Finding the right virtual world is not easy. If you’re not familiar with one, there’s nothing you can compare it to. Also, there are many many factors to take into consideration, most of which depend on your personal intentions and interests: How is the service, how well does it perform, what features does it offer, how user-friendly is it, how good are the graphics? How is the community, how easy is it to make contact, how many people are in the service, how well is it managed? How is the company, is it financially stable, how is customer service, how expensive are the services, how innovative is their development? I already brushed the surface on several virtual worlds when There.com closed. Back then, my conclusion is (and still stands) that no single closed service will ever be able to be the foundation of the 3D-web. The only real alternative was Open Simulator.

OpenSim is special in the way that it is no service, but an open sourced platform which anyone can build their own services on. This leads to a great number of different implementations of the software, which resulted in a lot of public grids. All of them are hosting their own user base, and are usually not interconnected. Some of them could be your home. In order to give an overview on the existing grids, I collected basic information on a Grid List, and am starting to give a portrait of several grids. However, the choice is still up to you.

Some questions you might want to as yourself are: Will this grid still be in service tomorrow? There have been grid projects in the past that started very promising and with a lot of people signing up, only to disappear shortly thereafter. To sustain the credibility of the operator, at least some complete real-life identity informations about them would be useful. There is a surprising number of grids that do not even provide an email-adress for contact, leave alone information about the people running the site. (For the grid list, I included only those grids that at least provided an email contact.) Also, are the services as you imagined them? That’s hard to judge from the outside, so if you found a grid you like, log in and get around for a while before you start spending money on something. Is it laggy? Is it mainly empty? Do they provide you with some basic equipment, or are there offers to customize your avatar? All of these might be things you’d miss if you didn’t check them beforehand.

If your main incentive is to meet other people, take a look at the user base of the grid, and look for optional hypergrid support. Many grids are very small, and even on the largest of them the number of people online at a given time is rarely in the three digits. You will spend a lot of time going through empty regions unless you can find some social centers or connect to other grids occasionally. Similar questions arise when you want to make a business out of selling in-world creations. Without a large userbase, there won’t be many customers. Additionally, if a grid doesn’t offer a currency system or some other solution, you simply will not be able to sell (or buy) anything.

Can you do what you had in mind doing? Take a look at the terms of service, or a similar statement. Are you too young to join? Do they prohibit adult content? Will they allow you to connect your own region to their service? There are some questions that should be cleared up front.

Language barriers might be important for some. Several grids are language oriented, and chances are, you will meet people of that nationality or set of languages on the grid more than any others. That’s good if you only speak that one language and want to meet other people who can understand you.

I hope, the upcoming grid portaits may serve as a guidance for some. You should keep in mind that it is, still, your choice. Also, you don’t have to join any grid, if you don’t want to, and opt for having your own OpenSim installation. That’s the good thing about it: It is versatile enough to be able to meet anyone’s needs.