The old, unused ratings section in the Second Life profiles will disappear with version 1.15.0, but rating services have rushed in to provide SL residents with more rating options. Want to rate your annoying neighbor or compliment that awesome builder you just met? RatePoint , Real Reputations , and TrustNet are ready to help. Found the best dance place in SL or just looking for somewhere quiet to sit and meditate? SLicr and SLoog will help you get there and tell others whether the trip was worth it or not.

The old rating feature in SL is gone, but the need to find and rate places and rate people grows in importance as new people join the SL community and new places are created to meet the needs of the masses. New users report that finding their way around is one of their biggest concerns, and experienced users say the original rating function is now ineffective.

Enter SLicr and SLoog: two systems developed to meet the search and rating needs of both old and new users. SLicr and SLoog both depend on their users to voluntarily rate places, adding to their respective databases and increasing their usefulness to all users over time. However, there are some differences.

For example, Atomo Hosho describes SLoog as “…a bookmarking system, [where] users keep track of their favorite places by attaching tags to them. Rating is indirectly provided, since it is computed based on the number of different people who tagged that place, parcel and region name, etc...”

SLoog’s Web site is well laid out, easy to use and makes using their system fairly straight forward even for beginners. SLoog’s creators use a tagging system to compile ratings: “It is totally transparent, every time a place is tagged it can be then [be] queried in our site and via the SLoog HUD. In order to allow users some privacy, bookmarks can be saved privately so that they don't get listed on their profile page. However, these private bookmarks do get listed on the rest of the site so they're available for everyone else.”

Vitis Obviate