Google+ Invites

I was able to get in yesterday after an invite from two separate individuals was delayed by nearly a day.  Despite the long wait-time, the system is fairly intuitive to use and seemed to hold up well when I dumped a 200-photo album of the BuildCity project onto the network.  Google+ had all of my info and uploads from other Google products I use (Blogger and Gmail primarily) ready to access as soon as I logged on, so I was able to pick up a profile picture from Blogger right away.  The integration is nice, and the features that I've discovered so far are straightforward and simple to figure out.

Anyway... who wants an invite?  Let me know by posting a comment here with your contact info and I'll drop you a line.  Just a small thanks for my readers. ;)

Question: What social features would you like to see in Activeworlds?

There's a discussion going on in the Wishlist forums about a new 'Do Not Disturb' button which is decidedly anti-social... but never the less the potential improvement afforded an opportunity for further 'status' types of suggestions, so I took it. :)  I personally would like to see the option for various statuses (AFK, DND, BRB, Building, etc.) and an associated icon in the exact same way that 'AFK' currently behaves.

While commenting on the thread, it also came to me that AW is pretty lacking on the social side of things.  What was the last big social improvement... being able to see sent telegrams?  Yeesh.

What do you all think should be added?  We tend to talk a lot about the technical and practical side of things here, without ever getting into personal interaction.  Let me know by commenting on the post below. :)

Thanks!

A Closer Look at Advertising: What should activeworlds.com represent?

For all of the points I hit on yesterday concerning advertising, it completely slipped my mind to mention the recent changes to activeworlds.com -- the first impression of Active Worlds to most new users.  After years of a stagnant and static front page, activeworlds.com finally received a face lift several weeks ago. Surely the community would be esctatic!  An update, finally!  Well, it certainly got a lot of feedback... most of it was pretty negative.  For the forum community, at least, no failure was too minimal to drag out and beat to death... and then some. There are spots to improve on, certainly, but yeesh! I'm still not sure who is responsible for the updates, but I'll take this time to commend them for continuing to apply minor tweaks since the initial update.  The flaming forum barrage surely would have driven off a lesser person.

At any rate, I'm not going to use this as a sounding board to pass judgment on the site as is -- I think we've covered that well enough.  Rather, I'm more interested in the potential of what Active Worlds' homepage should be; what it should do, and what it should represent.

Is grassroots advertising the answer for Active Worlds?

Of the things I would say that I am not, a social builder would be one of them.  This is probably perplexing if given any thought, because I enjoy building towns and even the occasional collaboration -- but that isn't my preference.  To be honest, I feel that I've come to a compromise with townbuilding because the projects I like to build are so massive -- mountain ranges, neighborhoods, cities -- that it would be impractical to have a single builder on the project.

This may explain some of my more recent projects, such as incentive neighborhoods in the Southern Highlands and Builder's Challenge. I tend to set up a context as a larger, pre-existing environment that builders come in and fill.  Still social in a way, but I'm never building alongside others -- I'm a before and after thought.

Either way, the challenge and experience gained by working with other builders in this way has been invaluable to me personally, so I'm always glad to see new builders coming through.  New builders have new ideas, and that can inspire all sorts of things in a project.  This sort of truth is behind my approval of a trend that citizen Urbane Chaos has taken to lately -- writing articles about Active Worlds around the web.  And what an article! Most everything I'd want to tell someone about Alphaworld is nicely formatted and ready to go on that page.  This should bring in new builders by the truckload, right?

Well, maybe.  I've dabbled in a bit of this myself -- with limited success.  If you follow the forums you may remember that we made FARK.com last year during the There fiasco, which drew a few older members out of the woodworks.  I'll occasionally spread links on social networks and have taught others how to use them effectively, and personally I feel that this as a method of advertising has a lot of potential.  If you'll notice, Flagg has picked up on it in the past few months... utilizing re-tweeting to spread his message and starting a Facebook Fan Page to get the userbase mobilized in advertising.

Twitter / Flagg: AWI's ONE-DAY SALE Announc ... via kwout

Active Worlds hasn't really had any sort of advertising for years, and I think this may as well have been their un-official policy all along.  Word of mouth; if it's a good product, you'll tell your friends about it.  Before social networking, this was unreasonable... and the Active Worlds Universe has really suffered because of it.

These days... I don't know, is it?

I feel like a lot of us have given up on that route some time ago, but it may be worth it to revisit the idea.  In Urbane Chaos' example, I had never heard of hubpages before visiting... but they seem to have it all right there.  The method here is to write and article, and use their tools to add some pictures and make it visually interesting.  There are numerous feedback options -- including facebook integration -- that then allows readers to take the article and share it how they will.  In this particular case, some AW citizens have done so by sharing it on their facebook feed.

Other avenues have also seen success -- Flagg's retweet contest drew 12 retweets (about 7 more than I had anticipated), and reached at least a few hundred additional people because of it.  He threw in a prize for incentive, but I really see potential there.  A good number of tweets can get passed over before something really sticks, and it only takes one to get the attention of hundreds.

As social networking outlets gain in popularity, it seems that this idea that was once asinine and destructive may actually be viable now.  Given the current situation, I'd say it is worth a shot.  At least with these few anecdotes, I see the potential for a successful advertising campaign.

What do you think?