This is the thirty-third (and a third?) in a series of mini-interviews with the residents of Second Life. For the most part, I'll try to leave the responses unedited, except where editing will grant greater clarity.

I have been an admirer of Gwyneth Llewelyn for quite some time; ever since I found SL, actually. The level of intellect displayed on her blog is rather mighty indeed, and I read it often, frequently having to mouth the words to myself in a vain attempt to understand. This also marks the first time a Resident Snapshot has gone longer than one page!

SL name:
Gwyneth Llewelyn

How did you first come to SL?:
In mid-2004, I was looking for some 3D environment on the Mac, just to have a bit of fun, after being bored with The Sims. There are very few ones, and World of Warcraft was not available for a "trial download". I came across SL which at that time had a special feature announcement on Apple's website. So, it was mere luck. Most "games" tend to grab my attention for about 15 minutes; they're simply not compelling enough ... although "building" games like the Sims, or Civilization, Alpha Centauri, etc. always fascinated me, even if I cannot claim to be good at any of those :)

After spending 90 minutes tweaking my avatar (6 times longer than I expected SL to appeal to me!) I thought there was "something" to SL. I spent that first day 20 hours online ... then slept another 4 hours ... and logged in for a further 16 hours :) After that, I realised that SL was something totally unexpected, new, completely different, with an appeal that I haven't felt about any application whatsoever - at par with the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, back in 1993.

How did you choose your name?:
The choices of last names in SL have always been awkward. Like many people, I have my "usual" choice of nicknames that I happened to use for most of the things (Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, etc. as all sorts of
social web sites). It was clear that I had to pick a special choice, and, since I wasn't really expecting to use SL for long, as well as imagining that I could use any other name afterwards, I looked at the (misspelled) "Llewelyn" name and thought it was fun. In spite of being half-German and half-Portuguese, I always liked the complex and
unpronounceable Welsh names with way too many consonants. All I needed was an appropriate first name. A few Welsh/Gaelic/Irish names are so common and easy to spell that I wanted another one with few
vowels, and thus "Gwyneth" seemed appropriate :)

There is also a secondary reason. There is an historical Llewelyn who was King of Gwynedd, a region in Wales. "Llewelyn" means "leader, lion" (and often associated with "king", "ruler", and "brave"). "Gwyneth", by contrast, is "white, pure, virginal". A "White Leader" (or "Virginal Lion"? :) :) :) ) sounded very appropriate at that time for what I thought to be some sort of role-playing game, although the multiple puns on the word would not be familiar with
most of the non-Welsh-speaking world :)

Interestingly enough, after over 2 1/2 years, a search for "Gwyneth" in Google recently listed "Gwyneth Llewelyn" as #14 - most of the entries being reserved for the most excellent actress Gwyneth Paltrow. A search for "Llewelyn" listed "Gwyneth Llewelyn" as #10 - this time, shortly below Desmond Llewelyn, the famous actor that
played "Q" in most James Bond movies :) All fun!

What's your favorite thing about SL?:
The people. Unlike the Web, where you have "cool sites", in SL, you have "cool people". And they get "cooler" by the minute. SL is the ultimate social tool, where people self-express themselves by "doing things". The Web is also about self-expression (mostly Web 2.0) but it has this "detached" look - you know people are there writing
things and setting up websites, but you don't really "meet" them and talk to them. In SL, however, you're in touch with the people directly.

What do you like least about SL?:
Hard to say. Mostly, the lack of patience of so many people who blame it all on Linden Lab. But it's not different from other companies. People blame Microsoft every day of their lives and many make a living out of critisizing MS publicly, but still, 84% of the world uses Windows.

Favorite hangout/store?:
Definitely Neufreistadt/Colonia Nova, but I'm biased since I was part of that ongoing, growing community since its very beginning :)

Name one new feature you'd like to see added to SL:
In-world HTML is at the top of my priorities right now. It's the only thing that is lacking to make SL "subsume" the "old" Web.

Shout outs:
We need more proselytising. Although the learning curve is much higher, we definitely need 150 million users of SL by the end of 2008 or so.