Archive for June, 2009

Special thanks to Terror for helping complete the look of this website with his gorgeous avatar art! He’s a very talented developer and artist and he did a great job helping me capture the look and feel I was aiming for on this blog.

At a whopping 90,000 (that’s NINETY THOUSAND) users online simultaneously thanks to the hype of version 2.0 we successfully pushed the IMVU server to its limitations and caused IMVU to implode.

The website portion is currently down while the client seems to be in tact thus far (at least it is for me and the group of friends I’m chatting in a public room with). And it seems so long as you don’t log out, you will continue to experience 2.0 at it’s finest. IMVU has issued a statement about their technical difficulties here in their blog. Looks like until they figure out the issue, they are rolling back the 2.0 update. If you log out, you will then experience the prior update without the 2.0’s UI.

I for one am impressed at the turn out. 90k on at once is certainly nothing to scoff at. That said, there was supposed to be a special, 2-hour sale fro IMVU’s over priced credits and now the website is down. One has to wonder tho, how sales will be affected over the next couple of days for both developers and credit resellers. Will today’s website black out harm sales, or will the overwhelming amount of active users make up for it? Stay tuned!

If you are a VIP member, you got to sneak peek at IMVU’s client version 2.0 yesterday. The rest of the community gets to try it out today. (Get in on the discussion here!)

So far, this new client version has been welcomed with slightly open arms by the community, although there are few who detest it with a passion. It seems to have both it’s great, bad and horrible points. Being a VIP member, I got to play with it yesterday. So far, save a few details… I have to say that I’m pleased with the changes.

So what’s different? A LOT! This freshly designed, full-window client has a modern edge. You can do just about everything from within the client – including reading your home page messages, shopping and purchasing over priced credits from IMVU. Special features include tabbed chats, in client message box, new room search filters and other little goodies (it’s up to you to decide if the others are features or duds).

Take a look at the new IMVU 2.0 (Click image to view larger).

Below are my opinions of the pros and cons of this new version. Some opinions from the community that I agreed with are mixed in.

Pros:
*Client loads a lot faster. No more standing around looking smudgy and half naked while you wait for everything to load.
*Ability to smoothly run several chats (I don’t know about y’all, but I hadn’t been able to do that in a year).
*LOVE the new listing for public rooms. I love that we can now search for empty rooms, rooms with 1-3 people, 4-6, etc. Great idea. I love how easy it is to simply sort out the AP or the GA rooms. I love that we can use the filters in multiple ways – choosing different levels of occupancy, room rating, etc all at once.
*LOVE LOVE LOVE the messages center. It’s a little cluttered, but it gets the job done (I imagine it would look less cluttered if I didn’t have so many dang home page messages lol). I love that unlike the “new” message viewer on the regular http://www.imvu.com/catalog/web_index.php/inbox page, I can actually read my messages in their entirety without having to go to my home page (funny how we were given over 1,000 characters yet you have to go to your HP to read them all lol). So this is great! BEST Part? I can select a TON of messages at once and hit DELETE!
*Absolute best part about the entire experience thus far? Tabs. I am a sucker for tabs and being able to tab IMVU instead of having 101 tabs in my browser makes for less going on on my dektop. Kudos.

Cons:
* You can’t access your inventory while shopping
* You can’t type any trigger commands
* You can’t even type “save outfit” while in the dressing room
* That shadowy dressing room is pretty lousy and makes all products look low quality
* Developers now have to make sure to create a really kick-butt icon, and rely only on that icon
* There is no way to access the product pages
* I also don’t like that we can’t fully close the “friends” window, only minimize it to our taskbar
* The categories have been much too simplified (for instance TOPS is lumped into that one category – just TOPS; I really prefer the convenience of “tops-angel tops-baby tees-crop tops-etc.,” which really allows a shopper to narrow down exactly what they’re looking for instead of going on a wild goose chase
* Yes, the screen is wider but it’s also shorter. That header takes up too much space
* Because of the screen resolution, it is now impossible to take nice screen shots for products and avatar pictures. I had to switch back to the older client in order to do it.
* No shout outs are displayed in the new client and with IMVU clearly trying to move the community away from the website, what will this mean for shout out dependant developers and credits resellers? Are they simply out of luck on that one?

