IMVU Pulse

IMVU has a new feature called "Pulse". I think a lot of what they do is just "let's throw this on the wall and see if it sticks", without putting much thought into WHY people might want it or HOW people might use it. This works great sometimes, but even when it works great you end up with features that aren't that well thought out of scalable.

At first I thought the feature was pretty cool, but I soon noticed some things that really bug me about it.

The first problem I have with it is that I don't see pulses from very many of my friends. Now, my case may be somewhat unusual because I have over 70,000 friends but it seems I can only get pulses from maybe the first 500 or 1000 of my friends...so I get Pulses from Brett and Matt and Dusty, who are all IMVU employees and have all been on my friend list for years, and from Kittenkat, who has also been on my list for about six years, and I have gotten a pulse from ONE other friend, who has been a member since 2006, but any of my newer friends, the Pulses simply don't show up, and most of the people on my friends list that are still active are in the 69,000 friends that came AFTER 2006. Very frustrating. I probably look like the Jinx, Jinx and Jinx show because I never post on any of these other Pulses (because I can't see them.)

I expect, and I think most people do, whether consciously or not, for Pulses to behave the way your feed behaves on Facebook. In fact, Pulse IS pretty much your IMVU version of a FB feed. And it mostly does, except that on Facebook it would show the Pulses from ALL my friends, not just the ones I've had for at least four years. :/

One other small thing that bugs me a lot is that if you've posted in response to someone else's Pulse, and then someone else posts, you will get an email stating that someone has responded to YOUR Pulse. Now, you can turn off notifications of Pulses, but you cannot differentiate between your pulses and those of others. I'd rather get emailed when someone responds on MY Pulse, but it's been four weeks of getting responses to Matt's Pulse about Create Mode that are disguised as responses to MY Pulse. I really think IMVU has to tweak this a little so if my email notifications are going to be all or nothing like that, at least the email itself could say "Someone has posted a response on Matt's Pulse".

I also think they are somewhat unwieldy. I can view the last three comments on a Pulse, but if I've missed the last FOUR comments, I may have to click to view all 100 comments or whatever. Maybe it could show the last four comments and clicking could show you the four comments prior to THOSE instead of the whole thing. I'm pretty wordy and I haven't hit a limit to how much I can write in there, so loading in 100 comments can be a bit much. If you DO want to view all comments, it should take you to a separate page with only that Pulse on it.

And finally, I feel Pulse takes away somewhat from other features. Homepages are starting to become less important (maybe they have for a while, but even more so if you can just talk to people in a pulse.) And they get in the way of my Inbox. If I sign in to IMVU, I end up on the page that shows my Pulses first, and I have to let that load in before I can go to the inbox. Perhaps Pulse should be moved to peoples homepages.

I see a lot of potential in Pulses. I do like the fact that I can let people know if I have a new product or ask their opinion about stuff or even just say "hi", but I hope that IMVU will put some more thought into it and do a little tweaking.

IMVU VIP

Wow, IMVU VIP has changed a lot since it started. I had signed up for it when they first started the program and ended up canceling because the program sucked so much. The stuff they offered you was just lame, lame, lame! Well, okay, the Brittany Barber Chair is kind of funny...

Now it seems like you get a really nice bundle each month, and I figured with the discount you get on catalog purchases and the small amount of credits you get it might be worth it so I decided to sign up.

For some reason though, my card was declined. It sent me into a bit of a panic actually, checking my bank account to make sure everything was okay! Everything seemed okay so I tried making my purchase a few more times and it didn't work. Now I'm wondering if it might be related to the ban I had my bank account put on anything related to PayPal after There announced their closing and immediately banned me and then PayPal froze my account - well, froze ME from doing anything with my account, while still accepting payments to it and taking bogus charge-backs out of it. Since I couldn't unlink my bank account from PayPal THROUGH PayPal, I had my bank change my account number and disallow anything coming from them. I'm not sure how that would affect a credit card payment from IMVU, but maybe it affects all virtual goods or something?

I guess it saved me a little money for now.

Speaking of PayPal, it's been about long enough maybe I can talk about my There/PayPal fiasco in an upcoming entry.

There is closing so whatcha gonna do with all those Therebucks?

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Want discounted Therebucks? Well, too bad!

