Twitter Lemmings Fall Over Cliff of Dalai Lama Stories

The verdict is still out about whether the Twitter identity attributed to the office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama was created by an authorized entity. Although it's been reported that the account was closed by Twitter today because it was created by an impersonator, there is no official information from Twitter or H.H. Could be Chinese misinformation to thwart the 20,000+ followers. Or could be a total fake to start with.

I'm just going to sit on the edge of the cliff and wait to make any conclusions.

(An hour or so later)

Okay, looks like it was an impersonator. But it was a good idea. Maybe the real H.H. will sign up.

I'm #2 in The Metaverse on the Twitter Elite List

Twitter Grader has some secret-sauce algorithm to create a list of Twitter Elite in each region. On a whim, I queried "The Metaverse" and I came in at #2. I don't know quite what to make of this, but it makes for a fast blog post.

A Quick Survey of Gods on Twitter

I'm not sure what led me to check, but here are Twitter pages from some currently worshiped deities. According to Twitter, you can follow God, but you can't follow Jesus because he doesn't exist. Allah has protected his updates and Krishna is working with Wordpress. And Satan?

Botgirl's theory of why Twitter was down this afternoon

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.

Twitter helps deliver baby sibling for Augmentationists and Immersionists: The Emergents

Heavy use of Twitter for the past couple of weeks made me realize that there's a group of Immersionists who have evolved enough to deserve a new classification. Let's call them Emergents.

While Old-School Immersionists maintain a distinct boundary between the virtual and physical worlds, Emergents extend their Avatarian identity into the human environment through tools like Twitter. Sophrosyne Stenvaag was kind enough to comment:

I'd also add Laterals: there are half a dozen or so SL Digital People in my WoW guild, who openly say, "I'm [avatar name] from SL," as I do.

What seems unique about this to me is that the Avatarians are reading and writing tweets while they are not rezzed within Second Life. The Avatarian identity is independent of the virtual world that spawned it.

Pretty damn cool.

Twitter me this Botgirl

Media-buzz darling Twitter seems to be competing against Second Life for most down time. Thank you so much for helping me practice patience.