Posted by: vivatymarkh | June 29, 2009

Shoes, bling, and some firecrackers

Happy Early July 4th!

Hope everyone’s enjoying their summer! We put our regular release out a couple days early this time around, so a few of you have had a head start on these great new additions:

Improved Profile Pages

We made it easier to learn more about the new people you’re meeting in Vivaty. Just click on any user’s name in most places (or click on View Full Profile in other places), and you’ll see a pop-up with that user’s profile. The profile includes new information (which you can control the visibility of in the Account Settings). It’s easy to see where people are hanging out, what their favorite stuff is, and even to send them a little gnome gift so they know you were checking them out. :)

profile

gnome

Shoes and Bling

It’s about time we let you change your shoes. Hello! Sorry about the delay, but now you can change your shoes, and also get some cool bling or accessories to trick out your avatar. Sunglasses, tattoos and more. Lots more are coming, and the first batches are limited editions, so get yours before they run out!

shoes

Improved Shop and My Stuff

We weren’t fans with how long the old version of My Stuff and Shop took to load up, so we redid it. Now, it should be lightning fast for you to go shopping and check things out to try on or decorate your scene. There’s a ton of content now, so we’ve made search much better too for you to quickly find something you’re looking for in Vivaty.

Object and Scene Pages

shoeprofile

Now if you click on objects, especially from the stores, you can see a little Information icon “I” which you can click on to see the profile information about that object. So for example, if you love the Garnet Red Sandals, you can learn more about how many are left in the store, other items that are similar, and who are the lucky devils who have one already!

Address Book Integration

Some of you guys are really popular. REALLY popular. So we wanted to make it easy for you to invite more of your friends to join, and to send more of them gifts, too. We’ve integrated web address books into our flow. So if you have a Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, AOL or other address book, you can easily select addresses from those lists to send invitations.

ab

Things That Make You Go Boom

Finally, celebrate the 4th of July in your scenes with some firecrackers! These little things make a big boom when you click and set them off. But be careful! Just like in real life, firecrackers are unpredictable. Sometimes you get a fizzle, sometimes you get a crackle, and sometimes you get a delayed explosion the size of a large farm animal. That’s going to leave a mark. :)

Have a great holiday!

Mark Hull
VP Product Management

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Posted in beta

Posted by: vivatymarkh | June 16, 2009

Game on!

Latest round of Vivaty improvements went live last week. Quite a few things undercover that should result in faster, better, stronger performance. On top of that, we rolled out a few fun things, too!

Get Your Game On

We’re testing out Flash games in Vivaty. We’ve scattered video game machines around a few hangouts and for some lucky users. It’s pretty simple to get started. Just walk up to the machine, doubleclick on it, and boom, you’ll have an option to play one of more than 1,200 different games. (I recommend playing “Bloons”). We know many of you have been asking for them, so we listened and built them for you! Now, let us know what you think and help us decide where to go next with them! Add your ideas to feedback.vivaty.com.

arcade

bloon

She’s a Dancin’ Machine!

We thought we’d make it a little easier to go dancing. We built a little dance maker (not to be confused with a tiny dancer), that lets you record a series of dance moves, and then to play them back anytime you want using the “Actions Menu”. Admittedly, it’s a little hidden while we test it out, and after a round of revisions, we’ll make it more widely accessible. To record some dance moves, right-click on your avatar and select “Moods” and “Dancin”. You’ll see “Edit” and “My Dances” in there, which is where you can start recording moves. They’ll be saved in the Actions menu, which you can click on any time to run that series of recorded moves!

dancin

My Account

We’ve made it easier for you to do basic account maintenance (e.g., change your email address, adjust your profile visibility, etc). You can click on “My Account” at the top-right of any Vivaty page, or just click hereto access it.

We’ve got some really cool things coming out. Some great shoes, sunglasses and accessories, in addition to some really cool new dance moves and gestures in the coming weeks. Some other big announcements in the next couple months, so stay tuned!