Unless you've been a little out of it lately (like I often am) you have probably heard about There.com's Therebucks buyback program for developers. What a surprise, eh? Isn't that something they said they'd NEVER EVER do? I thought it was...

Yeah so, There is buying Therebucks back from developers in a brand new program that pays them $1 for 1800 Therebucks which is a fantastic rate, since that is the actual face value of Therebucks. When it was first announced, it sounded like there might be a limit of $100 developers could sell to them at a time, once a week, as well as a transaction fee and a cap on the amount of Therebucks There would purchase each week, however SO FAR it seems as if they have purchased ALL of the Therebucks people have sold to them.

My reactions to this are...complex to say the least. I had someone in the There.com forums tell me "you know you will be in line to sell your Therebucks just like everyone else", but the truth is, since I am a developer but I am ALSO a reseller, I am always selling my Therebucks, usually as fast as they come into my account, so I'm not sure if I see myself EVER selling Therebucks back to There. Not because I don't want to, or because they could decide not to allow me to, but simply because I'm trying to sell them through http://jinx.tv and they aren't going to sit in my account long enough to ever go through There's buyback system. The only reason I could really see for selling to There is if I specifically set aside some Therebucks to sell to them just to try out the system, or if I was no longer able to sell Therebucks to There members looking to get more for their money. Yeah, right...I think discounted Therebucks are going to be more in demand than ever! And this doesn't kill the reseller market because there are always people who make Therebucks through garage sales or selling off rare items they collect or other non-dev activities.

So does this ruin my business or my livelihood? Well, not really. At least not yet as far as I can tell. I mean, if I'm in stock I'm in stock, and you can find out through following me on twitter when I'm in stock so even if I were only selling once a week or only selling a few hundred dollars worth a week, http://jinx.tv will still be there. Perhaps I will try creating some new content for There to increase the amount of Therebucks I earn myself to sell - although I've gotten into farming/gardening quite a bit lately so I may not have tons of time to do this. I'm probably better off making content for http://imvu.com, since I make more money selling IMVU credits than I do Therebucks and have for a long time, and it's easier to make money off content made for IMVU. Still, I did make a little list of things I'd like to make for There whether it's the best choice financially or not - just because I LIKE making stuff for There and I must admit I feel more of an affinity for There than IMVU.

In the short term this has actually been great for me...I was able to pay my February rent with no problem, where lately there has been such a glut of Therebucks I've been putting all my money into buying them from people and falling a few days behind in paying for them. Now I'm back to paying for Therebucks right away AND paying my rent on time, which is nice. I've sometimes wondered why I put SO MUCH effort into buying and selling Therebucks when it really is not very financially rewarding for me and IMVU is less effort for more money. One of the reasons is to not put all my eggs in one basket, if you know what I mean, but also There is just so much part of my life at this point, I can't imagine NOT buying/selling Therebucks. Probably a funny thing to hear from someone who VERY rarely logs into the There client.

Okay, so enough about me, how will this affect other people? Developers should be happy. One developer, after the announcement, said they were "so happy I could cry". For realz? I don't see this as THAT exciting for devs. It's not like they couldn't cash in their Therebucks before...they are just getting a slightly better rate, and that rate is at the expense of people who are used to buying Therebucks at a discount. I estimate that about $10,000usd of TBs go through the reseller market a week. I guesstimate that about $6000 of that (at least) is from developers. Let's say they sell $5000 of that to There for $1 per 1800tb. That is $5000 less of TBs for people to buy at a discount. At the least.

Geez...is There really going to buy $5000 worth of Therebucks a week from devs? If they don't, the backlog could add up quite quickly and frustrate people selling to them, and if they do...where are they getting the budget to buy $5000 worth of TBs? Perhaps this is the result of There being owned by a capricious multi-millionaire? I suppose after their initial seed money for this project, they figure that their Therebucks sales will increase, and they can use the increase to pay for the next lot of Tbux that they buy? That's how I imagine it working, so There isn't really losing $5000 a week, but a smaller amount, especially if paying it out is assigned to an employee they already have who simply has an increased workload, so There has no additional labor costs from this. It still equals a net loss for them, albiet a small one.

