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The Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog) have a new beta project going on over at Sheep Labs that offers you an email notification as soon as the surname you’ve been waiting for in Second Life becomes available. [Via Clickable Culture and eSheep Christian Westbrook.] The service is useful because SL residents get to choose their own first names, but surnames must be chosen from a constantly changing list. New names are opened, remain open for a matter of weeks or months, and then are closed, making it possible to get a rough idea of when an avatar was “born” by looking at their name.

The Sheep now offer a service whereby you can watch the namespace to see if a name you’ve been waiting for becomes available. Innocuous enough, except that there’s been talk from various quarters lately of the fact that Linden Lab may change its naming conventions at some point in the not too distant future. As I blogged a month ago, one idea that’s reportedly been bandied about is to let users purchase unique last names that they would then be able to parcel out to new residents on a controlled basis. This may or may not go hand in hand with the idea that third parties may soon be able to sign up new members through their own sites. Either way, it’s an idea whose drawbacks may outweight its benefits.

Its benefits, in fact, seem rather limited. Specifically, it would allow those with enough money to purchase a name (i.e., corporations, since the bidding for names would soon drive the price out of reach of most individuals) to cordon off a namespace for their own use. This would be useful for identifying an individual as being associated with the namespace owner. It could also insure that people who were associated with each other in the real world would be able to flag that association in the virtual world, if they could afford the name. However, in both these cases, the SL grouping tools do the same job at lower cost, the difference being that you can turn group titles on and off at will, while surnames are always on.

The drawbacks of this hypothetical scheme would seem to outweight the benefits. First, it makes name camping much easier than in a system in which one user can only control one name. Second, it ties new users to the name owner on a permanent basis. The only way to change your name would be to scrap the identity you’d presumably worked very hard to build. It also explicitly favors organizations or groups over individuals, since many people would presumably be able to raise the money for a name more easily than one person.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out, and how much control LL chooses to give up over this issue. I still like the idea that we can all have whatever name we want, even if they’re not unique, and rely for differentiation on a unique key associated with each avatar but that’s not used as a name. That’s probably not going to come to pass anytime soon, but really there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.