Kitely Now Offers Email And Twitter Signup Options

Kitely, the Amazon cloud based virtual world running on OpenSim have announced that you can now signup with a Twitter or Email account. This is a welcome development as some people, myself included, refused to signup with a Facebook account … well I don’t have a Facebook account! Not a personal profile anyway, I have a Facebook page.

The details of the changes can be found in this blog post. I have signed up via Twitter and it was an extremely smooth process, I also have two hours access a month and an Island to play with on the free account model, if I find Kitely engaging then I’ll look at the other pricing plans but in terms of trying it out, this is a good model.

Kitely has a pay as you go pricing plan, although you can opt to pay for visitors to your Island if you choose, I don’t think that will be the model most follow, however as I said, on the free account you get two hours a month anyway.  Five bucks a month gets you twenty hours a month in Kitely plus a second region, whereas USD$20 gets you around 83 hours a month and 10 regions to play with, USD$50 a month gets you 200 hours a month and 30 regions whereas USD$100 a month gives you unlimited time in Kitely plus a whopping 100 regions to play with. However these are personal minutes, so you can see why for some, the Kitely model isn’t appealing.

Kitely owner Ilan Tochner has updated me in the comments about the pricing model to say that initial minutes are available due to people receiving Kitely Credits on the payment plans, so here’s a correction:

$5 / month = 25 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$20 / month = 100 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$50 / month = 250 hours / month (in Minutes+KC)

$100 / month = (unlimited Minutes + 5000 KC) / month

However if you want to see a decent use case for Kitely, there’s a post over at Hypergrid Business about an architecht selling his prefab sims.

Kitely runs on OpenSim and allows you to import OAR files, which means you can quickly recreate a build of a full sim there. Therefore it’s great for advertising your wares and quickly demonstrating your building skills. On the current pricing plan it might not be the best platform to build in, although if you go for one of the higher priced plans it surely is.

I signed up to Kitely and had my plain sim running in minutes after installing the Kitely plugin, it’s a very smooth process. I’m not familiar with OAR files as I’m not an OpenSim user, although I have an idea of how they work, this option isn’t available in Second Life and of course, with Intellectual Property issues I don’t see that changing anytime soon but the on demand model of Kitely really is a nice concept and one that Linden Lab should at least take a look at.

If you want to find out more I highly recommend you keep an eye on Maria Korolov and Hypergrid business, it’s a very informative site.

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