Some There/Therebucks history

So, the other day...I guess it's been a few weeks now, Kittenkat contacted me because she was very distressed over IMVU's proposed tiers system and she thought, since I live only six miles from IMVU and have been known to sneak attack them and just show up there, that maybe if she could win me over to her cause, she could get me to march into IMVU and get them to listen to reason.

Honestly, IMVU should probably hire Kittenkat to be their in-house economist or something, but my days of IMVU peeps telling me that they owed me a debt of gratitude so great that they are happy to buy me lunch once a month for basically forever are probably over. The best I can do right now is publish what Kittenkat shared with me after being frustrated by one of IMVU's newer employees "Joepez" telling her she didn't understand the There economy as well as There's original founder and some of his cronies and tried to explain to her a few things about the There economy.

Please enjoy this wonderful bit of There history compliments of KittenKat!

As There's founder and ex-employees should be able to tell you, I was there since the beginning, and my resale site (tbux.com) pretty much single-handedly shaped the resale market from the beginning. If anyone knows anything about the resale market at There.com, it's me.

For the record, here is the story of the There resale market:

I became involved in the There developer program pretty shortly after it was released. After time I and the other top developers had accumulated enough therebucks that there began to be talk about selling them for cash. The first person to offer us cash for our therebucks was Baloo, who happened to be There's economist (he operated his resale site on the side). He offered us terrible rates (2700T/$1 as I recall) but we sold to him, because he pressured us and because it was money.

It didn't take me long to decide that we had to be able to sell them for more he was offering. So I got together with There's other top developers, showed them my proposal for tbux.com, formed tbux.com, and began to sell directly to There members at 2000T/$1 (~200T/$ savings over There's official rate). Sure, Baloo could offer consumers a cheaper rate, but he had depended on having the major developers selling to him, so by banding together, we eliminated his supply, so we had no trouble selling for that rate. Shortly thereafter we began to resell other developers' tbux, offering them a rate of 2200T/$1 (our spread is and always has been very low).

We've had a small handful of competitors over the years, but none have ever succeeded at driving the rate of tbux down. Even during the period of economic turmoil and panic which followed There's "Black Friday" (in 2004, when There Inc. announced that it would no longer develop the consumer version of There), tbux.com kept buying and selling at the SAME rates.

And here we are, in 2007, buying and selling at the same rates we always have, and still selling out. 2000T/$1 is now the standard resale cost of Therebucks across all resellers, a whole 200T savings over There's rate of 1800T/$1.

So, to say that There's resale market is where it is because its "mature" is just completely inaccurate. There's resale market has not changed at all since it started with tbux.com back in August 2003."

For the record, *I* never sold to Baloo. My first sale was actually an exchange of ThereBucks for frequent flier miles which allowed me to attend the first There real life gathering in 2003.

Anyway, thanks to KittenKat for allowing me to share that nice writeup of There and ThereBucks history in my blog. Maybe it won't help us stop tiers, since Will Harvey has indicated that they only implement things we suggest that they were already implementing anyway, but it's still a great read. Cha right...like Will knows more about the There economy just because he founded There. According to any IMVU employee who worked on the blox project There is already dead, and yet as far as I can tell they are still growing strong. Wishful thinking, guys?

Yelp at Commonwealth Club

The other day, my bf and I went to the Commonwealth Club for the first time ever. I'd been meaning to attend events there for quite a while but never got around to it. What finally got me off my butt to go? The founders of Yelp were speaking.

I was quite excited to go to this event, as my imagination along with the program description billed it as a visionary talk about the future of marketing and how Yelp is leading the way in empowering consumers and really letting their voices be heard using the power of the Internet, and the way Yelp channels advertising dollars into things like free food/wine/events for targeted consumers, providing more value for BOTH businesses AND consumers.

Oops, I think most of that was all in my head. I was a bit disappointed with the event, which turned out to be a question and answer session that didn't have much of any new-to-me information or anything visionary. The format and questions were a bit uninspired and pedestrian and the Yelp founders just didn't have much energy or that much to say.

I did learn that Yelp was almost called Yocal, which sounds almost exactly like "yokel", which was rather amusing. Imagine trying to get people in San Francisco or New York or anywhere else to call themselves "Yocals". Yeah, right. The person who thought of Yelp was so convinced of the idea that they purchased the domain name for $5000, managed to sell the founders and others involved on the name and then transfered the name to them for the same price of $5000. Good call.

I also learned they spent twenty minutes pitching the idea of Yelp to their first investor, who then gave them a million dollars to get started. Nice! I want both friends like that and the persuasive power to get them to give me a million dollars after a 20 minute pitch. I can be pretty tenacious...I bet I could get much more than a million if I only knew the right people.

