Voice Your Opinion on SecondLife Residents

We wrote about the innovative rating website RatePoint when it was released back in January. But now that the website has been working they are going to announce a major new release: next Monday they are releasing RatePoint for SecondLife. And given the popularity of SecondLife I am positive it is an absolutely wise move for them.

Basically it is a social rating service to rate SecondLife residence. Once residents start rating, connections will be made with other residents with similar voting patterns - here they are named dittos and are used to more accurately predict what SecondLife resident will like or dislike.

Here is what RatePoint CEO Chris Bailey says about their choice of SecondLife as the first step:

SL is an environment that can immediately take advantage of this platform and it is something that the SL community really needs. We are planning other platforms in the future, and they might not be gaming environments: products and services sites, auction sites, listing services, etc… Anywhere that we can offer much more focused data for the user to make a better decision.

Today I have had a chance to peep at what it would look and work like. And you know what? It's actually impressive. It is rather simple: you will need to go to a special RatePoint stand at SL, touch the keyboard and keep a special garment you will be given. After that you will have two new things in your inventory to wear: the public view and the private view of RatePoint for SecondLife. The public view is the 5 star image that hovers over the user's head. This is something that even non RatePoint users can see and shows the aggregate rating of the SL resident. Anyone can click on it and see the Gabs (comments) that were made about this resident as well. The private view shows ratings for the first 4 people within a 7 meter radius around the resident hovering above your head. So when you want to rate someone around you can simply click on the stars for this resident. It will let you rate the user and even add your personal comment for the user (though there are three default options for comments). In general, it is all very intuitive and you really do not need to think twice to get such a garment for yourself as soon as it is available.

I imagine it will be nice wandering around SecondLife proudly showing all other residents (even those who do not even know RatePoint exists) the five stars over your head and some nice comments about your avatar. So if you don't want to miss this release, go to http://secondlife.ratepoint.com/ and register to be notified when the service is available early next week.