I went over the the Metaverse Meetup last night that was really, really, rocking!  I tried to take some pictures but hardly anything came out - I'm sure others will be posting pictures and I'll include links to them in a later post.

However, I do want to say a couple of things about yesterday - one that I'll be working on a internal Second Life Project providing Metrics at IBM and also met and some wonderful people last night as well as seeing some pretty amazing stuff at the Meetup.  I just got done emailing all the people I'm mentioning here - or I hope I have got most of them as I had several conversations last night.

CombinedStory - Boris Kizelshteyn - I met Boris at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference earlier this week while talking with Ancient Shriner - Jared Freedman.  Boris is really nice guy and seemed to know a lot about the SL Community and it's really rich.  His company, CombinedStory, is actually right around the corner from where I work at IBM.  We were discussing getting me some SL immersion training and I learnt a lot from talking with him.

I also spoke with Melody Chamlee, of Ziff Davis who was really someone I can speak with - some one of like mind - I rarely meet someone who I am that tuned in with.  Hopefully Melody will get back to me with some questions for input she can use on some of her Ziff Davis articles.   I think Melody was also involved in one of the 4 projects we briefly looked at last night - www.DearIDea.net - I'll go into that in another post.

I ran into Nathanial Freitas last night again - he's the guy responsible for me being at Virtual Worlds 2007 in the first place! - had I not spoken to him at the Etsy party last week, I'd never know to ask for the Press Pass that allowed me to meet all the rest and know about all of this wonderful stuff - including the Metaverse Meetup that happened last night.

Funny thing, I did not immediately associate him with the party last week and feel really bad that he had to come up and introduce himself to me - I've met so many people lately sometimes it gets blurred - but as soon as he mentioned the Etsy party, I remembered, and we had corresponded last week.

I'll do a post or two about www.Cruxy.com, Nathanial's company very soon; we're setting up to meet in Park Slope soon where I'll interview him about www.Cruxy.com.   I will say that one thing people don't know about Cruxy.com is that it's hosted entirely on Amazon Web Services and Nathanial does not have to pay for any kind of hardware - I had no idea Amazon had gone so far into Web Services! I turns out Amazon did what HP and Sun talked about, years back.   But I'll leave that all for another post.  Meanwhile, check out www.Cruxy.com - especially if your a musician or artist (and I'll cover that in my art blog, www.artnewyorkcity.com ).

Also had a nice conversation with Jean-Ann Mills, an Events Producer for Electric Sheep Company in Second Life.  She said that planning an event in SL is just as involved as it is in real life except she does not have to worry about the food!  I told her….that's not true… Avatars need to eat too - just like the Pharaoh's of old - who went to the next life with all the most cherished objects of their physical life on Earth, including food. 

I also asked Jean-Ann to try to facilitate a meeting with Electric Sheep Company and me (she's an event planner - so maybe she can also help setup this "event") -so I can see their metrics backend. 

I need to see it before I can write about it (that is .. if they want me to write about it).  I had talked to Jerry Paffendorf and Sibley Verbeck over the last two or three days but nothing really concrete about a discussion over metrics - and I'm a Web Analyst - so I need to see what they're doing - especially now.

Ran into John K. Bates again, from www.EntropiaUniverse.com and we spoke again briefly last night - it was great to see the support the Virtual World Community has for all it's members.  I think John did a pretty good job of showing why someone would want to go into Entropia instead of, or in addition to Second Life.

Briefly spoke to Adam Broitman of Morpheus Media - his company sounds like the place to go if you want to get a basic implementation in Second Life and don't have a ton of money to spend.  I'm going to try to plug that service to some of my SEO clients, like www.Mascord.com that really should consider SL but haven't been willing to take the plunge.  Most of the Architects I've dealt with are kind of the conservative sort - then they wonder why the conversion rates are low or the audience is not broad enough. Seth Godin has the answers - it's just that few really want to listen to them and follow through to the logical conclusions.  What can I say … I'll keep plugging away.

And Mike Moran, who was not at the meetup, but comes into this context because of one thing he says in Chapter 6 of his new book, as yet unpublished, about Doing it Quickly.  A lot of these SL ideas I'm proposing could be doing quickly and not very expensively …. but the idea, as Mike proposes, is to do things in a small way first, and Quickly…and fail often to succeed in the long run. 

I think Mike Moran has a message a lot of people need to hear - about metrics, conversion process and Trying new things Quickly …. Testing.  I think Second Life projects, that I'm proposing is are a way in - to address the low conversion rates - or at least, to build Branding - which is what sells the Architect's plans anyway…. so maybe now, when I say, go into Second Life - I have resources and people I can send my clients to.

I spoke with Peder Burgaard at the dinner last night before the MetaVerse Meetup and he's doing a research Project and had worked with several at IBM and I offered to help him with in any way I can with people I know at IBM.  Peder had some really good ideas and I'm sure we will correspond.

Honestly, I can't be totally sure  Dan Benzakein is not the guy living in Paris who I spoke with yesterday or someone else I spoke wit the day before at Virtual Worlds 2007.  I think it's the former, not latter; in either case, we had a great conversation - both cases.

And I think I was speaking with Prokofy Neva, manager of Raven glass Rentals a couple of times over the last 3 days - and we had a nice conversation about Metric last night at dinner.

And at the end of the long evening - I saw the 4 projects being talked about at the Metaverse Meetup, including a Wii interface to Second Life that is pretty neat and Open Sourced that was just thrown together in the last couple of days.

Yes, Momentum is moving very quickly in Second Life - now might be the time to jump in - that's my prediction …. the time is now.

If you wait 6 months or a year, you'll be behind the wave.