Thanks,

Mark
VP Product Management

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Posted in features, new release

Posted by: vivatymarkh | June 4, 2009

Tweet 3D and Buying Scenes

See @aplusk in 3D! Vivaty just added a Twitter object for you to put in your scenes! You can easily add this object to your walls, and enter the name of the Twitterer you want to showcase. Maybe you want to put your own tweets in your room, or maybe of your favorite friends and celebrities.

6-4-2009 12-19-28 PM

The Twitter object updates when you visit the scene. This is the first iteration of this, and we’ll add more capabilities in the future, including the ability to post from here, and include multiple styles. Buy it now in the Vivaty Shop!

 6-4-2009 11-17-35 AM

Speaking of multiples, we’ve added the ability to own multiple scenes! Many of our users want multiple scenes, so we ‘re now letting you buy them and create quite a few! Admittedly, it’s a little expensive right now, until we learn a little more from our users about this (so prices likely to drop in the future), but now you can switch things around pretty easily!

6-4-2009 11-18-52 AM

You’ll also notice we tweaked the Launchpad a little bit. It should look a little nicer, in addition to being faster, and easier to connect with some new friends.

Check out some of the latest clothing items. We’ve got some cool swimsuits for summer, some awesome hats, and around the corner, stay tuned for some piercings, tattoos, and shoes! (finally!)

More to come!

Thanks,

Mark Hull
VP Product Management

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Posted in beta

Posted by: vivatymarkh | May 18, 2009

Attention Vivaty Shoppers. Garden Gnomes on Sale, Aisle 4

That K-mart reference is probably going to be lost on a generation of users, but the good news is that you can now go shopping in Vivaty! We’ve opened the doors to the store, and introduced a bunch of new clothing and objects for you to add to your collections! To celebrate the grand opening, we’re giving you some bonus Vivaty Points during the next week when you visit your scene and when you bring some friends with you!

Shopping is super simple. Just click on “Shop” at the bottom of your screen, and you’ll see all the things that are available. You can sort by category and enter keywords for specific items. There are some free things to get you started, and then a wide variety of options for any size Vivaty wallet. There are even some rare exclusive goods for our grand opening, so pick them up while they’re still available! We will be introducing new items all the time (sometimes multiple times during the same day!) so it’s important to come back often! If you want some help, you can learn more here.

While the store has only been open for a couple hours, clearly some of you have been camping out in front of the door. We’ve had thousands of purchases already, and our new dresses, hairstyles, garden gnomes and bottles of virtual champagne are flying off the shelves! Thankfully, another big shipment is on its way. :)

shopp

Gift Invitations

You told us you loved giving gifts to friends, so we decided to make it even easier. Now, when you click on “Invite” in the upper-right side of your screen, we’ve given you a new version of invitations, centered around Gifts. Send some of our most popular gifts to your friends who aren’t on Vivaty yet. For a limited time, we’ve made these gifts all free, so it’s even easier to be generous. And, if your friend accepts your invitation within 60 minutes, you’ll both get a bunch of bonus Vivaty Points!

gift

Actions Menu

Some of you guys are really good dancers, so we thought we’d make it a little easier to show off some of your best moves. Click on the “Smiley” button at the bottom of your screen, and we’ll pop-up the Actions Menu, which shows all the dance moves, gestures and different things your avatar can do. Just click on those, and you’ll be doing your best John Travolta impression in no time.

smiley

Miscellaneous

We’re now compatible on Internet Explorer 8.0. We’ve also tuned up the Launchpad and the My Stuff bar at the bottom of your screen, so those should load up much faster than before. We have a nice facelift coming to the Launchpad in a couple weeks too (think of it as just a couple Botox shots to improve the recent cosmetic surgery we did). Also, we temporarily have disabled the ability to change your scene. This is only for 2 weeks, and was a very painful decision, but we did this in order to bring you the shopping experience sooner. It’ll come back, and in a much better way (trust me!) on June 2.

