Connections

It would appear, much to my own dismay, that my thoughts of writing more regularly were just that… thoughts.

Oddly enough, within 2 days of making my last post I got contacted by someone to check out the site ourtbeat.com. The premise is similar to kaneva, in that it should be a social networking site with a 3d interface where users can interact with each other. The optimist in me thinks that this could be cool. The main difference between this and kaneva is the more focused user base. It should be a place for artists to interacts. Where they can display their wares and make contacts - be they musician, video producer, painter, graphic designer or any other type of artist. By having a focus, the site hopes to be able to avoid the vast wasteland of garbage that are myspace and kaneva profiles.

The pessimist in me wonders, with every persone who ever touched pencil to paper, or anyone with a cracked version of photoshop and frontpage, or any tweaker with a copy of fruity loops thinking they are an artist, what’s the difference? If there’s one thing an amateur artist knows not to do, it’s crush other people work. I think the big fear is that focus then being turned on their own work. Another fear is, since this is a very small development team making this, that it will be a virtual world similar in look and feel to Sociolotron, which is basically a 3d scrolling map with some paperdolls. Sociolotron looks like a reskinned 1987 video game. I hope the more modern engines available will mean that, even though the team is creating it from scratch, they have a decent library base to start from and can just skin it and create interaction.

I’ll wait and reserve judgement long enough to check out the beta, and at least see it go live.

As for Kaneva, four people signed up after my last post, but none of them stayed active long enough to do more than make a profile. Not a big deal really, there are a lot of different sites around to checkout and update. That I have received exactly one(1) message from someone that I didn’t already know that wasn’t a solicitation for raves and friending tells me a lot about the user base. People aren’t cruising around the site, looking for people to talk to, or even viewing the multimedia other users upload. Instead it is a great popularity race. I can hope that when they go live they reset everyone’s raves to 0, or perhaps rework that system altogether. For now, I’ll check it out every few weeks to see how they are coming along in development, but I’m not terribly hopeful.

Happy Hump Day!

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