Okay so, let's say you are a member of There who frequently buys discounted Therebucks. I have people who regularly buy certain amounts from me. Like, say, $100 worth a week. I haven't done a survey about this or anything, but I'm guessing $100 is their budget for the week, and not that 200,000 Therebucks is their budget. They don't magically have more money to spend on Therebucks just because  they aren't getting them at a discount, so if they have to buy from There, they will now get 180,000 Therebucks for their money (and There will get $100, which they will spend to pay developers for their Therebucks in the buyback program). Okay, so now you have 20,000 less Therebucks to spend a week. Let's say you normally pay 100,000 to There a week for rent or neighborhoods or other non-flexible things. You now have 80,000 instead of 100,000 or 20% less to spend buying developer stuff. Hmmm...okay so, that means developers will now make less than they would have otherwise. Because they'd rather sell to There at "full face value" and have their Therebucks go into the ether than sell their Therebucks to members at a slightly discounted price.

So, let's see....resellers lose money, members have less Therebucks to spend, There loses money, and even the developers who feel they are getting more for their Therebucks are probably losing money.

Nope, this buyback program doesn't make any sense to me at all. It doesn't even cut down on chinese gold farmer scammers - it will probably make their sites even more tempting to members!

I used to date this guy who would always say to me "don't poke the bear!", which basically meant "don't bother me when I'm in a foul mood", but it may be somewhat appropriate here as well. I kind of feel like by making this post I am poking the capricious multimillionaire owner of There bear, who I am starting to feel has some kind of beef with me. Oh well...what can you do?

If you have anything to say about this, I'd love to hear from you!

Therebucks BuyBack (whoopie?)

Okay, so for those who don't know, MW (aka Mike Wilson, multi-millionaire owner/CEO of There aka Skippy) recently made a post in the There.com forums about a new Therebucks buyback program for There developers.
You can read it here, if you haven't already.

Naturally, there has been some discussion about this since the announcement came out, although as far as I know it has been a somewhat lackluster response limited to the developers section of the There forums, I suppose because this seems to be mainly of interest to developers (although in reality this could affect quite a few more There member than that.)

At first I wasn't sure what to think of the program, and to some degree I still don't, since a vague announcement and an actual working program are not really the same thing and it remains to see how this will actually be implemented, however, so far these are my thoughts (which I did post in the There forums but thought it would be appropriate to repost here):

(I'm happy to have anyone else add their thoughts here as well, feel free to leave a comment!)

This seems like bad news for people who enjoy buying Therebucks at an 11% discount (or more, depending on who you are buying from). So, good news for developers, assuming the queues aren't long, but bad for Therebucks buyers. Meanwhile, it does nothing to stop the resale scammers, in fact it may make those sites look MORE attractive to those who don't know better since reseller Therebucks are likely to become harder to find. (and so if people are getting less Therebucks for their money, it may come to pass that they simply have less Therebucks to spend and therefore the slight increase in value Devs get for their Therebucks may be offset by slightly lowered sales, not to mention the fee they will pay to There and the money some will lose if There does not use MassPay.)

Meanwhile, I think it gives an artificial sense of the strength of the There economy. In 2009, although my sales ended up being SLIGHTLY higher than in 2008, there seemed to be more people trying to sell Therebucks than ever. So whereas in the past it has always been normal for resellers to sell out and not have any Therebucks in stock, then be back in stock, then sell out again ad nauseum, and to oftentimes be out of stock more than in stock, for the second half of 2009 in particular, I have found myself almost NEVER out of stock...in fact I don't think I've run out of Therebucks for a few months straight now, and meanwhile my average Therebucks balance creeps ever higher.

This says to me that the amount of Therebucks going into the There economy is becoming more than the amount going out - a surplus that has never before occurred in There history (except for some temporary situations caused by Black Friday and the Coke Studios Therebucks conversion.) So it seems bizarre and unnatural for There to buy Therebucks from developers AT FACE VALUE, when obviously that is not at this time the actual value of Therebucks.

It doesn't stop scammers, people who like to buy discounted Therebucks will lose out (and there are more of them than there are devs) and they are being bought at an artificially high price from devs who have to wait in a queue to sell a limited amount at unknown intervals with a future promise that someday they'll be able to do exciting things like trade them for other currency (virtual?) Whoopie!