I met Melanie Leeth of Imlay at an Atlanta Technology Angels event.  I learned a lot about Imlay that I did not know.  But more importantly, we had one of  those great uplifting energizing conversations that you have every so often.  Melanie has great cognition of the Internet space and we talked about some potential opportunities that need to be addressed that are obvious to both of us.

I asked Melanie to lunch recently because I wanted to talk about some concepts that I have been thinking about and get her uber smart thoughts.  We never really got there.

The topic of the day turned out to be 3D virtual worlds.  Seems like folks are telling Mel that virtual worlds are where the Internet is going and we had a rather animated discussion around that.  Mel does not get it.  Neither do I.  So when two relatively well schooled Internet folks don’t get it, what does that mean?  We are either way right or way wrong.  Part of the way wrong could be that we just don’t hang out with people that use such services.

So I did a tweet to my twitter followers.   Not a one responded that they engaged with virtual worlds.  Amber knows a few people that hang in the virtual world world, but does not go there herself.

This led me to ask Joe Reger over at dNeero to create a social survey.  While hardly a statistically valid study, the early results showed that nearly 40% of the respondents have tried a virtual world, but less then 10% have engaged with one in the past week.  Over 60% of the respondents are under 29.  You would think that young people taking social network based surveys would be pretty much in the target for the big virtual world service players.  Not so from what I am seeing.

Once place where virtual worlds do seem to be thriving quite a bit is in the 7 – 9 age group.  While the social aspects are not the driving force, every kid I know in that age group seems to be on Webkinz World.  After giving it some more thought, my view is that the time for virtual worlds being used widespread is coming.  Coming as these kids grow up and virtual world technology capabilities grow with them.  The Internet is going there, but its going to be awhile.

So right now Mel and I are way right. In seven to ten years we will be way wrong.  In Internet time that is 50 years.  Timing is a bit off to worry about it right now.