Social Networking
Twinity
At first, twinity seems like it’s just about virtual world attempting to play with the big boys at Linden Labs. In that sense, you’re right, but they have a trick up their sleeve: you.
Let’s start off with accessibility, shall we? Twinity requires a download to play and is currently only available for Windows. Though this is often a big concern down the road, I’m sure they’ll have something in the works once they come out of beta (hopefully). Next is price, which because of beta is free as well as they also give you some in-game currency to play with off the hop which is always nice.
One of the biggest things I look for in these worlds is creating my avatar (yes, I’m a fashion whore leave me alone) and Twinity gave me quite a shock here: you can actually import your face onto your avatar. I thought at first it would simply match the hair color, or eye color but no, It actually shapes my face onto the avatar. To be brutally honest with you when I was doing it (be it almost 3am) I said to myself “wow, that looks familiar…holy crap that’s actually my face!” does need a bit of work on that feature, but it’s off to a good start. The base selection of clothes/hair seems to be a bit limited, but I think it’s possible to have user generated stuff so I suppose it’s not that big of a deal.
The next list is things to do. My main interest is often creating a ‘home’ or ‘apartment’ and Twinity isn’t too bad at that. I was able to create a place that is going to charge me 47G (in-game currency) a month which isn’t too bad given that I was given 3000 when I signed up. Users have the ability to choose layout of the place, the style (apartment, office, cafe, etc) as well as location. It was the location here that shocked me, as they’re real places. I chose an apartment then for skyline chose Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Well to my surprise when I looked out the apartment window I saw the CN Tower. Now that is cool. On top of that, it has the basic abilities to wallpaper each wall, create the objects you want and has a nice list of textures you can buy as well as make and upload your own.
The interface and controls are two things that can use some work. Most of the things you need to do in Twinity involves right clicking, which is kind of annoying. On top of that, when the menu loads you have 3 different options for the one thing and none of them make a lot of sense (change texture, apply texture, change texture settings). After playing with them, you get used to them but some better wording would help, since all I wanted to do was make the walls red. The next issue is camera control, it doesn’t follow so you constantly have to be right clicking and swinging the camera around with the mouse as you walk which is annoying beyond belief. A little more user-friendlyness would be appreciated.
Another annoyance of Twinity is the fact that is a complete memory-hog and runs very slow. I understand it’s in beta, but the fact that it runs as though we were still in 1998 annoys me to the point of not wanting to play this any more. Every time I load something, I get a spinning loading icon, even if I’ve already loaded this window 3 times. A caching feature would be a nice touch.
There was also some options and talk about making movies, but at the time of this post I didn’t have the patience to check it out given how incredibly slow in seems to run.
All in all I think Twinity may show some potential for some users who want the ‘realistic’ approach to virtual worlds, but given that is lacks the friendly approach to casual players I can’t see it taking visitors away from competitors. Perhaps further along when it comes out of beta we can decide if it will actually become a player or not.
Ping.fm
Ping.fm is the best sNetwork manager EVER!
Ok, maybe not ever, but it’s really really good. Ping allows you to take tons of your microblogging, blogging, and status updating service and put them all as 1. This way you can update on Ping, and it will update everywhere (or only on 1 spot) without you actually having to go there.
What’s nice about this is that it has the different types separated, so you don’t end up making a blog post simply saying “I have cake” where as it should have maybe gone to status updating. What is nice about this aside from being able to post in one spot, with the aide of the PingPress.fm wordpress plugin I can now send out a small message to all of those networks telling people to come see my post; or in the cases of the blogging networks it hits, actually posting it (woot for posting on multiple platforms at once!)
Ping.fm is currently in beta, so you’ll need a beta key which is “vivalaping” right now. If it doesn’t work when you read this and it’s still requiring a key, comment on the post and I’ll update it accordingly.
Smallworld
Smallworld is a new MMO virtual world currently in Beta out by Outsmart. Unlike many Virtual worlds, there is no downloads but also isn’t horrible 3D graphics. I made a list of the Pros and Con that I could think of. I’d highly recommend everybody to check it out, it’s one of the best I’ve seen it q very long time. With such a nice build, I’m hoping this doesn’t end up being another one that goes from Beta to Nada.
