One of my readers asked about where I got the list of top 50 regions in Second Life™. Fortunately they included a link to what they were asking about, because I was like, OMG! I did that? Well, as the picture shows I got the list from Hamlet over at New World Notes. I didn’t do it.
SL Forum Post
Here is Hamlet’s latest list: Top 50 Popular Second Life Sims. This is from August 2012. Hamlet gets it from Metaverse Business.
I was wondering if the list is available online. It does not seem to be. I suspect it is part of a commercial subscription service they may offer.
There is the Lab’s web page with popular SL regions: Popular Places. This is actually just a category in the Second Life Destination Guide. The Lab provides the following information in the Destination Guide’s FAQ.
Popular Places features venues frequently populated with real people, communities and conversations. This list is periodically refreshed but does not reflect real-time traffic and activity, nor does it aim to reflect the most popular places in Second Life. Every effort is made to include venues that adhere to Linden Lab’s policies on traffic bots and camping.
Another source of what is popular is: Second Life Popular Places. I have no idea who runs the site or how the stats are collected.
Another way to find popular places is to use Second Life Search. Open it, select PLACES, and type in popular places. The results make no sense to me. Let me know if you figure out how they decide what is popular.
SL Search for Popular Places
Traffic is supposed to be a measure of popularity. But, last August there were problems with the Traffic Measuring in SL. See: Second Life Traffic Numbers.
Last but not least is the What’s Hot Now section of the in-world destination guide. There is a web version of this, but it has problems depending on whether your cookies are right and it can find your login credentials.
The What’s Hot Now (WHN) guide can be confusing. To understand it, notice that you seldom see an region with more than 25 people. Some time ago that was not the case. A region with 40 people would show. But, often that meant the region was full. New users had no idea why they could not TP into the region. So, now regions with more than 25 people in them drop out of WHN.
In reality this is more of a Sort of What’s Hot Now.
I think the “Second Life Popular Places” website gets its data from vote machines at venues, similar in appearance and behaviour to the ones the LL used to provide.
You are right, Handy: is is based on the vote boxes. And it isn’t very reliable, as many sims pay some L$ per vote, in order to raise their ranks.
“Let me know if you figure out how they decide what is popular.”
You can get good results by selecting ‘Places’ and then type in ‘land’. Finally select ‘Traffic: High to Low’ in the drop-down menu. Right now the Hair Fair is listed at the top. 🙂
Example link for SL web search
Another (but not very comfortable) way to search for popular places is the SL Overlay Map from Katharine Berry. Quite old, but still working. Open the link and select ‘Popularity’ in the overlay drop-down menu. All regions in red color have high traffic.
SL Map Overlays
Thanks Maddy.