GOOGLE LIVELY - Second Lifers crammed themselves into the beta release of Lively earlier this week to check out the competition. Unfortunately for some, they found they couldn't choose the name they would have chosen, prompting some to ask, "Is a Rose really a Rose without her real name?"

"I logged in within hours of it going live, and every reasonable variation of “Benjamin Duranske” (BenjaminDuraske, Bduranske, Benjamin.Duranske, B.Duranske, etc.) was taken as an account name. “Benjamin Duranske” is uniquely my name, as far as I know, and I have never been unable to get pretty much whatever variation I want as an account name when I sign up someplace," Benjamin Duranske commented on the Virtually Blind blog.

"Something fishy is definitely going on, as I’ve heard that quite a few others who write sites, books, etc. on virtual worlds had the same thing happen — I wonder if it was an inside job or just a really fast squatter. I ended up with duranske.benjamin, which is fine, and since it doesn’t really matter that much (you can change your visible screen name to anything you want regardless of your account name) whoever took my name can have it until they forget the passwords.

Presumably, though, that’s where the TOS against “impersonation” could come into play (e.g. somebody logs on and causes a drama storm under my name)… or at least I hope that’s where it comes into play," he concluded.

Other users noted the same glitch in the system on the Second Life Universe forums thread titled, "Google's Second Life Killer?" Several forum regulars from SLU were unable to get their virtual name of choice. 

According to Anya Ristow, "Regarding naming...When you create a Lively account I think you're actually creating a google account, and there are millions of those already for gmail and whatnot. When I joined it by default wanted to sign me up as my already-logged-in google account.

Right-click your avatar, select the profile tab, change your avatar name. It's persistent across logins. Both names seem to show in contact lists, so you should still choose your account name carefully.

And there's no checking for duplicates of the name you put on your avatar, but that's okay. My RL name is dirt common. The account ID is what marks you as not-THAT-Anshe-Chung. You can get the account ID from any avatar's profile. So, account ID is the "real name" and avatar name is what you choose to call yourself. Pretty neat, actually," she said.