PROS
CONS
Virtual worlds timeline (with dipity)
An amazingly, well put together timeline of anything relating to virtual worlds or simulations. Reading over it, there was even somethings I missed which is something to be said.
Dealing with Corporate Blocking Policies
Web Worker Daily had a great article yesterday titled “Dealer With Corporate Blocking Policies” with I absolutely adore.
I’ve been facing the same issues at work, especially with the social networking thing. Being as that I work the night shift, they give us pretty much free will to surf as long as we actually work when the time comes. That’s easier said than done when 90% of the ’social networking’ sites are blocked. I mean FlickR? come on. So for anybody who is in this situation, check out some of WWD’s recommendations, they’re uber smart people. Oh, and subscribe to them, they’re THAT awesome.
LiveSpace a Virtual ‘Wow’
Gizmodo has a video today of a new Virtual World called LiveSpace (CitySpace? They call it both in the video) and it looks amazing. It’s server-side rendered with OTOY, which means your crappy computer can still run it and it will look good. I’m honestly just impressed at the graphics, server-side or not. I’d love to play around in a world like this. It almost makes me giddy just thinking about it.
LivePlace Is a Virtual World Rendered Server-Side, Streamed To Any Device @ Gizmodo
Firef.ly
Firef.ly is a new service currently in beta created by Betaworks that turns any of your sites into a chat room. Before you say that you’ve seen this before listen here: There is no downloads. That’s right, two lines of code thrown into the footer of my coding (totally painless) and my site has now become it’s own chat room.
If you have a look at the bottom right of your screen, you should see a floating box with # Here, # Chatting, Start Chatting. Click start and the screen gets sort of an ‘overlay’ thing going. You can still scroll and look at whatever is on the site, but you can also move your mouse around and start typing. Where ever you type, it will create a little chat bubble that anybody else on the site can see.
Some of the extra features that look to be put in are the choice of pre-loaded cursors (because arrows are boring) and what looks to be the option to use an image of your own choosing (that doesn’t seem to work yet or I can’t figure out). There is also a twitter option to have certain parts of the convo go to twitter (again can’t get it to work). What IS working though is the time line feature. this allows you to scroll along the site’s time line and check out conversations from the past, which are conveniently marked with little white lines, turning the chat room into a nice form of bulletin board as well.
I really hope this service lasts, it seems to hold a lot of promise. What they really need now is to get a forum/blog going so we have some way to help them perfect this. They do have a blog, and it’s even listed at the bottom of the main page, I’m a tard. Thanks Andy. Anyway, check it out because it’s awesome. Remember to leave a message there when you check it out, I’ll be sure to see it. 
Lively? Hardly
The other day I decided to play around with Google’s new play thing Lively and to be brutally honest with you it was pathetic. This comes as something really hard for me to say, given that I have a history of spouting off at every given opportunity about how great google is but Lively is just unbearably bad. For those of you just tuning into what Lively is (or at least trying to be) it’s an avatar based 3D char room. Players are able to ‘create’ and ‘customize’ a series of avatars and chat it locations similar to the real world. This is hardly a new concept, but given that it’s being backed by one of the most powerful forces online the expectations are fairly high.
The first issue I have with this is the idea of it being browser based but requiring a download. A download for something is normal these days, especially for virtual worlds/mmo; Having browser based with no download are no problem either. However, the expected quality between the two is going to variry a great deal. If a user is required to download something it should be far superior to something thrown together in java or shockwave. This isn’t the case with Lively which is a big turn off right from the get-go.
Next lets tackle what is actually in this world and how it’s presented. Avatar selection is very slim. Users have a choice of 8 (I belive it was 8, might be 6 come to think of it) different avatars ranging from an anime styled character to a cat-like creature. For each of these avatars, you have a very limited appearal options which includes mostly different colored hats. There is no skin tone option or clothing layering option which most other servies offer making uniqueness very limited among users.
