In a surprising move Linden Lab has bought the web portal "Avatars United". In April 2008 now retired blogger Vint Falken presented Avatars United (AU) as "Facebook for virtual personas". While I never was much of a fan of Facebook - and the current (and repeating) controversies about privacy concerns prove me right - I do use the social business networks Xing and LinkedIn with good success. A social network for avatars that bridges te gap between purely in-world presence, blogs and email was an intriguing thought so I signed up.Avatars United never really fulfilled my vision and expectations. There were certainly a lot of good ideas, but at the same time they fell short in many aspects. The site used to be slow, features were not intuitive or buggy. Also - despite Vint's call for action to SL avatars to become the largest group in AU - it never reached a critical mass.
Other services stepped in. Flickr holds now the largest community of SL avatars for photo sharing, despite efforts of Koinup and Snapzilla to offer more SL centric services. Blogger and Wordpress hosts the majority of SL centric blogs, Twitter and Plurk have huge communities of SL avatars despite more specialized latforms like Ning or even SL centric platforms like rezzed.net (defunct), moolto (a Ning site) or ProfilesLive (aka SLProfiles) offering better tailored services. There are avatars on Xing, LinkedIn and even on Facebook, who is currently undergoing the second wave of ethnic cleansing regarding digital personas.
Avatars United - forgotten by many and dwarfed in usage compared to any of the other sites above - now got the huge boost from Linden Lab. The cards have been reshuffled, the game is open again.
What does Avatars United offer today:
- Microblogging
The "Shoutbox" allows you to publish short blurps of thoughts which can be seen by your contacts or everybody else seeing your public page.
Who else offers it: Twitter and Plurk are the platforms used most by SL avatars, but also avatar forums on Ning, rezzed.net, moolto and others offer this.
AU implementation: Solid, but lacks cross-connectivity into other services like ping.fm
Killer feature: no - Photo Sharing
You can create albums and upload photos to it. Other users can comment on the photos and "like" them.
Who else offers it: Flickr is the "mother of photo sharing services", Google has Picasa as probably #2 in the market. Koinup offers specialized services for SL avatars and has a nice followership. Snapzilla is specialized on SL avatars as well and is widely used.
AU implementation: slow and offering no advantage I can see compared to other sites.
Killer feature: no - Blog
AU allows you to create your own blog entries, as well as to subscribe to other's blogs and to comment and "star" posts.
Who else offers it: Wordpress and Blogger as the most popular services, but also communities like Ning.
AU implementation: straightforward and spartanic, but missing again important connectivity features.
Killer feature: no - Feed Reader
The opposite of the AU-blogs is the function to aggregate blog sources you read in a web based feed reader. With the idea of AU as dashboard, you could read all your favourite blogs from within the AU page.
Who else offers it: ther eis a plethora of standalone feed readers - as web service Google Reader is probably the largest one
AU implementation: extremely slow and buggy, claiming perfectly validating feeds as not being proper ones
Killer feature: no - Plugins and Gadgets
AU offers the functionality to include 3rd party plugins into your page, adding more functionality. Right now the number of plugins is small, but since AO offers support for Google's OpenSocial standard, there will soon be more.
Who else offers it: Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing all offer plugins, there is also a number of plugins available for the iGoogle homepage. Ning offers plugins to a certain extent.
AU implementation: I have not tested this yet
Killer feature: maybe - no other SL/avatar centric platform offers this functionality. It depends on how this feature gets adopted by the community, but this could be a winner. - Currency model
While the basic functionality is free, certain features need to purchased with AU "coins", where 500 coins equal roughly 5 US$ or about 1500 L$. It seems that 3rd party plugin developers can charge "coins" for these too.
Who else offers it: Google Apps offers commercial widgets for one time or repeat charges. No SL oriented site I know offers this.
Killer feature: maybe - for social websites it is the clearest revenue model I saw so far, and it depends on the attractiveness of the offered features. And of course with the new owner Linden Lab, an integration of the "coins" with L$ would facilitate the success.
Where is the beef? Right now I don't see it. While I definitely will continue to use AU, right now I see no compelling reason to prefer it over my usage of iGoogle, Blogger, Plurk, Twitter and Flickr. However AU is in a great starting position now. With a more responsive server platform, and with essential cross-connectivity features added, it might become a true dashboard for avatars. Let us pipe in our photos from Flickr and Koinup. Let us mirror our blogposts from Wordpress and Blogger. Let us Tweet and Plurk from the AU interface or get support for ping.fm. Let us rate XStreetSL items within AU and create wishlists. Let us mirror our in-world friendship relations in AU and see who's online. Add a landmark sharing service.
