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

Posted by: vivatymarkh | March 3, 2009

Now you can spend those Vivaty Points!

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

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Posted in features, new release, virtual economy

Posted by: vivatymarkh | February 26, 2009

Firefox Add-On for Vivaty

We’ve built a Firefox Add-On for Vivaty that we’d love for you to check out.

We have a lot of Vivaty users in Firefox, which we think is absolutely great! Firefox is an outstanding web browser that is constantly getting better and is very supportive of the developer community. (We love our IE users, too, don’t get me wrong, but competition is a good thing, don’t you think? :)   )

You’ve told us you want quicker access to Vivaty, and we know you love being able to access Vivaty from your web browser and wherever you are online. Well, this add-on will make it even easier. When you install it, you’ll have the ability to jump into Vivaty, send gifts, edit your avatar, and more, directly from the browser, regardless of whatever web page you’re on at any given moment. You can also access it by right-clicking anywhere anytime. We’re like Visa — everywhere you want to be — but without the finance charges.

This is also just the first version. We have more cool features coming soon that really make the Firefox experience very cool. Stay tuned for those (btw, if you have ideas you’d like to see, lemme know!)

We actually released the Firefox Add-On for Vivaty a few weeks ago, and have been sharing it with some of our users while we work things out with the Firefox people.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! Right now, you’ll need to do a quick registration with Firefox/Mozilla before you can download our Add-On. But if you write a review and give it a few stars, you can help us get it approved, and therefore, take off this registration requirement.

Thanks!

Mark

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Posted in developer, firefox | Tags: ,

Posted by: vivatymarkh | February 24, 2009

Marc Jacobs or Ed Hardy or Abercrombie or?

We need your help!

Our clothiers are busy sewing up the latest avatar fashions! We’d love your feedback on what you like, what you don’t, and what other styles you’d like to see! Come over to our forums to see a few examples, and share some of your ideas or links of your favorite designers!

http://help.vivaty.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7

Mark

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Posted in beta

Posted by: vivatymarkh | February 24, 2009

Let’s go to the movies!

Hi everyone!

We’re a little late with our blog post, this time around, but we definitely have some cool things for you to check out.

Let’s go to the moviesblog_cinema

Now introducing Cinema Vivaty. We’ve launched three movie theaters that are playing a variety of cool things. Coming Soon Cinema shows the latest movie trailers. Cinema Twilight shows all things Twilight!  Cinema Vivaty shows full-length movies. Each theater has multiple movies, so stick around, have a seat in the theater, and check them out. Each movie is sync’d up so you’re all watching the same thing at the same time. Go figure! There are more cool features coming out in these theaters in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Also, you can request movies and clips here. More comedies? More romance? More action? Tell us what you want to see!

Let’s get together!

We heard many of you ask us for helping in finding other people to hang out with, or to point you in the direction of all the action. To help you with this, we’ve introduced Vivalerts, which are little alerts you’ll see in your scene every few minutes letting you know where people are hanging out, with a quick invitation to go join them if you’re interested! Even if you’re not in Vivaty, when the party is really hopping, we’ll occasionally send you an alert via the Vivaty Message Center at the bottom of your window in the desktop tray. That way, you’ll never miss out when things are hot! We’ll try to do that only once in a while, but if even that’s too much, you can turn these settings off in the Vivaty Message Center.

Now presenting, Miss Congeniality!

We wanted to showcase some of our best friends in the Vivaty community. Those who are the most generous, the most popular, the most active, and our overall VIPs (a combination of cool factors). We’ve quietly launched this Vivaty leaderboard, which you can see from your Launchpad. It’s just the beginning, as we’ll soon start to reward our best community members with a little celebrity awareness!

Tell us what you think!

We’re constantly interested in hearing what new features, ideas or any feedback you have. You’ve probably seen our good friend Samantha in our community. She’s always interested in your thoughts. Additionally, you can share your requests and ideas in our new forums.  We listen very carefully to your feedback, and now it’s even easier for you to share it with other members.

Keep an eye out on an upcoming blog post. Would love your feedback on some upcoming avatar changes and clothing!