As we’ve now established that all the avatars will be clones, lets look at the functionality of this system. In an attempt to ‘create a room’ (which is common in many virtual world to allow to to customize a small space to call their own) I managed to put down a sofa, a table and a poster to float in the middle of my room. This would have been easier if the viewing screen is not cropped so small and the camera angles were not horrid.
The last things I can possibly think of at this time which irritate me about this poorly designed website is that the characters use chat bubbles (which is ok if the whole environment is viewable, but quite obviously is not due to poor camera controls) but does not support a chat log feature that I was aware of in my time using it. On top of the chat bubbles, character movement is completely done with the mouse by clicking and dragging a character to place which becomes very annoying, very fast when the cameras try to keep up with the mouse location.
Final summation: If Google wants to make it completely browser based they have to remove the inital download and install of the modules and make control a bit easier. They did a fantastic job with Google Docs and not having to require any downloads so there is no reason why they can’t do it with this. If they choose to go with the download route make it a true virtual world download and up the quality of the product (which honesly has to be done even if you stick with a browser based envirtonment) to allow more customizable feature and some sort of user interface would be a huge help. Until then, I’d stick with Second Life.
Avatar: Legends of Arena
09/20/08 Update: I’m seeing a lot of hits from people looking for the update on this after getting the “Can not connect to database,..recent version update blah blah”. Well I’ve been getting it too, doesn’t really seem to be telling the right error.
Solution: Reinstalled mine in the default directory (C:\Program Files). After starting the game (clicking on the shortcut to start the game), do not switch to another window. Do not click on any other programs or Alt-Tab to another program anytime after trying to start this game. Once it is started, it needs your full attention.
So Do not Go IM your friend while it’s loading. Do not continue to surf the internet. Do not change songs on your music player. Do not write up something in notepad. After clicking to load the game, just sit and wait for it to load, don’t do anything at all until it does. (this doesn’t mean close them all down, it just means don’t touch them anymore)
I find that if you switch to another program while this is running (at the start of the game, or anytime during) the next time it tries to load a screen it will display the ‘recent version’ error.
After the icon at the bottom of the screen spins for a minute (or 5) the yellow bar will blink green and the next screen will load. Again, just be sure you are always on the Avatar program’s window and it should be ok…most of the time.
This seems to work 9/10 times for me. So just keep trying, you’ll be able to connect eventually. It’s not you, it’s them.
Let me know if this works for you guys, thanks
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First off, I’m not sure why I like Avatar: The last Airbender. I guess it just hit me as “that could be cool” so I watched all of them. Don’t judge me.
Now to continue on, I just got watched the last 4 episodes of Book 3 yesterday and thought when he went into avatar form again he was totally badass. The whole dragon-turtle thing was kind of weird though. That’s not why I’m writing this though. I just saw a post talking about an MMO for Avatar titled Avatar: Legends of the Arena coming out in September and my mind just went into ‘yay’ mode.
Unfortunately, however, I then start thinking about the previous Avatar games they released and my hopes are dashed. I’ll be trying this out since it sounds to be mostly PVP which can prove for a bit of fun, but if they start charging for it my chips are off the table. Guess we’ll see in two months when it’s released.
I found a video of it (below) which could be interesting. Skip to about 2m30s to see some actual action.
Luupi
“SOCIAL NETWORKING – THE WAY IT SHOULD BE…
Sick of superpoking? Over being a pirate? Why not just be you! From the maker?s of Habbo, Luupi is for the real people behind their virtual lives.”
Luupi is loopy? Nope, they’re completely freaking retarded.
I received an email in one of my ancient alts awhile ago from out good friends at Sulake, makers of Habbo Hotel, saying they came out with a new Facebook clone called Luupi. I pity the world it we’re letting Sulake breed. This site looks really bland (though I do like the colors and logo).
The site lets users upload pictures and videos and put captions under them. There doesn’t seem to be a huge profile option, so I think it would be better to refer to it as a FlickR clone. Aside from uploading images and giving them captions, users are able to join ‘communities’ and leave messages/chat through a ‘comments’ window which most of us know as a message board.
Users also have the option to set mottos/moods as that in facebook; Yippie.
Lets hope they have better management with this than they ended up having on happy. Keep it clean guys. And yeah, I joined just so I can put my name in for the free camera