Avatars gone wild

It just dawned on me that the vast majority of beings I've met through their avatar identities were initially introduced to me outside of Second Life. Yes, I know I've been writing and sketching relentlessly here about the subject of identity movement. But up until last night, it was more of an academic exercise than a visceral experience. Here are a couple of the last puzzle pieces that fell into place for me:

• I finally scrutinized an image I had captured from tweetwheel visualizing the connections between my friends on twitter. It reveals a great mix of humans, second life avatars and anonymous twitter-folk. The original here is more legible.

• Although my top-ten Twitter directs are Second Life avatars, I had made none of their acquaintances in-world and still haven't met most of them in the digital flesh. (I did have the pleasure of meeting two of my twitter pals last night at an impromptu get-together at my place in Extropia. (Image from tweetstats.)
  

On a related note, New World Notes covered the virtual world/web 2.0 connection yesterday. It was gratifying to see a Gartner analyst and a blogging avatar (yours truly) given equivalent pundit weight. I can't say for sure whether that speaks well of avatars or poorly of analysts.