Kotaku
One of the little weird things I noticed about Second Life when I played it for a few weeks last month was that while you could pick your first name, you had to select your last from a list of pre-defined ones.
It was really weird, I couldn't have figured out why... until now.
Second Life announced today that they will start charging for custom last names. The feature will likely cost $100 up front and $50 a year. The new "feature" hits the end of this year.
The company's business development team decided to create a vanity name feature in part to help legitimize the growing number of executives, political candidates and other famous people who stage rallies and give stump speeches in the virtual world.With the new feature, Linden Research will try to verify that avatars with high-profile names belong to same-named owners. For now, it's nearly impossible to determine the offline identity behind any avatar.
Sounds like Second Life found another way to pump money out of their user base.
`Second Life' to charge for names [Yahoo! News]
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