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!

Just wanted to share some of the news about our public beta. thanks to everyone for helping us get to this point!

• TechCrunch
• Scobleizer
• ZDNet
• Wired
• Mashable
• Virtual World News

And a few others, which we’ll post tomorrow in our press section. 

You can also check out our YouTube channel or follow us on Twitter.

/heidi

We are excited to share some news with you, as reported by a few people this morning like Techcrunch and Robert Scoble. Vivaty Scenes is now open to everyone on Facebook and AIM.

Thanks for all of your feedback, bugs, and ideas during our closed beta period. We’re still in beta, which means we still have a lot of stuff to fix. But we can’t wait for more people to experience Vivaty Scenes.

We have been lucky to attract thousands of beta users and we’ve demo’ed Vivaty Scenes to dozens of people in the last six months. Every time we show it to someone, they have a new question or suggestion that makes us think about how to get the “blend” just right… between what you love on the web and what you want more of. We want the “who” and the “what” to stay the same but the “how” to change…

The signs of a more immersive web are all around us: we wake up every day to more media sharing APIs, more “live” and self-expression options on IM clients, and more visual depth being added to profiles on even the most simply-designed sites like Facebook. The web is getting more expressive, visually engaging and fun and we hope you stay with us to be part of it.

So what’s new?

Here’s what we’ve been working on since our last post.

Invite friends: while I know many of you met some new friends in our meet-ups, now you can choose your own Facebook or AIM friends to experience Vivaty with. Click Invite inside our applications on AIM or Facebook, or drop your friend right into your scene through a Facebook URL. It’s easy, try it with my scene: http://apps.facebook.com/vivatybeta/?hostId=4

New scenes: We’ve got new scenes, like a beachfront cabana and country chalet.

Avatars & Moods: All our avatars got a little face-lift and we added 4 new ones. Plus you can now choose an avatar mood, like Happy, Chillin’, Flirty, Angry or Sad. (beware of Sad, it’s really Sad)

More fun with friends: Even when a friend is not there, you can drop in, comment, rate and leave notes in their scene.  Make a Facebook friend your Vivaty BFF with special themed BFF frames, and more.

Flickr and Facebook galleries: More choices to pull your favorite Facebook and Flickr photo feeds into your scene.

Today we had an exciting development… we went live as a featured “mini-application” module on the new version of AIM 6.8!   This begins a phased roll-out of our first product, Vivaty Scenes.  We’re starting on AIM, then we’ll (soon) open up our Facebook application to full public access.  Stay tuned! We’ll keep expanding the feature list for both platforms.

The experience in AIM really gets us closer to our goal: more visually rich, engaging, immersive, and highly personalized experiences on the distributed web. We are not trying to re-invent the social graph, asking users to import their friends’ addresses again and again. Instead we want to embed Vivaty where web users already have friends, then make those experiences with friends more engaging and fun. 

To get into Vivaty Scenes on AIM:

-     Fire up your AIM or get the new version.

-     Once you have AIM running, click on the “Get More” link on the bottom of your AIM client to open the AIM Plug-In Manager, or Download Vivaty Scenes from the AIM Gallery.

-     Click on “Get it Now” button next to Vivaty in the “Featured Developers” section. That automatically adds Vivaty Scenes to your AIM client.

-     Click on the Vivaty Icon on the bottom of your AIM client and your Vivaty Scene will be created with your avatar.

-     Once inside your Vivaty Scene, make sure and invite your friends to join you. You do this via the menu in the AIM client next to the words Vivaty Scene, and choose ”Share This Plug-In”.

Once you’re in, you can embed any web link, such as Flickr feeds, find YouTube videos for your TV screens, add music, and decorate your scene.  Or you can just pop in for a quick 3D chat with a Buddy who’s on AIM.

Are you an AIM user?  We need your help!  Give us your thoughts on Vivaty Scenes on AIM.  If you have ideas, features, or bugs to report, please email us at help@vivaty.com.

/keith 

Thanks to everyone who’s been coming to our meet-ups, reporting issues, and sharing ideas (especially Holly T, Erueti, Saira and Donza).

Yesterday we took a little break to head over to Under the Radar, a get-together for new start-ups to demo and show their stuff. We were presenting in the Social Networking category along with social-meets-mobile companies Jygy and Xumii and niche social network Nesting.com. After a quick six-minute demo on a wireless card, our CEO Keith pulled off the victory. Thanks to everyone who voted for us!

We celebrated of course, but quickly returned to reality… getting the Vivaty experience right. There are so many features you’ve asked for that make a lot of sense: more avatar customization, more SNS integration (Twitter or Friendfeed anyone?), more objects, sit gestures, more moods, and more user-control around chat. While we won’t get to all of these by our public launch, we’re carefully tracking requests and we will eventually get to yours!  Want to share more feedback live? Join us for our next meet up.