The opportunities are exciting for sure. Now it comes to show the SL residents the beef.
7 comments:
I went there only to just sign up in my name, and so when I get pestered, I can give the link and not have to be hassled about not having signed up. Seriously.
I see nothing there I want nor need.
Not ping.fm'able, so it isn't gonna get posts from me.
I have a blog that gets 99% of its updates via ping.fm currently, don't need another.
I have a Pro acct on Flickr, and a back up on Photobucket, a very very very old acct on Snapzilla. Don't need to re-invent the slide carousel again.
I am on LinkedIn, del.i.cious (or however it is typed), StumbledUpon, LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, (the defunct) GeoCities, Yahoo, GoogleWave, Twitter, a few guild-specific forums/boards/sites and a few other community-building online entities.
I don't "need" another.
I use Plurk constantly, Facebook & LiveJournal daily, ping.fm when I need to hit all my sites in one shot for news/updates/gig notices this all works simply and well for me.
IF AU were to become ping.fm'able it would be another place, like Twitter that folks can read about 1 - 5 % of my posts on any given day. I sincerely doubt it will ever meet the fluidity and facility of Plurk, which fully meets my online communication needs.
I can easily share text, images, music in a threaded contextual environment that is nicely customizable (backgrounds and such) for my taste and ease of reading. It takes ping.fm updates. The "bio" space is small and undemanding and easy to update. It runs well nearly all the time, the page refreshes nicely, the staff responds to trouble tickets.
OH here's a few other things!
AU is already SL-laggy. Don't need more of that.
The UI is 5 years old looking.
The LinkedIn style prompt to "complete" my page to THEIR specs is annoying. I will not find my page complete by adding apps. I've nearly completely eliminated them from my FB existence, that was for my FB noobhood, I grew up.
And I"m NOT interested in spending money for I cannot imagine what on a page I'm only grudgingly filling out. I don't spend money on FB, sure as sh|t not gonna do it here. Heck, I earn my SL money in SL for everything I do in and about SL nearly all the time. Don't recall the last time I bought Ls, prolly been a year.
That's my 2L!
- Madame Maracas
The site is pretty early days, I agree. Not sure how it will go, and I agree this is very much old lettuce leaves and a bun. No beef, but if it integrates over time with xstreet and SL authentication, and apps are developed that as SL specific, it might go somewhere.
I had similar thoughts when testing Avatars United.
Today when I want to share SL photos, I email them (from inside SL) to the Snapzilla email address. Snapzilla sends a copy to my Flickr account and then Friendfeed sucks my Flickr feed (and other feeds) onto places like my personal website.
Right now, if I want to sent a photo to Avatars United, I have to save it to my hard drive then, in a second step, upload it to Avatars United. Yuck. Linden Lab probably intends to make that easier, now that they own Avatars United.
By the way, I think the world's biggest photo-sharing site is Facebook, followed by Photobucket and Flickr. See http://bit.ly/cla6re
you are 1005 right! it needs all those plugins - even in Ning you can do flickr uploads (lol, i uploaded 500 at one time to a Ning and did not realize they had to approve them individually - i had 500 approval emails the next day)
=)
Retired?!!! Let's say 'on hold, until LL publishes a roadmap!' ;)
I had the same reaction about Ping.FM and metaWeblog API's. I would much prefer if I could syndicate my content into AU. I found I had an account that said I joined a year ago, but I couldn't remember having ever joined. Still, I was able to get into my account, so I suppose I have seniority over a few folks, but my account date doesn't show on my profile. I believe that the other virtual games may end up abandoning AU. Especially the EVE folks since Second Life is sort of an insult in their environment.
I am as impressed today with Avatars United as I was when Vint invited me two years ago: Not. Still no compelling reason to have the service has appeared though at the time I joined there was at least some prospect. With the recent acquisition by The Lab, AU has actually become a nuisance as a dozen "unite" requests from people I've never heard of as appear daily if having a long friend list bestows wealth or high status. The Lab's official support of Twitter, Facebook, and now AU leads me to believe that an official strategy to reduce in-world issues is to keep residents out-world checking all their social media sites. Honestly, I'd rather see more time and treasure devoted to improving our .. erm .. *their* world, such as better avatar meshes, increased prim limits (50x50x50 would be enough), or a more efficient viewer. Perhaps this reach to the Web indicates that too many people have too much time on their hands at The Lab.
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