The folks from Kaneva have tipped me off that they will be moving from private to public beta on Monday. Anyone interested in getting into their virtual world will be able to sign up at their site and presumably other bloggers can start chiming in with…

Yeah Khamon, you’re just so durn informed and intelligent the rest of us pale by comparison. LOL (forgive me while I ignore the rest of that self-centered post)

Prok, yeah, while I have no intent on getting involved in Kaneva (or any other VR world for that matter)… it is an interesting experiment. Are people more interested in socializing or in playing with 3D toys? Even on SL, I noticed that people very often commented, “Oh, I never build or script. I come here to visit my friends”. Seems like the folks at Kaneva are aware of that element and are focusing more on the social structure than in toys and gimmicks.

I haven’t even checked out the 3D part. Doesn’t matter to me really how it functions. I’ve been studying the external social structure. Part of the interesting thing there are the interactive web-page / blogs. Such have been done with amazing success elswhere (MySpace or SL… which is the most popular? LOL). So as a social environment with a bit of 3-D VR thrown in, Kaneva might surprise the SL-tunnel-visioned and come out way ahead of the game. As you pointed out, the total absence of griefers (and the apparent ability of the company to strongly control such antisocial activity) is a big plus in the “online socializing” book. I wonder how many SL residents would be willing to switch to a board like Kaneva just to get away from the griefer element? I’d wager more than LL would believe.

Carbonel, did you notice there wasn’t any flying?! Also, to change the view, what you have to do is go up top the game screen and hunt for an icon that looks like a camera and press it. I think it toggles from a kind of overview to eyelevel view.

Jerry Paffendorf always used to talk about the wish to just walk from room to room, like a big dormitory, not to have to leave applications, or to have to wait for teleports or fly. So this sort of platform may be going in that direction. If you can just migrate right from a My Space to this thing, or if Meez takes off more and its portable avatar concept can go into Kaneva and 10 other things flawlessly, people will go there.

I certainly don’t plan on giving up on it, but hope to continue to explore it and decorate it. I don’t have any compelling desire to go there, however, because the demographics for it don’t promise any interesting friends, and for some inexplicable reason (to me), while it seems to be an English-language site, all the buzz words blown up in the tag cloud all say stuff like ANIME and other Japanese cultural stuff obscure to me. I’d like to learn more about all that, but it would mean a non-busy Sunday afternoon, not a compelling interest to go see on a school night.

I was just noticing today on Twitter that one of the IBM guys was signing up 50 new recruits to try SL…but then the new signs-ups were capped or down, raining on his parade. And I can’t help thinking that if big businesses want to use social media to connect up their globalized workforces, they might start making back-up or redundant or just *other* networks to have that are lighter and more portable and less crashy than SL, and Kaneva might be that. I never let the low and mass culture of a thing put me off to considering how it might be used for wider purposes later.

Pix were emailed to SL Herald, incase they missed the raid, but they decided to deny it like the holocaust

WARNING: pix arent child friendly

http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t114/YHelloThar/Snapshot_026.jpg

http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t114/YHelloThar/Snapshot_024.jpg

http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t114/YHelloThar/Snapshot_021.jpg

Gosh this is tiring already. Most of what I see people doing in Second Life is just as you say, putting up a prefab (there are loads of really nice ones now), shopping for clothing and attachments and hanging out socializing. Their main problems, at least most of what I see in Live Help, are the software not working properly and griefers attacking them. If Kavena provides an working, griefless, bling haven, I expect we’ll lose a few people to it. More impotantly, I expect word will spread and the influx of new residents will slow to a crawl over a short period of time. If that happens, land prices will never decrease.

However, to be considered is that people use Kaneva for a totally different reason than SL. Kaneva appears to be designed as a griefer-free social board. Their ratings system membership requirement means it’s not easy to just sign up and enter the world. It’s a lengthy, time-consuming process that griefers won’t bother with. If they do bother, the first time they grief they’ll be busted from the board so quickly it’ll make their gramma gasp. Then are they going to go through all that process again? How many times until they get tired of it? Not more than twice, I’d bet, if they even get that far (I’d think it possible that Kaneva might have a pretty accurate origin-point tracing system and low tolerance for jerks).

So my guess is that they want people to be able to enjoy Kaneva without the inherent sociological flaws of Second Life (and face it, there are severe flaws there, to be sure). Kaneva may not be as versatile. But I think it might end up being very well supported. Why?

Because Kaneva features a slice of Real Life that is just the opposite of Second Life. They encourage people to post RL pictures, information, likes, dislikes. Every person has an EXTENSIVE profile web/blog page. It is definitely a highly-social environment. And there are a LOT of people who use Second Life just for socializing.

Who might use Kaneva? Every person who spends all day on Second Life in dance clubs, that’s who. Not everyone on Second Life builds, or scripts, or races cars etc etc. A lot of people just stand around and chat, or furnish their home, or whatever. Kaneva appears to be specifically tailored for that. If all someone wants to do is buld a home and furnish it, join groups of RL similar interests, and chat without having to worry about trolls and griefers and antisocial sociopathic kiddies… Kaneva might be exactly what they’re wanting.

One of the things I did notice is that there is a “report abuse” button on each person’s profile, right there for the pushing. I’d bet dimes to doughnuts they won’t have near the griefer problems that SL has had.

So do I see Kaneva swiping some of SL’s market share? Yup. It’s just starting out, but I would at least give them a “possibly viable” score on the VR chart.