Kitely – Page 7 – Ciaran Laval

March 2, 2012March 2, 2012

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.

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December 30, 2011December 30, 2011

2011 Reviewed

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fourth in a series of annual posts, the other three look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab messing around with their blog, meaning links that were working at the time, no longer working. However that just means I get to read them again and catch up, so there is a plus side to that.

2011 brought us viewer improvements, Mesh, lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. On the downside, Linden Lab’s use of the blog to inform us of new features and tools was pretty poor to say the least. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects, so let’s get this rolling.

January

Blue Mars reversed several gears and announced it would become an app for the iPhone and iPad, as is the way with these things, links in the linked article no longer work.

The Grid merger between adult and teen grids was in operation, this doesn’t seem to have caused many complications at all, with the exception of over zealous word filters but we’ll come to that later.

FJ Linden blogged about improvements, including talk of a new group chat system, improved region crossings, web based profiles and announced that the group limit was being raised from twenty five slots to forty two.

I moved my blog back here, after three and a bit years of being a guest blogger on Nobody Fugazi’s Your2ndPlace. Nobody Fugazi had generously allowed a few of us, including Marx Dudek, Arthur Fermi, Sarah Nerd, Jezebel Bailey and Konner McDonnell to blog on his site but as he no longer had a Second Life account and he was pondering what to do with the site, I suggested that he should concentrate on his own projects, none of the others threw anything at me over the suggestion!

New CEO and Aston Villa fan Rod Humble blogged about how he had been getting immersed in Second Life, exploring, building and scripting in his first few weeks and wearing a Toga too! I noted how he had a warm welcome, and also suggested Second Life would benefit from a better system for implementing NPC’s.

SL Marketplace changed its ratings system to match the three inworld maturity ratings of General, Moderate and Adult and promptly annoyed merchants because of how over zealous the word filter for automatically changing the maturity rating of a listing was, this one runs and runs.

Inara Pey reported that Esbee Linden was leaving, courtesy of Daniel Voyager reporting it! Daniel changed his blog during the year so old links don’t work.

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March 30, 2011March 30, 2011

Kitely has potential but Second Life is still the Daddy

Kitely, an Opensim based virtual world provider, has been talked about by Maria Korolov over at Hypergrid Business and Hamlet Au over at New World Notes. The system, running from Amazon’s cloud services has some interesting concepts and some great potential, it’s also far from ready for prime time and very new.

Interesting points to note are that sims can go to sleep when not in use, rather quickly I’m told, this is an important concept because the billing policy of Kitely is per visitor minute, rather than a flat fee. That’s an interesting way of doing things. Logins are managed via Facebook connect, this for me is an absolute dealbreaker and no amount of saying lots of people use Facebook connect will change my mind, when that’s the only login choice in town, I simply choose not to engage. I’ve currently got Facebook blocked on my firewall, if I have a need to use it I’ll unblock it.

However plenty of folk are happy as Larry to use Facebook connect and therefore, Kitely is worthy of discussion, plus it’s a virtual world and I’m interested in them, and it’s my blog, so neener neener.

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