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.

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!

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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!

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.

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.

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!

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

Just launched a few cool new features. Check ‘em out, and then let us know what you think in our forums.

1) Spending Vivaty Points on Gifts.

When I’m walking around the Vivaty community, people come up to us all the time and ask when they’ll be able to spend Vivaty Points and start buying clothes for their avatar and furniture for their personal spaces. Heck, I’ll admit that I’m a little surprised how often I hear that request, and it certainly is exciting.

Today, we launched the second phase of our economy features. Now, you can spend those Vivaty Points on some special limited-edition gifts to give to your friends. You can even spend them to send to friends who aren’t on Vivaty yet (once they join, they’ll pick up your gift). These gifts are available only for A LIMITED TIME. New gifts will be coming out every week, too.

It costs just 100 Vivaty Points to send these gifts, and a special introductory offer, we’re giving you 25 free Vivaty Points every time you send a gift — so think of it as a 25% off coupon. Now, if you want to send any other gift from the gallery, you can still do that for free. Also, we give all new users 500 Vivaty Points for free, so it’s easy to afford and try these out.

I’ll admit, we are putting our toe in the water with this, because we really want to look closely at how our community is adopting the feature, and learn from it so when we launch the full-fledged Vivaty store in a few weeks, we benefit from all your feedback to launch something that’s really great.

That said, I saw a demo of all the cool new things you’ll be able to shop for in the coming weeks, and we’re playing with the redesign of the experience to make it easy to do — and I’m super super excited about this stuff. Your new avatars are going to look totally hip. We’re going to give a sneak peek to some of our friends, and if you want to be included on the VIP list, drop me a note at mark [at] vivaty.com.

Btw, go to the forum, and please post pictures of fashions you like or any links to websites of things you’d like us to build. Already, we’re creating clothes and objects based upon your ideas — trust me, we pay attention to your feedback!

2) Rating Movies in Cinema Vivaty

Now in Cinema Vivaty, you can rate movies. Right-click on a movie and tell folks whether your love or hate what’s playing. If enough people hate it, it’ll skip to the next movie. Man, I wish I had that capability when I saw the Jonas Brothers Concert Movie over the weekend. Just kidding!

This is kinda cool, but it’s nothing compared to what you’re going to see in a couple weeks when we launch the final part of the movie experience…stay tuned for that! We saw it demo’d today, and it made everyone in the company laugh and smile. It’s awesome!

Some smaller things: Some of you may get an alert asking you for your email address. In some of the Vivaty experiences, you don’t need an email address to register. Unfortunately, in those scenarios, you also don’t get alerts when you receive a gift. So we’re going to ask some of you whether you want to provide your address so you can get those alerts. We’ll give you some Vivaty Points, too, so it’s a no-lose scenario! And if you have any concerns, please read our Privacy Policy. The short answer is we won’t do anything you don’t want with your information.

Firefox: You guys rule! Thanks to all the great reviews from our community, Firefox/Mozilla approved our add-on. You can add the cool Vivaty add-on here in just two clicks.

The team is buzzing here. We’re seeing more and more of you folks joining everyday and participating in the Vivaty community. We’re really excited to build and share with you all sorts of cool new experiences in the coming weeks, too.

If you want to stay in the loop like all the cool kids, follow our twitter account, too! Say hello! Talk with you soon!

Best,

Mark H.
VP Products

We know that many of you were busy preparing last week for the Thanksgiving gorgefest. Here at Vivaty, we believe only in deep-fried turbaconducken, and as you might guess, we’re still recuperating. While you were busy preparing, though, you might’ve missed a couple of nice enhancements we released last week.

First, we’ve made the avatar editing experience much better by swinging the camera out in front of your avatar, and putting the clothes in an easier place to access so you can try them on and see how your avatar looks with ease. Keep your eyes on this area as you’re going to see a couple of new features here shortly that will help you share your cool avatar designs with friends.

Also, those keeping score at home probably noticed we adjusted the camera a little bit just in general when you walk around Vivaty and when you zoom in and out of your avatar. This should make it much easier for you to navigate and for you to get a better visual perspective. Let us know if you like this improvement.

We also launched a major overhaul of our video objects and televisions. They’re much better behaved these days. As a special treat, we also launched video playlists. Now you can load up a television with 6 videos and they’ll play back-to-back. That’s pretty cool for when you’re watching your Taylor Swift video marathon.

We also introduced a special sofa that we’re doing some testing with sitting. After a long day of running around in Vivaty, we know your feet get tired. Well, now you can sit down and rest a bit. We’re actively testing it right now, so be forewarned, but you can check it out by adding the magenta sofa to your scene.

Finally, we also lost a little doggie. Somewhere in Eskape Cove, our trusy canine companion, Rover, ran away (shame on us for not tying him up while we played the Shell Game). If you can find him in Eskape Cove, and send us a picture of him with you, we’ll send you a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate (if you’re one of the first three who find him). Just send me an email and let me know! Good luck!

Thanks,

Mark

It’s not unusual to jump into Vivaty and find a few Vivaty employees chatting with folks, or playing the new Eskape Cove shell game, or checking out the latest scenes. But sometimes even we need to get back to work!

We introduced something pretty cool this week so that even when you’re not logged into Vivaty in your web browser, you can still get the latest updates when your friends log in or drop by your scene, so you can then jump in and join them.

Vivaty Message Center

It’s a small little thing that sits at the bottom of your Windows task bar. It’ll fade in a little balloon that tells you when your friends have logged in, sent you a gift, commented on your scene, or when some other cool bit of activity takes place in Vivaty. You can easily customize it, too, to just get the messages you want to receive.

You don’t have to do anything special to get this. We’ll install it automatically when you download the latest version of the Vivaty Player on your next visit (You can always uninstall or disable it if you don’t want it, too).

Eskape Cove Shell Game

Also, the next time you’re online, check out the Shell Game at Eskape Cove. No, it’s not some guy with a wooden box betting you $20 you don’t know which shell the ball is under. Instead it’s a fun game where you race the clock to pick up enough shells in order to bring out your inner hula. Best scores gets an exclusive gift from Vivaty that you can’t get anywhere else! It’s a lot of fun, and is the first in a series of fun games that are on their way, so stay tuned for more!

We’ve seen some great scenes recently. Loved seeing Stephane C.’s scene and Summerdays2106’s scene. We love Papillon Denuit’s scene, too. Finally, I think people can thank xion696 for the results in last week’s elections.

See you soon!

Mark Hull
VP Product Management