Avatars want to find one another too!

Yup. Ok... see also: http://www.plurk.com/p/n0zk.

In most social networks, plurk included - there is a location field which quite naturally contains real world locations. A lot of people join social networks as avatars from virtual worlds or games such as Second Life (SL), World of Warcraft (WoW), Open Sim, etc as they wish to communicate with other people outside of those networks but not necessarily share RL details. It's quite frustrating for a number of Avatars that they can't set their location to be their virtual world location (most virtual environments have at least a world/game and region/server). It'd be great if this could either be selected in location - or else if separate fields were available for this data. This would make it possible for say all second lifers to easily identify one another; all world of warcrafters, etc. The above plurk possibly explains it better. Maybe.

At this time I personally know of over 700 second life people (a mix of people who are in some cases only known by their avatar name, and others known by avatar/real life name) and this number has been growing steadily. I also notice a number of World of Warcraft folk and gamers and 'residents' from other online spaces who tend to be represented by their avatars - and many more who are in multiple spaces. The only sites that tend to provide such fields are avatar only sites - but manypeople prefer to use the same networks they use day to day or wish to share stuff with real life people as well as other avatars.

Thanks. It's about being able to identify yourself as a member of a community - and to find others from the community. Groups would be another way of effectively doing this (cliques don't really serve this purpose as they are like personal mailing lists and you can only add friends).

Sounds like a good idea! In the interim, a truly freeform location field like on Plurk is decent, since you can say "Envision, Second Life and Pasadena, Maryland". Social networks that require you to enter RL city/state/zip for location are much less tolerable. As long as you provide plenty of characters to enter in the Location field, that's good for now. Deeper SL integration would require significant coding.

Says groups would probably be the best option as it's far more versatile - both for the plurk team (it will shut up a lot of users) and for the users who will be able to find people from their various communities or who have shared interests.

If you check my profile in Plurk http://www.plurk.com/MadameMaracas you'll see how I've blended my VW locations and RW locations with the tools provided as they are, HOWEVER I'm not easily seachable on all of those indicies. So folks viewing my profile will know, but folks looking for fellow SLers or WOWers or Chicagoans won't necessarily find me.

If you were to search your database for Second Life or SL, I know you'll find 100's of folks, very interconnected from that one VW. Especially if you do a Plurk content search vs. profile search, as not everyone has twigged to multi-locational profile presentation as some of us have done. We're a very social, chatty bunch and would like to be able to find each other a bit more efficiently, please. We totally dig Plurk, just want to nudge you guys in a helpful way!

Not too long ago you asked how we promote or why we don't promote Plurk to our friends, integration of all of our online personas beyond a useful Gravatar could be what makes Plurk the next "killer app" or whatever you care to call it. FaceBook forces those of us that "live" in virtual worlds to use our Real World names OR to be very careful and hope they don't punt us for using a very real, yet non-corporeal identity. IF Plurk were able to integrate all of our online social communication needs, which it might very well have the capability of doing, it would dominate all with it's friendly interface, threaded convos, ease of sharing links, photos and videos as well as chat and private messaging.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I'm known primarily as Madame Maracas online in the following places: Second Life, WoW, Chicago, Plurk, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, Age of Conan, MetaLife, OpenLife, LiveJournal, Delicious, Blogger, WordPress, GoogleTalk & EverQuest 2.

However, I'm known by at least 3 other names variously in Chicago, Illinois/meatspace, EverQuest 2, There, Yahoo, LinkedIn, FaceBook, Technocrati, AOL, GoogleTalk, & Skype.

Of that secondary list, FaceBook and Chicago would be the primary places of "missed" opportunity for communication. YES you offer FB integration, and actually I use ping.fm so I can control the flood of plurks to FB better, however FB folks that might come searching for me by interested will not find me on plurk as I'm here not under my RL name, but my SL name.

Hope this makes sense to you, sorry so long!

- Madame Maracas

I work as a community director for various websites (most recently for Aviary.com) and I would strongly encourage Plurk to look into this. There are sites like Koinup.com and Myrl.com that are trying to fill the gap for avatars but they do a poor job of integrating real life identity, and most people who play in both arenas (that is, all of them) get tired of bridging the gap.

I currently moderate a group on Flickr for Second Lifers, and we have over 8,000 members and quarter of a million photos. This is a very strong community that has no real online home once they log out of SL. They've built hundreds of groups on Flickr and I'd imagine they'd do the same on Plurk, given the tools. It'd be great for your traffic. I already see them defecting regularly from Twitter in favor of your service, as they tend to be more conversational and less broadcasty.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Thaumata Strangelove
Second Life Avatar

I agree that it's becoming increasingly important for social networking platforms like Plurk to provide ways for people to find each other, as members of groups. A great example of how this is done now is LinkedIn. With LinkedIn groups it's easy to both find and identify yourself with a particular group. For instance, on LinkedIn, I am a member of the Gov 2.0 group.

The ultimate solution would be an industry standard that allowed people to connect Avatar identities to a 1st Life identity, with controls that would allow them to reveal / conceal which pieces of information were shared/connected between them. For now, I maintain to distinct identities, one virtual (Valiant Westland) and one 1st Life. I share the connection between these with those who "need to know" the relationship between them.

Avatars are not the only one's wanting to easy find each other, i know that divers and teacher are also seaching others. Not that we wanna exclude others, just want a easier way of finding each other

Nods. And I've seen people wanting 'foodie' groups too. It'd be advantageous for lots of groups/communities of people - real or virtual.

thanks you guys for adding this feature :D now i can stop claiming to be from space XD

Thank you so much. Your recognition is really appreciated. @Nexeus - a Second Life plurker has already created a HUD that allows us to post new threads to plurk from within Second Life (though it doesn't allow us to read threads). Katharine Berry is a Second Lifer and created a plurk tool for iPhone (which is outside of SL) but just examples of how our community has embraced plurk. Thanks.

Thank You So Much! This is what we were waiting for. I've blogged about this here:

http://www.secondeffects.com/2009/01/...

Shares:

* http://nikadreamscape.wordpress.com/2... - Plurk bringing the Second Life Community together

* http://www.thebosl.com/index.php?opti... - What's Hot (BOSL - best of second life)

* http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/08/resi... - Residents get Plurked!

* http://www.vintfalken.com/second-life... - Second Life a Country in Plurkistan

* http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2009/01/p... - Plurk adds Second Life as a Country

and ... of course, there is much happy rejoicing in a number of plurk threads as Second Lifers discover the change add add Second Life as their country.

Thanks again...

Thank you so much!! Second Life is a huge community!

Yay! This is so cool :-D

Thanks to all that made this possible and a special thanks for the powers that be the Plurk Gods to have made this kind gesture to us humble plurkers ;-)

Cheers

*packs up his stuff and heads home to his country: Second Life*

Thank you for recognizing us!!

This is awesome. Thanks to you Second Lifers who helped show Plurk this is worthwhile!

Quite funny you chose to respond by creating SL as a country!

It does open the floodgates... Especially since you don't have to report your real location now. Could plurk support multiple locations in the future, or perhaps a series of "interest" fields instead - since what this really matters about is finding one another based on common interests in the "Interesting Plurkers" engine, right?

I'm not ready to "move" to SL, but the move toward finding people "interesting" for more reasons than their physical location has piqued my interest!