Last Friday, the mobileYouth team held our first ever virtual networking event at the popular youth hangout, Habbo Hotel. We decided to try the event as a bit of an experiment. As we highlight in the mobileYouth report, some pioneering brands are already using internet communities such as Habbo to connect with their youth consumers. We thought we’d try and use Habbo to hold a meeting of people interested in mobile and youth trends.

As with any ‘real’ networking event, there were a few technical hitches. We had emails from some people who were unable to log in to Habbo and Alan Patrick blogged about his struggles with the Habbo registration system. Later we were victim to some unwanted party crashers – Habbo hackers who would enter the room and randomly kick out our guests.

Despite the problems, we were lucky to have an interesting group of people turn up and stimulate some lively virtual discussions. Oscar from NVIDIA, Helen from BeepMarketing, Alex from SendMyTxt, Tomi from Communities Dominate Brands, Antony from Future Platforms, Werner from Jataayu and a couple of guys from the AOL UK communities team were a few of the new and familiar faces I ran into.

As for the networking experience, it was difficult to follow conversations when lots of people were typing and Habbo didn’t keep a conversation history to refer back to. Habbo wasn’t perfect, but it definitely offered something a bit extra to an email discussion or a Skype chat.

To see some pictures from the event, click here.

# posted by Jan Kuczynski @ 3:21 pm