The Alphaville Herald

Meez Too

by prokofy on 17/01/07 at 12:33 pm

By Prokofy Neva, Dept. of Spaces, Worlds, Planets, Universes, Metaverses, and Wannabee Virtualities.

I noticed the kids are using Meez more because they’re bored with MySpace, which they’ve pronounced contemptuously as “gay” or “retarded,” while still declaring TSL as “fun” but “hippy”. They claim they don’t care about Meez very much (not having just scored a copy of World of Warcraft Burning Crusade), and they witheringly disparage Meez’ nerdy me-too avatars that look like a botch between Bratz and the Sims.

Still, it’s an indication that these social software sites are starting to avatarize and go in deeper toward worlds. 2007 is the year of the avatar as I predicted 2006 was going to be (“We’re all going to be so amazingly cool, because we already have — we already *are*? — avatars”). I can see that free services providing accessories, backgrounds and even animations for avatars might evolve so fast within browsers going forward, that someday they may meet existing 3-D virtual worlds too laggy to log-on to and requiring downloads — going backwards.

Meez, still in beta, enables you to pick way more looks for your avatar for free than Yahoo IMs but apparently not as many as IMVU — IMVU starts the meter running with game currency if you really want to tart up your look — and has actual user-designed content for sale, unlike Meez (yet) — and it also has more moveability for the avatar to interact with other avatars.

Yet Meez goes further to meet that geeky hands-across-the-sea dream by incorporating “portability” or exportability to other social-software venues as part of its features. So far, the porting seems to consist mainly of links like photobucket.com gives you to enable you to use photos stored on its free site on forums, blogs, and web pages. They also offer the option to download your “user-generated content,” which so far means merely picking among the company’s generated backdrops and looks and combining them. If they go more in the direction of IMVU enabling you to upload your own textures and anims, that could change.

I’m trying to get the image to embed here on Typepad — after 10 tries I saw the trick is to copy the too-long URLs in two pieces but then it crashed the page — and I can also give the direct URL link to see my animated emo beatnik ugly Christmas-present-sweater-wearing unicorn-riding cowboy attired in bowling shoes posing in front of a pirate ship (hi, Jarod!).

Kinda clunky. Still, it’s a step along the Metaverse highway that isn’t being made in Second Life or MySpace, so it’s interesting. You get your own space on Meez as well, with a ratings system. How are these guys paying for all this Meez-too fun? Forcing you to accept ads from companies such as Wal-Mart on your space. Oh, and there’s a forums too where you can share good stuff like your death poetry — although judging from the number of times I drew “The topic you are viewing does not exist,” they must have resmods even more zealous than Strife Onizuka.

Best of all, the Meez people have incorporated Second Life’s beloved Tringo into their pages and even note on their site, “For Tringo business development inquiries, email bizdev@meez.com”.

Meez is free, but if you opt to clothe or accessorize your avatar with some of the neater stuff, you’ll have to pay to buy “Coinz” with your credit card. I can’t help thinking the makers of Meez would make it more attractive if they had a way to earn coins by being best-rated or winning at Tringo or something, or enabling the exchange of Coinz for Lindens or other game gold.