Social networks starting to move towards richer interaction models

Hi5 today announced that they will integrate an embedded virtual world platform that they had acquired earlier this year into their service.

Hi5 is one of the most popular social networks and its userbase is mostly outside the US. They clearly see the value in having their users interact with each other more in real-time, rather than the current bulleting-board-like model where a user posts something and you see when you ‘refresh’ your page.

With a dynamic real-time interaction model like Unype, users do not have to refresh their homepage or relogin to the service to see what is new. Each new action, post and event is propagated to all live clients in real-time. Unype’s backend has been fine-tuned to support just that.

We are looking forward to seeing more social networks develop and employ more real-time interaction models.

Simplified look and more connection points in Unype!

Along with the new and greatly simplified GUI thanks to feedback from all of you, now Unype also has more ways to connect with others. Here is the latest look:

Here are some of the improvements:

* Simplified GUI. We got rid of the screen clutter to make it easy to get to where you want to get. “Items” and “Tours” have been simplified into the “Shared” tab.

* New ‘quick-access’ latest visitors, voters, contacts, who added me, most popular view. This is a dynamic view of who is looking at you, who is voting for you, who added you. You can also see the list of most popular users and see if you have made it in there!

* Better online users view. The new online users view located to the left of the map gives you a better view of the users that are online in the system. Note that, this view is now ‘collapsible’. You can hide it if you want to see more of the map view.

* Number of profile views! Now you can see how many times a user’s profile has been viewed.

* Popularity! Now, you can vote for users on their profile and also see how popular they are.

We just passed the 160,000 users mark and as always, we are looking forward to more of your feedback, please email us directly at murat at unype.com!

Future of the internet is in the photo below

I found this photo at one of the ‘funny things’ websites. And I don’t think it’s funny at all.

Actually I think these people are having a better experience of the internet than you and me right now.

Look at how they are pointing each other to some of the articles on the ‘internet’. Which of us can do it now? They can point an article to each other and then talk about it in real-time. Again, we cannot do it. The most we can do, which is leaving comments on a blog or a BBS would be like leaving post-it notes on this ‘board’ and then leaving without talking to anyone here. Not very real-time or satisfying. These people can have real-time conversations about the content. They are definitely having a better experience than any of us.

On the other hand, for the future Lively, Vivaty, Metaplaces etc are sharing the same vision with Unype: Being able to connect with people in the same ‘virtual’ location in real-time. Unype has a twist, where ‘that virtual location’ is actually a ‘real’ world location. Like Times Square. Or Central Park. Or your backyard.

So Unype can build location-based services on top of its services, as well as ‘permission-based’ location-based advertising. We are building our ’smart’ location-based advertising platform in a way that ‘any’ location-based application developer will be able to plug into it through APIs.

We welcome any location-based application developers out there ( mobile or desktop ) to contact us (murat theatsign unype.com ) and learn more about the platform. It frees you from having to develop a smart location-aware ad-serving platform and at the same time, it would optimize your monetization.