Avatars United! Facebook for virtual personas.
April 16, 2008 12:33 pmOn a side note: 43 left to go
Nadine Nozaki was as kind to invite me to the next facebook… for avatars. Having a strictly ‘no human’ policy, it seems like fun: Avatars United is a community for game avatars only. You cannot upload real life photos nor include information on your avatars description that could reveal your real life identity. You are welcome however to upload photos of your real life friends’ game avatars. It is also possible to link more than one avatar to your account, to make sure you list your alts - be they in Second Life or another virtual world. Basic facebook functionality (groups, events, …) is there, although, I did not find any API’s (yet?).
Avatars United Mission Statement
Avatars United (AU) is a community website bringing virtual characters from all online worlds together. The project is built in recognition of the fact that strong bonds and close friendships actually can be tied within virtual spaces. AU has furthermore gone one step further in recognizing virtual personas as personas in their own right by building a community for avatars only. Anyone involved in any type of virtual world is familiar with addressing people using their avatar names even after having gotten to know them. With tools to communicate with, find and track old virtual friends and share experiences from virtual realms AU wishes to stand out as a community highlighting the social aspect of life within virtual worlds.
Discrepency between WoW and SL presence
Currently 21 out of 558 avatars are Second Life residents. Is this because not enough SL avatars stumbled over this yet? Or, as we have a lot of ‘personal avatar’ blogs, networks, groups, on the web already, we actually do not need another networking site representing our avatars?
- World of Warcraft - 396 avatars
- Eve Online - 34 avatars
- Second Life - 21 avatars
- Everquest II - 13 avatars
- Star Wars Galaxies - 12 avatars
- The Lord of the Rings - 12 avatars
- Ultima Online - 11 avatars
- Guild Wars - 10 avatars
- Everquest - 9 avatars
- Entropia Universe - 6 avatars
- City of Heroes - 6 avatars
- Dark Age of Camelot - 5 avatars
- Tabula Rasa - 4 avatars
- Lineage 2 - 4 avatars
- Age of Conan - 4 avatars
- Finfal Fantasy XI - 3 avatars
- Dofus - 3 avatars
- Vanguard: Sage of a Hero - 3 avatars
- City of Villains - 2 avatars
- Lineage - 0 avatars
IMVU, There and Kaneva not represented
Strangely enough, it seems IMVU, There, Kaneva and the Sims 2 avatars are not welcome. It’s not one of the possible picks when signing up. And is this any - direct - competition for Myrl.com, a website aimed at connecting avatars from different virtual worlds - Second Life and There at the moment - solely and offers more networking functionality?
19 Responses to “Avatars United! Facebook for virtual personas.”
Do I need an invite? If yes, please send me one. What about rezzed.net?
Nice, report it’s to empty, yes, Not peter just to sign up, no need to get invited, even is invite like I did to vint is a way to get your friends to join.
Cool! I’m joining :-D
For some reason only 1 of the pictures I uploaded show in my album. I like the idea of the site though.
[…] I read today on Vint’s blog about the Avatars United website. I used to not really enjoy social networking sites in the past. […]
Daman, strange. Maybe some beta-error? (It took my picture a while to appear though.) What is that I read about a blogger strike?
And Peter, no you do not need an invitation, you can just sign up.
Very fast response from those guys :)
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For some reason our file-upload server could not handle file extensions in caps. It worked when i renamed the file from FacesOfDaman.JPG to FacesOfDaman.jpg.
A big thanks for reporting this, until we have a permanent fix for this please rename your file as described above and upload it again.
Yeah, I’m not sure I see the point of yet another virtual social network. I mean it’s fun and all, but with slprofiles (and all the others), flikr, personal blogs etc… it seems like just another password to forget.
Peter, I’m actually not even sure if I have a rezzed.net account. *grins* (Not sure if I ever heard about it. I think I missed it. *goes to search if she has an account there).
[…] you have - you can add alts from other games or Virtual Worlds and connect with others. (Thanks Vint Faulken for pointing this one […]
So, I read this blog that says, “go to this site http://nevacross.com/?utm_source=cdg&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=blogging and build an avatar . Use it on AU!” I go there, no way to join…. odd. Then I read your blog. Too late i suppose. BUT I do have hope that this will expand like facebook did with high schoolers, etc. Are we IMVU users the little kids that have to wait until the trend ends to be able to join? I hope not.
Erin, IMVU avatars are welcome at Koinup. So don’t feel bad about missing out on Avatars United. If they are ignoring IMVU, There, Sims, etc avatars, we can take the ‘Avatars United’ with a little disbelief. ;) It’s like the catholic labour union in Belgium saying they represent ALL belgian workers. *grins*
Have you tested to give them feed back about missing worlds? Other stuff have been fixed quicker that saying Hi to them. I never heard of IMVU myself, But I’m sure hat my problem.
Just got a mail from AU:
We have now added IMVU and There to our list of
“games” so that avatars from these worlds can register.
We are also doing some research in order to add Sims
sometime soon, none of us have any previous experience
from Sims, so we don’t want to mess it up :) . If there are
any other games/worlds we might have missed, don’t
hesitate to let us know.
About 3 hours after i repoerted it
Balp, Woot! I suggested also There and vSide and MeetMe. And probably I’m forgetting still about some Azian ones. (I’m sick and tired of seeing virtual world communties being ‘continent’ based. God, we should find an universal language. - except those in 0 and 1’s we already have.)
Daman, as for the time zones you mentioned. Also I - with a belgian IP - can only pick swedish and finnish. So I guess there are only three option: swedish, finnish and english. ;)
Yeah. It was confirmed by them that they only have those three options. I just mixed up myself, considering those were by chance the languages where I’m staying.
We are on out way *giggle*
1 World of Warcraft - 401 avatars
2 Second Life - 47 avatars
3 Eve Online - 34 avatars
We proved to be an effective flashmob (according to P.N.) already with the more-than-25-groups movement.
Erin, as you can read here, IMVU, Kaneva, There and vSide accounts are now available too. =)
Care to comment?