A lot of the issues, I am hoping will be resolved. After all, this is just day one and it will take some time before everyone is adjusted and things start coming together. When I got the sneak peek at 2.0 many months ago, a few of the issues above were not issues at all. So I can only assume that those things will be soon introduced to us.

This new version seems much more geared towards the new IMVU user – and well, that is pretty much why it was made in the first place. Studies show that new users quickly lose interest in the site because they don’t understand how to do things. Having to go back and forth between the client and the website in order to shop was a bit of a hassle. It put off a lot of new users when they didn’t understand the simple concept of being able to buy new clothes for their avatars.

Time will tell with this one. Like I said – I’m enjoying the change thus far and have high hopes for this project.

The Product & Content Request Forum (also known as PACR) is a great forum where users can request specially made and often personalized items of the community – either to be submitted in the catalog by its creator, or sold in exchange for credits to the requester for their own use. It’s a large money making opportunity for a lot of people within the community – especially if you are a big name developer looking to make a little cash on the side.

But at what point is enough enough? There are literally hundreds of these “file sale” threads plauging what was once the place to go to ask someone to make you a custom skin or a pair of shoes. At what point will IMVU put their foot down and give us a forum specifically for selling files? – or dare I say it… do away with file selling all together.

We saw it happen with account selling. It started off simply being frowned upon by the company and it soon lead to it being banned within the forums, causing many users to create their own off-site forums in which to sell and trade accounts with other users. Soon after, it was written in the Terms of Service that exchanging accounts was illegal. Heck now you can’t even give the darn thing away!

How much longer will IMVU allow us to sell files? Time will tell I guess, but I see the end drawing very near. That’s bad news for a developer like myself who makes more money these days selling files of odds, ends and whatever else to aspiring developers than I do selling products I submit to the catalog.

It’s not just the hundreds of file sale threads that are the issue. As with anything great, someone has to ruin it. The trend as of late is to steal files or purchase and “edit” files only to turn around and sell them to unsuspecting customers. And we aren’t just stealing from one another any more. Even big name developers have been recently discovered to be selling files made for other virtual worlds such as The Sims or Second Life. They are pulling freebie files from places like Renderosity and throwing them into nifty packages and pawning them off as their own work. Makes you wonder how much longer it’ll be before we see those people with a nasty lawsuit on their hands. And it can and will happen. The websites stolen from won’t care that these unsuspecting customers purchased the files from someone else. All they care about is that their work is being used illegally and they will have every right to slap a lawsuit on anyone they want.

Is PACR doomed? Is there time for us to pull our act together and save what was once an excellent business opportunity?

Welcome to Kimi’s IMVU News blog. First, I’m gonna shed a little light on what this is.

First of all, IMVU is a graphical instant messaging client developed by IMVU Inc. It’s foremost a 3D chat in which you can interact with people throughout the world using a virtual environment as your chat location.

But it’s so much more than that once you get into it and make yourself apart of the community. In fact, there is so much to do on IMVU that for some, it becomes rather overwhelming. It has a little something for everyone – from it’s basic 3D chat to public forums, more intimate groups to interact with and my personal favorite… the ability to create your own content.

This blog is purely my perspective. I can’t tell you what you’ll find here because the world of IMVU is forever changing. There will be ups and downs for sure. But what I can tell you is that you will always get my biased (that’s no typo!) opinion about news regarding our little community.

Who am I? My name is Kimi – both on and off of IMVU. I am what we call a “Pro” level content creator. I’m very involved and active within the community and I’d like to think that qualifies me for keeping a blog of this caliber. I’m a very opinionated young lady, so expect me to dish it out. I’ve done and seen it all in my 1 1/2 years there from being a regular customer to online modeling, developing, saleswoman and more.

So sit back, grab a beverage and enjoy the ride!