Adz Childs Counts Second Life Name Lengths
Greetings, my 339 SL brothers and sisters! Ever since the Lindens made "Au" a selectable Second Life surname in 2006, I've wondered just how many other Residents chose it. (Especially since I happen to have it in both worlds.)
Thanks to Adz Childs, now I do.
Adz uses an open source bot to collect and compile existing Resident names, a process I wrote about last January, and the aggregate data often suggests interesting trends. (At the time, for example, Allen and Beck were among the most popular surnames.) On his blog Artificial Boy, he's recently been publishing data on the length of names, first and last. Among his latest is a list of shortest surnames by usage, which is how I know there are now 340 total Aus in Second Life. But that's far from the most popular two-letter surname.
"Oh" remains the most popular two letter name, currently with 97,286, and as of last January, and 2nd most popular of all, between Allen and Beck. By contrast, the most popular last names by length are six letters-- 2,847,973 Residents have those.
Of course, surnames in Second Life are chosen from the Lindens' database, and are discontinued after a time. Curious for other reasons are the first names Residents willingly choose for themselves. And thanks to Adz, we now that 2,359 of you chose first names fifteen letters or more in length. I'm flummoxed there-- are there that any common first names that long, or are most of those AOL-ish gobblygook?
...and I thought mine was a bit on the long side, in retrospect.
Posted by: Athanasius Skytower | Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 01:48 PM
Regarding your flumoxedness about very long names:
http://adz.secondlifekid.com/2008/07/31/second-lifes-longest-avatar-names/
Hope this helps.
Posted by: Adz Childs | Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 05:30 AM
OMFG, thanks!
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 10:34 AM
#3 isn't Aeon rather than Beck? w-hat thinks it is.
Posted by: Seth Mandelbrot | Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 03:23 PM
Everyone forgets GossipGirl.
Allen 153,220
GossipGirl 133,905
Oh 97,285
Beck 95,932
Aeon 88,873
http://slnamewatch.com/index.php?action=list_records&status_filter=all&sort_order=DESC&order_by=usage_count
w-hat counts are incomplete.
Posted by: Adz Childs | Friday, August 01, 2008 at 07:44 PM
hmm.....
Posted by: Miley Cyrus | Saturday, August 23, 2008 at 06:08 AM