Whew. It’s been an extremely busy few weeks. Thanks for all your support and feedback. We continue to grow at a really amazing pace, as evidenced by the tons of new people we’re seeing popping into Vivaty and becoming part of the community. Keep sharing your ideas with us on how we can make the experience better for you all.

Keep adding us on twitter too! http://www.twitter.com/vivaty

Thanks,

Mark Hull
VP Product Management

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Posted in beta, features, new release, virtual economy

Posted by: vivatymarkh | May 5, 2009

Expanded User Profiles

Hey there!

Just a quick simple update this week. We just released a new version of user profiles that are web-based, so it’s easy for you to learn more about the people you meet in Vivaty. It’s also a great thing to bookmark for yourself so you can easily see who visited your scene recently, too.  You can share the profile and even save the RSS feed for it, if you’re superfancy.

userprofile

The profile is another iteration on the user profiles we have in scene. Mind you, there are many more developments and enhancements coming on the profile in the coming weeks, but we didn’t want to wait forever to get you something right away! Let us know if you have ideas for making it better in our forums, too. You can get to the profile by right-clicking on your avatar and selecting About Me to get a link to the full profile.

The next release is a biggie. We’ll launch the ability to purchase a lot of things with your Vivaty Points, and you’ll see a ton of new clothing for your avatars. Stay tuned!

Thanks,

Mark Hull
VP Product Management

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Posted in new release, virtual economy

Posted by: vivatymarkh | April 22, 2009

The New Vivaty UI

It’s been quite a while since we’ve redone our UI. Thanks so much for being super patient with us over the past few months as we’ve focused on building a great experience. We’ve now rolled out some pretty significant changes that are the precursor to us introducing the new shopping features in the very very near future. (so close we can taste it! that’s a good thing, btw)

New Interface for Customizing Scenes, Avatars

Definitely a big change here. Now you can easily access all the things that are in your inventory –  all your gifts, furniture, pets, etc., — in a simple interface that makes it supereasy to add it into your scene (it’ll be supereasier in a few weeks when we add Drag and Drop, too). We call it “My Stuff” (go figure), and in a couple weeks, we’ll let you use it as a closet to store all the clothes, dance moves and other things that you’ll be able to buy with your Vivaty Points.

editing

New Launchpad

You told us that you wanted to get a sense of what is going on in Vivaty without leaving your scene. No problem. With the new Launchpad, you can access it anytime, and it pops-up as a layer on top of your scene. This will show you where the party is at, in addition to all the new things to add to your scene, new gifts, news, and upcoming events.

launchpad

New Help Center

We want to make it easier for you to get help on the things you need, in addition for you to be able to send us your ideas and questions more easily. We’ve revamped our Help site, although it’s still getting new content all the time. You can check it out here at http://help.vivaty.com

Text Triggers for Gestures

There’s this engineer here named Len. He’s cool. He works his tail off and then every once in a while in his spare time he makes a new feature. Well, this is one he built in about an hour. Instead of using our menus for gestures, just type them into the text. If you want to wave, type “/wave” in the text, and presto your avatar will wave. Cool eh? And for some things, you won’t even need the slash, like a little smiley :)    Give it a shot. For the full rundown, you can read the help info on these gestures and triggers.

On top of all this, we did a ton of things to make Vivaty run a little harder, better, faster, stronger (insert Daft Punk / Kanye West soundbite here).

Busy week! We’re still working out a few kinks, and if you come across any, please let us know in the Help Center. A few more major changes upcoming. Stay tuned!

Thanks,

Mark Hull
VP Products

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Posted in beta, firefox, new release, scenes, virtual economy

Posted by: vivatymarkh | April 10, 2009

better chat, more flatts

Hey guys,

Crazy week for us in the Vivaty offices. We’ve all been singing tunes from the new Rascal Flatts album “Unstoppable” which you’ve likely seen us blog about, or seen in the news. Just ask “ldunston” when you see him in Vivaty, and he’ll sing you the lines from his favorite Rascal Flatts song, in his best southern accent. :)

The new album has been a huge hit in its first week of sales (likely to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts next week) and it’s been a huge hit in Vivaty, too. We’ve seen an incredible amount of Rascal Flatts fans dancing to the new album and watching the videos, thanks in part to all the great promotion the band gave on their Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace sites.

