The Top Floor Flat

I’ll do a proper update this weekend, I promise. As per usual, there’s not a ton to say when I’m just going to work every day :-). But I did want to link to this article – IMVU was the company I worked with for about a year (on and off) and I still sort of feel as if I work for them. I miss the people there a lot and the culture was great. I hope I’ll end up back there, or at least working with some of the incredibly creative team members from the company. In any case, IMVU recently had their big launch to a lot of press fanfare (hurray!) and not two weeks later, Google announced their entry into the 3D Virtual World’s internet space with their product Lively. There were a number of rumours circulating about the fact that Lively is not much more than a knock off of IMVU, supported by the idea (confirmed by IMVU’s CEO Cary Rosenzweig as mentioned in the article below) that a former IMVU cofounder defected to Google to help build Lively.

I’ve got to say, having Google as competition makes me a bit nervous, but IMVU has always had a very solid following of people who might be turned off by the idea of joining a network produced by a big cooperation. Also, look at Orkut – Google’s response to the social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It’s no where near as big or as well known.

Suffice it to say, IMVU has their work cut out for them with Google as competition. But they have quite a head start and just because they don’t have a swimming pool, full gym and smoothie bar in their office doesn’t mean they can’t kick some Google butt.

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