Weblos Alexa Page Rank Still Rising

Midnight is a terrible time to generate last minute traffic. Auction should end at same time of day as initiated. I for one would opt out of e-mail notification, but I can see where someone would. An in-house IM system would be nice, and a good way to transmit that data. As long as you have the option to keep it inactive when you don't want to be bothered. Maybe an icon at the top of the screen or something when you have a message incoming, you could answer or ignore.

IM would be huge for community purpouses. Not sure if its something that would be extremely difficult to implement or not. For that matter an official chat area would be cool too. Worked for AOL, good for any community.

Cat wrote:

Keep working Shaper... Rocky should hire you!

Will for a little while anyhow. At least long enough to get a manifesto put together, lol. Had one written up in september, but got knocked offline. Just as well, I think I have a clearer vision now anyways.

He'd probably be smart to do that, then I could justify the time. Course, he'd have to pay me better than I'm making now...

shaper wrote:

He'd probably be smart to do that, then I could justify the time. Course, he'd have to pay me better than I'm making now...

It sounds like Colin is the only one left over there, and he is out of ideas... Get them to hire you Shaper (if they have any $$$ left).

I wonder how the VC investors feel?

They are probably feeling a bit roughed up right now. They down to one person on staff, or just one original person? Can't see how they could run out of ideas, always seems like I got too many of them, lol. Maybe I should give Rocky a call

Actually, I think the weak point in the game is lack of community. The blogs are disconnected, you don't have a central place to conference with other players online in the game. Given the fact that many players are site building, makes it challenging though. Maybe ability to control who's at the top of your friends list and be able to trigger an IM by clicking on their icon or something. Have to think about that, but there definitely has to be a place where people can share their triumphs, projects and hustle deals in real time.

They absolutely have to fix the uniqueness factor for assets, they killed the market in a lot of ways by creating too much supply, instead of carefully rationing it. Domains and celebs especially. They could still bring the game back by increasing utility, communications, and the auction system along with that. I think those are the big 4. Tutorials would be really helpful as well. As it is, you go to click on the help section and they tell you why you should buy something instead of how to use what you've got. If you like what the game does, you're going to buy more as a natural result.

Ya, they were doing a lot better when they had live support to help babysit people. Course if they had someone spend a week building a good tutorial they could mitagate a lot of that need. I think having live support was important though, as it gave people a place to go with questions, provided them feedback (although probably a lot of it negative), and kept them engaged in the game. It at least provided something resembling community.

Creating a central gathering spot, probably a real chat room with a private chat option would fulfill a lot of the same functions. Messaging would probably help to, it would allow the community to provide each other with technical assistance, entertainment and the other things that make a network "social".

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There was a lot of that to. But I think he did like the concept. I just don't think they had the vision to think through the implications of their decisions. A lot of that damage could be undone with a bit of effort, but I'm not sure they understand what the issues are.

Can't fix it til you recognize the problem

If they were all about the money, they would be doing a better job with developing the commercial potentials of the game. It practically screams of commercial potential. They have some work to do.

1. Fix the game itself (auctions, interfaces, a scoring system, integration and asset management)
2. Improve communications
3. Develop some modules so that it is commercially useful
4. Promote

Instead they did a half-ass job of step 1, skipped steps 2 and 3 and dived right into promotion and ad networks (which they totally blew the implementation of). It doesn't do any good to get people into your store if you can't convert the customers.

There's some other things they should be doing, like setting up better integration with other social networks.

However they need an actual strategy and a willingness to implement it. Hopefully we can help them with the first part of it. I'd really like to see my investment pay off AND have a game I enjoy playing.

Once they get the basic infrastructure together, if they put in the ability to set up a storefront and re-arrange the page elements they would have something. Interesting, when you look at their code all their meta tags are set up for things like domain parking services. You would think that they could have looked at what they had and realized that it was much better suited to promoting travel, real-estate and was strongly positioned for commercial development.

The whole thing is built on the idea of states and cities being valuable, and to do that it depends on a lot of inhabited infrastructure at the base level. Storefronts seem like an obvious leap. It also gives people some genuine motivation to bring in traffic. You need a mix and suddenly you have a very cosmopolitan atmosphere of free enterprise. They tried to build it from the top down instead of the bottom up.

Going right for the throat on advertising they neglected the fact that you need to have people viewing sites to make advertising profitible. Targeting domain parking is ineffective because they can't target top level domains. That aspect might have had a chance if they were willing to use redirects, although there are some valid SEO reasons for not doing that. That leaves them with generating traffic.

Holding domains under the gun is short-sighted as well, people lose the incentive to speculate in large numbers of them, and don't have the necessary time to develop them if they hold a large number. This is even more true since they have inherent disadvantages to property assets which cost less. Looking at the levels structure, bronze to VIP it is strongly implied that there are good reasons to own domains. In fact there is a lack of incentive to do so. Seizing domains with content also puts them at risk of intellectual property litigation in cases, as does wiping the data. True this only applies to sites with original content, but is a potential liability nonetheless. Cases in other virtual worlds have not looked too kindly on this form of asset seizure or destruction. There is also the additional problem, that if they choose to erase the content rather than transfer it to a new owner, that they are loosing pages with content in the process. Pages with content are what attracts the search engines, so in the end, it is counter-productive. Some reasons why I oppose the policy. Also reasons why I am unlikely to renew my VIP status if they go that route.

Giving someone advise is pointless, usless they ask for it...
Weblo thinks everything is fine (or else nobody is there).

Maybe that is the case, or maybe not. Will find out when I send it, the response itself should tell me a lot about whether I should be liquidating my assets or not.

They actually have made a few choices and expirimented with some ideas. Some of them were basically solid ideas, they were however implemented in a poor fashion. The game concept itself is brilliant. Maybe they are content to have sold most of the world, one web page at a time, but I think they are really missing out on what the big picture is.

Have they all actually fled the ship? I was hoping that they were quietly putting their resources into building a real improvement. Kind of a bummer if they wrote it off, especially since they passed up a number of opportunities to sell the company or gain significant venture capital for a share of it.

Very possible, but better to know where they stand. If I don't get a response then I write it off and move on to other projects. Or take the blue print, organize it and get it in the hands of someone that can see the potential and do it right. Either way, at least I will know I made the effort.

... thats assuming they've blown through it. Even though they've done it, a good business plan/strategy can make it possible to generate renewed interest, or at least make the entire project saleable.

Another thing, after they rebuild it they should re-brand. Weblo is about the worse possible name they could have picked. Apparently they never read the book "positioning".