that it could have been sold as satire. But “senator” hypnotizes people into adding democratic symbols mentally when really SL is anything but a democracy. For example, I ran into a guy who had a region and a house on the beach, only to wake up next day, log in, and discover that the Lindens had piled another sim right in front, so where his oceanview used to be, was now a grassy hill. This is someone who bought that region. His only option was to adapt…

Then I discovered other Grids where I could, as it should be, decide my own name and I have been in these Grids since. It’s lonely at times, yes, but choosing my own name is worth that.

Besides, I’m just too untech to fiddle with settings until my cheap Nvidia card and Celeron CPU would generate an acceptable SL experience. It’s so hacked off and jumpy, if I want to make a left turn I end up 300 degree off track. I don’t have that problem in other Grids.

Ooops, I guess I snapped into ranting mode here.

Today I have added a couple alternative registration portals to the catalog. I believe this completes the list of available last names, unless there are other registration portals like CSI:NY or GossipGirl I don’t know about. These portals have exclusive last names. Never fear! my new feature indexes those last names too! More last names are available now than there ever have been… it is a shocking number: 1,809 , all told.