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.

Google’s Virtual World “Lively” goes live

Google has just released their virtual world project Lively. Product Manager Niniane Wang says the project came out of the personal 20% time.

At first look, Google seems to be competing with ExitReality, SceneCaster and Vivaty. There is certain friction in terms of a plugin download/install and it only works on Windows XP/Vista with Internet Explorer and Firefox (Out of the four products, SceneCaster is the only one that is Flash-based, all the rest require a download/install).

Google seems to be targeting the self-expression market like the other competitors. You create rooms, decorate the rooms and invite your friends one by one to your room to chat with them. They also have plans to have tighter integration with social networks.

When you launch Lively, you sign in one more time even if you are already logged into your Google account. Then you pick a username and Lively creates an empty room for you.

Then you are presented with options to fill your room with sounds and ’shop’ for room shells or use one of the existing ‘free’ shells (Obviously they plan to make money by creating a market for virtual goods, be it shells or other items you can put in your room).

Looking at the installed files, one can easily see that Lively is using DirectX9, Microsoft Visual Studio 7 runtime (2 versions behind the current one), their models are in Gamebryo format and their UI is built with Flash (swf).

Lively currently has the early VRML 1.0 look, and is not going for the high-quality rendering approach. Avatars are almost flat-shaded with a cartoon-filter.

Overall, this is a very exciting development given the size and reach of Google. I am sure Lively will bring more people into the realm of virtual worlds and validates Unype’s approach that people are looking to connect with each other in real-time on the web, be it on a map or in a cartoon room.

Jeff Pulver’s breakfast (with friends) in NYC

This morning I was at Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and friends. A supremely interesting and entertaining event with 101 people at Friend of a Farmer near Union Square.

When you enter, you are presented with your social networking toolkit:

which is two large name tags and bunch of small stickers for real-time social ‘tag’ging. You write down “cool”, “new york”, “internet video”, etc. on the small stickers and quite literally put them on people you are talking to, a very entertaining and quite literal social tagging experience. I think it’s brilliant, I felt the urge to tag everything on the way home on the subway “nice shoes”, “annoying ad”, etc
One thing of note was I had a chance to meet and chat with David Troy of TwitterVision fame. Unype shares a lot of characteristics with Dave’s work (which also includes FlickrVision and the new spinvision.tv). TwitterVision and FlickrVision are also featured at the new MOMA exhibit, Design and the Elastic Mind, definitely check it out.