You can join the party here.

In the middle of everything, we snuck in a few new features this week ahead of schedule. We launched some improved Avatar Labels. No more huge green text above your head. :) Now, you have a label that will try and stay out of the way. You can click on it to get special actions and learn more about the person, too. More improvements are coming for it, too.

We also upgraded all of the video screens across the community. Now, everyone watches what you watch at the same time. Before, when I started a video, if a friend came and joined me a minute later, that friend started the movie from the beginning, while I was a minute ahead. Now, we’ll sync all the videos together in your personal scene, like we’ve been doing in our cinemas and hangouts for a while now.

Some of you might’ve noticed a couple bits of randomness. For example, the screen picture might’ve been a little screwy. We just made a fix to that last night, so all pictures should look great (although we have to repair the “Zoom” feature). Secondly, some videos may no longer work, or instead may be silent. This one, unfortunately, is a little out of our control. As you know, our video provider is YouTube, and they enabled features that allow video owners to disable usage or sound of the videos unless they’re viewed at YouTube.com. If you find your video isn’t working, it’s very very likely that the owner of that video has disabled sharing. We’re sorry about this, but unfortunately, there’s not a ton we can do to change YouTube’s policies.

Finally, stay tuned for a couple of new posts on some upcoming features!

Thanks,

Mark Hull
VP Products

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Posted in beta, features

Posted by: vivatymarkh | March 31, 2009

Sit on it!

Maybe your avatars are exhausted from walking around Vivaty so much. Maybe your feet hurt from dancing. Is it the running around while throwing hearts that has you so tired?

We’re still investigating what’s behind everyone’s desire to sit down, but while we’re busy sleuthing, we’ve rolled out the ability to sit on furniture, bars, etc. So now you can take that new sweetie you just met, and have a serious heart to heart on the sofa of love. Or maybe you need to explain your latest macroeconomic theory — who wouldn’t need to sit down to hear that?

This was a pretty significant push, and a lot of content was updated as part of the process. A couple of you might run into an alert window the next time you visit Vivaty. It should go away in a few days, or you can clear your browser’s cache to get rid of that message, too. Sorry about that, but thanks for your patience!

Couple of other new things that launched yesterday:

Male Avatar Improvements

We did a complete overhaul of the female avatar a couple weeks ago. Now, the men step up to the plate. There are some nice improvements to the general look and feel now, that should make you look a little artificially chiseled. Additionally, you might see a couple new articles of clothing.

Where are the rest of the clothes? We sent a few back to the tailor to get stitched up. The tailors are hard at work, and in a couple of weeks you’ll see why when we begin to release hundreds of new clothing items for your avatars. Hang in there!

In the meantime, let us know what styles you’d like us to make first in our user forum (all you have to do is VOTE!) Vote now

Scene Names

Tired of your scene being named, “My Scene”? Now, you can change it to whatever you want (be good, people!). Change it in the “Settings” link which is under “My Vivaty.” Btw, did you know you can restrict access to your scene to just friends from the same control panel?

Easter Gifts

There are some cute Easter gifts that we just launched, too. Give a gift today to check them out. Little chocolate bunny that gets eaten up when you click on him. Ow! Easter bunny doggie. And another swarm of bunnies coming out soon!

doggie

What’s Coming

We have a major set of changes coming up in the next few weeks. They should make your Vivaty experience much more fun and easy to use. We’re working through a lot of details during that time, so it’s going to be crazy.

In the meantime, we launched a new version of our forums for you to tell us what you’d like us to build next. Share your thoughts with us!