Their business plan seems very sound and seems to have been executed almost flawlessly, but I also learned that Yelp's elite stuff and the parties/events were more like an afterthought. Kind of like "we like to party, and hey people want to give us free stuff. We can meet these crazy people that actually want to be Yelpers, have a party and businesses will PAY FOR IT." Geez, people just want to throw money and free stuff at these guys...I want to rub up against them just to see if some of that mojo will rub off on ME. Actually, from party pics I have seen, a lot of people (well, mostly women) want to rub up against them...but what is really interesting is that I think their whole Elite program is what really makes Yelp special and sets it apart from any other similar online consumer rating service (although Amazon just started something similar for products in a program called Vine.) Without the Elite program, Yelp is just another site to rate stuff, although one might argue it is designed better than the others.

And that's it...that's basically everything new I learned. Oh except maybe that for businesses like dentist and doctor offices and hair stylists, Yelp has the power to give them more business than they can possibly handle. Be careful who you give a great Yelp review to if they provide you with a regular service like that...you may find there is a wait list to get in next time you want to make an appointment!

Although I was disappointed a bit by the Yelp talk, I did have a great week with Yelp in general. After the Commonwealth Club Q&A thing, we found a great restaurant called Salt House and managed to get a seat without a reservation, then the next day one of the founders (Jeremy) sent me a compliment (my first "great writer" compliment) on Yelp saying how great my Salt House review was. Wow, a compliment from a founder! Well, to be fair it looks like he makes a point to send out a few compliments a day...but still I was thrilled. Then I got a ROTD (review of the day) for my review of Golds Gym, which garnered me some more compliments. Finally, my week culminated with a woman who I have secretly been a fan of on Yelp for some time sending me a friend request. Yeah okay, if you don't Yelp and secretly worship a few of the really good reviewers you probably can't appreciate that at all. So go Yelp already...try it, you'll like it!

Now, if only Amazon was that easy. I have been trying to increase my ranking on Amazon, and instead it's going DOWN. I think part of what I need is just time, now that I've figured out as much as possible HOW they give people their rankings.

Oh yeah, and my IMVU ranking, too. IMVU developers now have "Tiers", and to be the top tier (7) you have to have a perfect score of 21, and I have a score of 19 because I don't have enough forum posts (yes, part of your ranking as a developer or "content creator", in this silly system, is based on how often you post in the forums) so I only have 1 point out of a possible 3 in forum posting. Probably easy to remedy as long as I just remember to go back to the forums and post a few times EVERY DAY. I should be a perfect 7 next time they recalculate, unless they make other adjustments.

Will Harvey Say What?

About a year ago, I found this keynote address by Will Harvey, and it was a little dry but what really caught my attention was one little section, which you can listen to at the top of this blog post (sorry for the poor audio quality) since the keynote is a bit long and this part is hidden in the middle I thought I'd extract this key bit.

Basically, Will Harvey seems to be saying he likes to make it LOOK like IMVU responds (and responds quickly) to their user base, when in reality it is just a clever illusion. I thought that was interesting, especially that he would actually admit that somewhere where he was being recorded (oops?) but then I just sort of carried on with other stuff and half forgot about it.

I was reminded of and motivated to look this keynote address up after learning about IMVU tiers and how they work. IMVU has been promising us developer levels for so long it's like you don't even really hear them when they say it anymore, like that low hum your computer makes...but they are finally actually here! I noticed this several days ago just totally at random, since I don't usually read the IMVU forums. I checked and I was a level 6 out of a possible 7 and I was like "ah, okay, whatever", not understanding what made me a 6 or why I might care. I was even a little excited about the fact that they had finally implemented this, thinking it might give me some more enthusiasm for IMVU and developing (or is that "content creating" now?)

A little later the same day, Kittenkat contacted me to let me know tiers had been implemented. She figured I had probably not been around the forums, and she thought I'd be interested. I didn't really "get" what she was talking about, but after finally reading the thread/poll she started on IMVU's forums and checking out the helpful graph she made: I'm like...wait a minute...this sucks!

I don't even know where to begin...first of all, you have to participate heavily in the forums to get a top developer score. What??? Why??? Second, there are supposed to be awards commensurate with your level and yet they are a big fat secret from us so how do we even know how to react? Like, maybe we are freaking out for nothing? Maybe we are remaining calm when we should be freaking out?

I guess the thing that bothers me the most is what Will Harvey said in his keynote address...that basically it's all an illusion that they are listening to us and doing what the users want/demand. No matter how logical another system proposed (Kittenkat's) may be or how flawed IMVU's system may be...they're going to do it their way pretty much no matter what. Argh.