Friday, October 29, 2010

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.

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