Thanks!

Mark Hull
VP Products

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Posted in features, scenes, users

Posted by: vivatymarkh | January 31, 2009

What do you think? New commenting!

Lots of new improvements in the first release of the year, which came out earlier this week! Here’s a quick snapshot:

1) Easier to take and share snapshots!
Now you can easily hit the “Snap” button in your scene, and take a picture of yourself that you can send to your friends just by adding their email address!

2) New commenting capabilities!
You guys really fell in love with the new message boards, so we’ve made it even easier for you to leave comments for friends on pictures, videos and more. Simply right-click on anything to leave a comment. And when you come back, we’ll pop-up a little notification to make it easy for you to see where the new comments are!

3) Easy access in Firefox!
Those of you in Firefox will want to download our Vivaty add-on. With it, you can easily jump into Vivaty from anywhere on the web. Just right-click or click on the Vivaty logo that appears in your Firefox browser after installing our add-on. Check it out here!

4) Valentine’s Day gifts!
Valentine’s Day is around the corner. Show your sweetie how much you appreciate him or her with one of our special, limited-edition Valentine’s Day gifts, including a special heart picture frame, and Valentine’s Day puppy!

5) New Dance movies!
So many of you love to hang out in the dance scene! Well, now we’ve made it easy for you to show off some cool new dance moves while you’re there! Just right-click while you’re dancing to try out the new moves!

It’s only a few weeks into the new year, but our offices are absolutely buzzing with excitement over some very cool new things coming your way. There are tons of new avatar fashions, an incredible new scene to hangout in, and the Vivaty store is starting to take shape! Thanks for your patience as we get these things together. And yes, very very soon, you’ll be able to spend some of those Vivaty Points you’ve been earning.

Thanks,

Mark

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Posted in beta

Posted by: vivatymarkh | December 23, 2008

Get on the floor!

Happy holidays everyone!

It’s been busy around the offices, and we’re coding with a mouse in one-hand and a glass of egg nog in another, so it’s certainly a highly caloric experience.

Nevertheless, we’re happy to introduce a few new things for you, just in time for the holidays!

Bust a Move!
We’ve launched two new dance clubs. They’re fun places to hang out where there are no bouncers to give you the evil eye when you wear the wrong clothes. There are tons of people hanging out there, and trying out new moves to the latest beats. Come check them out!

Dance Club

New Corkboards
So I know our last version of corkboards weren’t exactly as reliable as we’d want. We’ve completely overhauled them, and given them a nice new look, too. Additionally, it’s now easy for you to have a conversation with folks through all the notes you post, and for you to visit the scene of those posters, too. You’ll also get alerts when you have new messages. This is just the beginning for a lot of changes coming to comments and boards, so stay tuned for more!

New Chat
We’re working on a series of improvements to chat, and today released a version that is more visible. Now a new window will automatically appear at the bottom of your screen whenever someone chats. You can type in the box right underneath it, too, to make it even easier to have a conversation. You can still have private chats by just right-clicking on whomever you want to talk to in a scene. This is a simple first-step that we know will make it easier to chat with new friends. Can’t wait to show you what’s next!

Share Snapshots
So many of our users have taken hilarious and awesome pictures of their avatars in their scenes. You can see them by just strolling through the gallery. Now, we’re making it supereasy to share with your friends, even when they’re not on Vivaty. When you edit your avatar, you’ll notice a Snapshot button. Clicking that will take a picture of your avatar in their cool outfits in the scene. Click the Share button, and you can enter email addresses of your friends. We’ll send your picture with a short note, inviting them to join you right then in the scene!

It’s been a wonderful year for Vivaty, and we thank all of our friends for all their help and ideas in helping Vivaty grow. It’s exciting to see how fast the numbers are growing thanks to you guys! We’re going to take a pause from our two-week release cycle during the holidays so the team can enjoy their vacations, but you’ll have another batch of improvements coming in January, so stay tuned.

Until then, happy holidays to all of you!

Cheers,

Mark Hull
VP Product Management

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Posted in beta

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