Thanks!

Mark

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Posted in beta, features, new release, scenes, virtual economy

Posted by: vivatymarkh | March 31, 2009

Rascal Flatts is Unstoppable!

Rascal Flatts Vivaty Scene

We know, deep inside, you you yearn to be a country-rock superstar.  :)   One of the reasons may because of Rascal Flatts, one of the most successful bands today, attracting tons of fans from all over the world. Maybe you heard their great cover of “Life is a Highway” in the Pixar movie, “Cars” or maybe you’re just curious.

The latest Rascal Flatts album, “Unstoppable” comes out April 7. In partnership with Universal Music, we’ve created a Rascal Flatts album listening party inside Vivaty. You can listen to the first single from the album in the scene today, and we’ll soon have the entire album for you to check out. While you’re there, check out the Rascal Flatts videos, leave comments, join their fan club, sign up for text alerts, and meet tons of other fans.

Join Now: http://www.vivaty.com/official/rascalflatts

This is the second listening party Vivaty has done with Universal Music, after our earlier one with Queen’s new album. The Vivaty community loves music. Create your own fan site today!

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Posted in features, new release, private beta, scenes, users

Posted by: vivatymarkh | March 19, 2009

Who’s that girl?

Hey everyone!

Lots of new changes that went live earlier this week! Here’s the latest rundown.

New Female Avatars

We’ve spent a lot of time sprucing up our female avatars, and frankly, we think they look great! Thanks for all your positive feedback. We listened very carefully to your comments and applied much of that feedback to the new version. Guys have a new version coming around the corner, too. You’ll also notice a handful of new clothing items. Some of you also noticed that a few items disappeared (wings, for example). Don’t worry! Those will be coming back soon. We just had to send them back to the shop for some repairs, and you’ll see a new version, in addition to hundreds of new clothing items, coming out in the next month.

Here are a few snapshots of some of our new female avatars.

Who Are You?

Have you ever wanted to learn a little more about the people in the scene with you? Or wanted to easily share your Facebook profile or Twitter feeds with them? We introduced a very simple way to do this. Right-click on any avatar and select About Me to see that person’s scene thumbnail, and also any links they’ve chosen to share with you. You can put any link you like in there to share with your friends. I know you guys are thirsty for ways to learn more about people, too. Stay tuned. Some cool new things coming out soon.

aboutme

Show a Little Love!

Yeah, we see you Miss Flirty Flirt. Trying out your moves on the boys. Very cute. Well, now you can win each other’s affection by sending hearts to other friends in the scene. Just right-click on an avatar and select Send Hearts to send a cute little flying greeting to your friends. Warning, if you fall in love, don’t blame us. :)

sendhearts

Rotten Tomatoes!

Love or hate our movies, you can now show how you feel. Just like Sending Hearts, you can also go into the movie theaters and rate them by selecting “I hate this” or “I love this.” Depending on what you choose, the avatar will throw something at the movie screen. So if you’re sick of the latest Twilight clip, just throw some rotten tomatoes to let people know how you feel!

movies

Power to the People!

We’ve given you a couple of new features to help you better control your experience in Vivaty. If that avatar next to you has really bad breath, or is otherwise way too annoying, just right-click and select Ignore User. After ignoring the user, you’ll no longer see their chat and they’ll generally just have to leave you alone. Also, for those of you who prefer to hang out with just an older crowd, you can now put some age restrictions on your scene. Just Edit Settings for your scene to control it. Also, if you have any more significant issue with other users, please just let us know, or send email to help at vivaty.com

Come by the Forums!

We’re listening closely to your feedback, and frequently responding inside our new customer forums. Thanks so much for your fashion ideas, and all the other suggestions. We think about them very very carefully as we’re building our future versions and features. Stop by our forums today. While you’re at it, follow us on Twitter for the latest updates!

See you soon!

Mark and the Vivaty Team

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Posted in beta, facebook, features, new release, scenes, virtual economy

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