1.I feel better now, Shel. Your foray into SL and the launch of crayon prompted me to open my SL account today under the pseudonym Steele Stallion (and that guffaw you heard was from my wife!).

By this time next week I plan to be stumbling and fumbling along with you. Like you, I never was much of a gamer (though I did play a lot of 007 GoldenEye with my kids in the 90s). But as a student of PR and marketing, I'm writing off this trip to research. Here's hoping we cross paths at a virtual Grateful Dead concert!

2.I think there are lots of newbies stumbling around Second Life (like me, "Doug Hayashi"-- "born" Aug 18) so I wouldn't worry about that.

SL for me is about meeting people I might not otherwise meet-- a new medium for communication-- and our varying levels of sophistication we will have to bear for now.

My agency has actually has some success bumming around on SL-- and we don't even have our own office-- but we have conducted client meetings and press interviews there, for example.


Congratulations on the launch (and on having announced clients on launch date-- there's a PR dream for you)! I enjoyed your launch party at the ampitheatre. Best of luck to all of you!

3.Unfortunately I missed the launch party by about two hours, would have loved to have been there.

Felt a lot like a ghost town when I arrived, met the occasional person also looking for the party. Shouldn't there have been more Crayon representatives - especially on the day of the company's launch? I have gotten the same feeling when visiting the Adidas and American Apparel stores.

Are there plans to have people working fulltime at Crayon (Second Life)?

Regardless, I do commend you on the initiative and truly wish you success.

Cheers,
Felix

4.It is a crazy world. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of it's potential. Glad to hear that I'm not the only one slowly finding my way. Most of the time I'm in SL I am as confused as I am amazed. An the more time I spend there the more amazed I get at what has been created.

5.Whew....I am so glad to learn that I'm not the only stumbling, bumbling ox in SL! <G> But I do have an excuse...our vaunted tech security group prohibits access to SL so I have only be able to sporadically visit in the evenings when I get home - even though it's part of my job description to explore/investigate new marketing opportunities we might want to explore! <don't get me started>

On plus side, since I didn't get to SL until late last night Crayonville was deserted when I toured around so no one could see all the mistakes I made <VBG>. Pretty cool. Which floor is your condo on? Whose condo is furnished already, Jaffe?

Hopefully, the next time I visit I'll be more experienced and won't keep flying into the sides of buildings <G>.

6.ha, I had the same problem, I came to the party, sat down and waited, i didn't know I had to turn on the audio until the last 5 minutes of the presentation. Is the audio downloadable from anywhere?

7.What a thoughtful and sincere post, Shel. I also have the sense that Second Life is somehow important -- or is going to be soon enough.

I just hope that it becomes more intuitive to use and find my around in. Or, like you, maybe it's just a question of me spending some more time in there and figuring it out.

8.Shel,

Great post... and yes, we all ARE newbies sometime. We also have to remember that Second Life is just one of the latest steps in the long evolution of virtual communities. Even though we've had virtual 2D/3D-ish worlds on the Internet really since the early 1990's, the circumstances to allow them to succeed (high broadband penetration, faster computers, people comfortable with text chat, gamers, etc.) have really only happened recently. The interfaces will improve. There's a lot of people and companies jumping into the realm of virtual worlds, and the competition (between Second Life, there.com, multiverse and all the others) will undoubtedly push the user interfaces toward something more intuitive.

Despite their history, we really are only in the infancy of real usage of virtual worlds.

Thanks for your honesty,
Dan

P.S. I've never been much of a gamer myself, either. For a brief bit, I played a lot of games on the Apple II around 1979 or 1980 or so (I remember being very impressed by Castle Wolfenstein when it came out), but after that, never really much at all (although I'm suddenly remembering some game with tanks that we used on microVAXes that were connected to each other). I was always more interested in building things on the computer and looking into ways they could be used for communication between people.

9.At the risk of sounding even more unsure about SL than some of my predecessors (although I'm sure I will), I'm still having trouble understanding how there can be enough SL credits floating around for anyone to build a real/pretend business. There is that much commerce there?

10.At yesterday’s launch of crayon inside Second Life, president and founder Joseph Jaffe said his company wants to “use new marketing to prove new marketing.”
So here’s an idea for the gang of crayons that would do just that: org...