Ilan Tochner wrote:Blady,
You didn't bring the idea of a community created greeting world to us, or using it for activities to help create an inworld community. The Kitley Mentors Group had built the Kitely Mentors Group Hangout before you ever got involved with Kitely:
http://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Ila ... up-Hangout
That has absolutely nothing to do with community development. It's just a private hut for a few people that the public has no access to.
The reason we invested resources into the Plaza is that the hangout didn't address all our needs and you were willing to take on the project of organizing the creation of a world that will and attracting merchants to inhabit it.
The hangout didn't address any needs at all.
If you read my previous replies you can find mention of several examples of things we have had to do to enable the plaza to exist as an always-on world. It wasn't just setting up another 4-region on-demand world and creating a group.
Ilan you rezzed it while I waited a few minutes.
It required ........ countless hours of my time with making sure it develops to address our needs.
It developed following the the diagram I created that you approved. It obviously met the needs of Kitely when you approved it on February 17th
http://forums.kitely.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=185#p1059
The time I'm spending on this thread replying to your accusations,
These are facts, not accusations.
the Skype calls, the IMs, and the time I spent inworld with the people who built the plaza are an investment we've made into this project. Our time is our most valuable resource and taking on this project has been a very big time investment on our part.
You micro-managing a project you had already approved of did not have to happen. There was a full-time coordinator who was spending 20-hour days there through-out the build. Privately giving select builders instructions to build something you like to look at (without informing the coordinator of the project before-hand) had nothing to do with improving or over-seeing a community build.
An hour spent discussing the plaza is an hour less I spend doing business development with people who have no need for a community outside the one they bring to their own worlds.
You did not need to spend an hour discussing the plaza (or you could have added such discussions to the Wednesday meetings, but you did not.) I posted updates in the forum through-out the build.
After the build was completed I added the touch signage on the plaza and I asked Dennis Albion create the tour HUD - two things I added without discussing with you and you had no problem with any of it.
The time Oren spends building infrastructure for the plaza or handling issues that don't exist with on-demand worlds is time that could be spent on other very high priority things. Things the delay of which is costing our company serious money.
Developing community initiatives are high-priority things.
We told you we would be done on April 15th. You asked us to be done by march 15th because you wanted to make the plaza public on that date (I have no idea why). Then you pushed the date back again. And absolutely no one complained.
I'm sure you don't really need me to explain the difference between integrating a software component to an existing service and using a separate third-party hosted service. But you seem to ignore the fact that those two things aren't the same. Setting up a wiki on our own servers, integrating it with our other systems, creating a backup and recovery plan for it, and managing its uptime are not free. They require time and effort.
I have no idea why you would do that. Wikis are free and can function on their own.
The things that were being built in the Plaza that did not suit our needs needed to be changed.
Nothing was changed. Each shop was to have 10 shops with pre-determined sizes. That was accomplished with most of the malls. That is why there are 60 shops available there now. That was the original plan and we did not deviate from it.
I spent hours talking to the people who were building them to make sure that they built what we need not what you had in mind.
They all built what they had originally planned to build while following the guidelines to create a certain amount of stores in their malls. There was nothing Kitely needed out of the mall builds that were not included in the original plan. And you cannot show me anything you changed that made any difference in the original schematic.
A few small things aside, I like what we have now. I didn't like what was being built without my input, it was not suited for the various things we need the Plaza for.
That is not true. Every theme is the theme we agreed upon.
We have our internal roadmap, some of which we share with the user community and some we don't. Kitely isn't a community-run project it's a for-profit company that works hard to make sure the people using it remain happy. We are very transparent with our plans and actively seek user feedback and engagement. As our time is very precious, small things, like this forums thread, can preempt our schedule and cause delays.
Ilan you do not have to continue to write these walls of text here - that is a choice you make to get the last word in. It is not mandatory.
Education and role playing worlds are usually set for private use but the people who use them often explore other worlds. They don't require a Kitely community to exist but having one can be beneficial to them.
That ios not true of Role play worlds. I have no insight into the education worlds.
There are also many people who aren't in big groups and that is why we decided to invest time on the Plaza now and not later.
Actually you decided to do it now to be able to offer the incentives to the merchants coming into the online marketplace. I did it to develop community in the social areas of Kitely Plaza.
You missed my point about Facebook, it was an example of a website were communities evolved without any greeters or company (Facebook Inc.) involvement. Ning is another such example. There are many others.
A 2D website is not a 3D world - there is no comparison.
The goal of a for-profit business is to make a profit. That is what we use to grow the company and feed our families.
Yeah, I earn money to feed my family also Ilan.
If selling $5 plans in mass would result in more profit than selling other types of plans then that would be our focus. The goal is to maximize total revenues not sell a few high-priced items. The current homepage is very effective in getting people to register and a high percentage of the people who register end up spending money in Kitely. There may be ways to make it more effective which is why we are happy to investigate alternative designs. But the fact that something looks better or is more in line with conventional wisdom doesn't mean it will create better results for the company (see Google's simplistic homepage and consider what was conventional wisdom when Google started using it). It's not like we don't have anything to lose, we already have very high conversion rates from our existing design and focus.
I certainly understand the complexity of the start page gets people to sign-up for more expensive accounts (it isn't very honest business practices, but it does generate more revenue). And I understand that works out in your favor. I never wanted to promote a $5 plan. I created marketing to promote the $35 Plan and that was discarded. People that take a $40 plan and one sim will not spend as much as people that take a $35 plan with 20 regions. There was nothing wrong with the $35 Plan marketing ideas and it was clearly explained to customers instead of using confusion to generate income.
Placing 5 lines of text in a 90 pixel high area requires using a small font with little spacing. Someone needs to really want to read your ad in order for them to get the message that type of layout conveys. It isn't a question of whether you can do it or not but rather whether that is the best way to get the type of action you want from the people seeing your ad.
Not true. here it is the size that Cristiano specified:
The fact that you don't know things we haven't announced yet doesn't mean there are no goals, plans or time frames. If I'm discussing something now it is because I think the time it takes us is a good use of our resources now. I prefer not spending time, which is a rare resource for us, on things that aren't needed now.
I don't know what this statement means.
I'm investing time having this discussion with you now because I want you to remain happy and involved with the growth of the Kitely Plaza. That said, please let us focus on things that actually help us move forward - such as designing effective ads we can use to help bring people to become part of the Kitely community.
I already did that in February.
And claiming that your input was the only reason the volunteers' project was successful is really not the way to retain volunteers. The Kitely Plaza Volunteer Team used their collective creative energy and experience in virtual worlds to complete their project on time and exactly as the schematic illustrated. They created 60 mall spots with 3 service centers, 3 fashion runways, 2 venues, 2 galleries, 2 volunteer hubs and a networking place for bloggers and journalists. Because of them it is a great success.
). I suggest you give people more credit, there are very competent design professionals here.
