imvu

imvu

With the popularity of IMVU now matching Second Life levels, I decided to check IMVU out again after a 4 year absence.

I signed up after IMVU went open beta, and was the 814th person to do so. In those days IMVU was Instant Messenger Viewer Utility. It was a tool that you add to any IM program of your choice, so to use IMVU you had to be using AIM or YIM, and the person you were chatting with must be as well. Finding people to chat with was difficult. Eventually, they got smart and just started their own IM service for IMVU users to use.

Even after creating their own IM service, I found it annoyng that you could only form a chat with one person, and then add people to the chat. I prefer to chat wih groups rather than random strangers.

I returned back about a year later to discover they were experimenting with a group chat feature. I liked this, but it was a bit flaky at first. It wasn’t long before I lost interest again, and I pretty much did not have it even installed on my computer for 4 years.

So, after reading the press release about IMVU making money, having 6 million unique monthly visitors, and traffic equal to Second Life, I had to go check it out again after a long absence.
A lot has changed, so much that I feel like a noobie again. The biggest change happened in July 2009 when they completely revamped the client program. In the early days you had to keep 3 windows open to use IMVU: the IM program, the client, and the website. When they added their own IM service it was reduced to two. As of July 2009, you only need one. Shopping, friend finder, group finder, and profiles are all now accessible in the client itself, even through tabs. It is all organized really well, and Second Life could learn a thing or two, (or three, or four…) from the client.

IMVU now has in my estimation the best 3D client program of any 3D Virtual World I have seen. Its unfortunate that the bar for this achievement has been set so low.

Since the last time I started IMVU, they have changed the default avatars. The oversized heads are gone, feet are smaller, and they look more proportional to human normal. Hands are still big though.

The bad news is that my account still has the old avatar with the big head. Some would just roll a new avatar with better looks, but in the last 4 years I have collected over half a million game credits through various promotions. Plenty to fix my avatar’s flaws. Its also too cool to have a 3 digit ID number when most have 8 digits.

عنوان الموقع
http://www.imvu.com/