57 Miles Friday Night Geek Meet

Last night I was invited to a Geek Meet by 57 Miles of Metaversed in Second Life. 57 is part of my twitter network and it is clear that he is very interested in pushing the way the metaverse is going through doing things. Consquently I knew that we would have a great collection of people at his event. Despite being 9pm on a Friday night in the UK it seemed a great way to meet lots more interesting people and share some ideas. I only mention the time because the way we all use these bits of technology to interact and meet means that we are able to thin slice the work day. There is a fine line between work and social, and in this case I considered it both. I met with both some friends, some new contacts and even what you might call competitors. We are all sat together, in our various timezones sharing some ideas live. Now imagine trying to even consider that over a telecon, or organizing a meet like that in real life. It just would not happen. I was able to pop on the computer and engage with people.

geek meet
Photos from snapzilla

I was up to talk about our internal metaverse projects with the CIO IQ team, as well as presence in Second Life and the future considerations of standards across multiple virtual worlds. My fellow speakers from Sun and Intel also did related pieces.
57 ran it very well, we had 5 minutes to blurb, then mainly take questions.
As usual for these events too we had pre event and post event mingling and it was good to see some people who I had only really conversed with on IM, Blogs and Twitter. e.g. Aleister Kronos, where we had never met in the same space in SL.

geek meet 2

It was good to be able to take so many questions, though I htink we could have gone on for many more hours. We are “forever N00b” in these environments. Everyone has as valid a set of ideas as anyone else. We learn by doing and sharing, and that applies to individuals and corporates alike.
For me it was also good to be in a room with some people who do know what this is all about, very often I am evangelizing to people who are coming to the concepts with some confusion or fear. Having a group of 40-50 experts together really sparked my thinking on some more issues.

Here is a little video of everyone there.