IMVU Review Part 1

IMVU/Social Network/Web Culture/Review
Found on: IMVU.com

Last week I posted a blog entry on IMVU , a new 3D avatar-centric chat client/service developed by the founder of "There", Mike Harvey.

IMVU currently has a community of over 1 million users and just from the looks of it, a lot more are just around the corner.

After trolling thru their website, I was really impressed with many of the features that seemed to be fresh and innovating for this space.

It Sucks that they don't have a Mac compatible software yet but since their still in beta, I'll let it slide.

Install and registration was a piece of cake and so was creating and customizing my avatar and once you had these steps completed, you were ready to chat.

Everything was aesthetically pleasing - the avatars moved with grace, the environments were full of detail and there were several to pick from -- my favorite so far is the Farris wheel.



The avatars are cute but not cute like Habbo cute, more like Anime cute; somewhere between "There" avatars and "Second Life" Sims. Speaking of cute, the IMVU avatars have a choice of half dozen or so expressions to select from like, "smile" "laugh" and "thumbs up".

So, there I was, sitting in a virtual pseudo "Starbucks" with some guy name Jose, having my first live IMVU session....chit, chat, chit, chat; I found out that he lived in Spain, his favorite band was Coldplay and that he prefered Bebo over Myspace.

To be continued...part 2 next week.