When: Tomorrow, June 5 at 11 – 11:30 am PST Find your time zone here.
Where:  Your scene.  Not in our beta yet? Email us at beta@vivaty.com.
Who:  Look for us (Mark, Heidi, Tony, Jay) and find other users by going into our scenes.

Email us at beta@vivaty.com and we’ll pair you up with someone new! See you in Vivaty!

Thanks to everyone who joined us in our first ever Vivaty Meetup last week. We had such a great time, we’re going to make it a regular occurrence, and try to do it every week. We were mightily impressed that die-hard Vivaty fans from Europe stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to join us!

We loved seeing all the creativity folks had put into their scenes at this early stage. Our prizes for the best scenes go to Carmen V., Erueti B., and Dianne J! Thanks you guys not only for showing your creativity, but for also sending us all your great ideas and feedback on how to make the Vivaty experience even more compelling for you and your friends!

The next Vivaty Meetup (can anyone come up with a cooler name?) will be held on Thursday, May 22 at 11AM Pacific Time (7PM GMT). Should make it a little easier on all our friends from outside the Western Hemisphere. Come join up and meet us and let us know your ideas!  Find your local time here. 

During this phase of the beta, we’ve turned off invitations, which makes it a little tougher to go explore, but you’ll see a few Vivaty people on your Friends List (Jay, Tony and myself – Mark) who you can chat with and join in our scenes. Make sure to drop by and say hello! Also, during the meetup, we’ll jump around and visit your scenes, too. We’re working on our housewarming gifts of virtual apple pie and cookies. J

See you soon!

Mark H

For the first time ever we’re going to be holding a Vivaty meet up, this Thursday (5/15). Beta testers will be given the chance to win a $50 Amazon.com gift card and have their scene included in our Featured Scenes category when we launch! With so many possibilities, we’d love to see fun, unique scenes that reflect your personality; change the furniture, make a video wall, blow up that fish tank, put an object in an unexpected spot, add a tree inside and more.  Click Read More to get the scoop.

WHEN: Thursday, May 15th, 5 – 5:30 pm PST (that’s 8 pm EST and 1 am GMT if anyone’s awake!)
WHERE: Your Vivaty scene
WHO: You, other Vivaty beta users, and us
WHY: We’re on the prowl for our top 5 user scenes (prizes and glory!)

We can’t wait to hear what you think and see some crazy and creative Vivaty scenes!

If you’re not in our beta and would like to be added, please sign up here http://vivaty.com/signup.php

/heidi

It’s been a while since we blogged but the product and dev teams have been working hard on all your reported fixes. We’re making great progress here so thanks for your patience. We love users who are vocal, even with nits, so keep it coming here or at beta@vivaty.com.

So far, our survey results show the top 3 reasons why people MOST like Vivaty are:

1. To change the look of my scene
2. To change the look of my avatar
3. To explore friends’ scenes

Now on #3, we realize your friends are probably not (yet) in Vivaty since we still have Facebook invites turned off. But we’re eager to hear what you’d like to do once you’re in a friend’s scene – spy, cruise around, have a chat, feed their fish, raid their closet, etc. Please let us know.

Here are 3 of our favorite user comments and some early fan art.

/heidi

“It’s FUN to have/edit my own room in Facebook! In my opinion, need avatar-editing (it could be cool if i could make my avatar using photos of my facebook-photoalbum), wanna send virtual items to friends or rate other people’s rooms.”
- Akira Gonaikawa

“It was easy to upload photos from flickr and even a video! Since Vivaty is browser enabled it also feels as if you’re in another window “which you are” except for the fact that this “window” is LIVE!”
- Carmen Villadar

“Actually I could rant quite a bit about where I am with Vivaty, but simply put, I’m in love with it. It’s the only facebook app (I realise it’s much more than a facebook app) I’ve ever seen thats any use and the only one I’d ever invite other people in my life to share and create content with.”
- Erueti Brown

We’re in the midst of planning how to involve a wider community of creators to participate on the Vivaty platform. Just think: your own interactive lamp, a floor to ceiling fish tank, your own line of hot tubs… We personally can’t wait for people like Carmen, one of our beta testers, to create stuff in Vivaty. We know there are many “voices” out there and many who will experiment in ways we can’t even imagine yet.

If you’re a creator, developer, or frankly anyone with an opinion, we’d love to hear what you’d want most from a new platform that’s browser-based. Create, create WHAT?, participate, participate HOW?, all of the above?  Email us at developers@vivaty.com.

/heidi

Our artists are hard at work designing our next set of scenes. We’d love to hear what design ideas inspire you. Which of the spots above is a place you’d invite your friends? Which photos or sites have the style you like most? Leave us a comment or email us at beta@vivaty.com.

Private beta update - we’re really just now starting to let private beta users in, so if you haven’t gotten an invite yet, don’t worry, we’re still really really early. Thanks to everyone who has taken time to share likes, dislikes and bugs.

/heidi

Photo credits: fijiresort.com, dazeen.com, architecturaldigest.com.