Hamlet Au reports on improvements to Cloud Party, in a blog post over at New World Notes. There are some interesting improvements going on with the product, especially in terms of the marketplace, which you can read about on the cloud party wiki, here.
Those who have US bank accounts can now cash out their Cloud Party Gold coins, but there’s no date set for when this will be available to international customers. They have a really interesting royalty feature for items and this is something Linden Lab may want to pay attention to. Royalties can be read about here. This allows a merchant to sell an asset and then have a royalty from all future sales of that asset, sent to them. So for example, if your asset is used in another users build, when that user sells their item, the original creator would receive royalties, this is a very good idea.
However where Cloud Party continues to languish in epic fail territory, in my opinion, is the requirement for those who seriously want to use the platform to use a Facebook login.
I can understand why they have initially gone with Facebook logins, it cures a development problem but I won’t seriously touch any platform with a bargepole that has Facebook as the only ship in the port when it comes to serious engagement. Spotify went the Facebook route and I won’t touch that with a bargepole, I didn’t even try Kitely whilst Facebook logins were the only login system and I’m not going to change my stance on Facebook for Cloud Party. There is an anonymous login option for Cloud Party, so if you want a brief look round, you don’t require Facebook, but if you want to seriously engage with the platform, you will need a Facebook login.
Relying on Facebook for logins is something I actively disagree with, having Facebook logins as an option, is a sensible step, but having Facebook logins as the only serious login, is a silly decision and really, a company should not want to be that reliant on another company for logins, or be in a position whereby Facebook change their terms and conditions and cause a problem for Cloud Party’s customers.
The sooner Cloud Party move towards wanting to own their own customer base, the better. However as I said, they are making progress and the royalties idea is a very good one. Cloud Party is still in its early days, but in technology time flies, they need to free themselves from Facebook’s shackles.
CloudParty added non-facebook login just before Xmas.
Yup I covered that in a later post Mykael 🙂