BRIAN KENNY: In April 2006, Beth Goza, a programmer at Linden Lab, enthusiastically featured her likeness on the cover of BusinessWeek magazine. But only those who understood Beth’s true passion would have recognized the image of her as her, because it was actually an image of her avatar, Kealiaha Trudeau, who resided in Second Life, a virtual 3D world that many considered to be the her starting point. Point to the Metaverse. Released in 2003, Second Life allowed users to interact with each other in real time. The open source virtual world was home to a thriving economy that scaled rapidly thanks to user-generated content. The site stuck at around a million users in 2006, but it proved too technically clunky for the casual user. But Second Life stoked the imagination of a…