Two years ago, we flipped the bit on Collectivus and started sending hundreds of rubber ducks out on worldwide adventures. It was an experiment in traveling social objects. We call them Thingies.
A year ago, we started working on phase two of our experiment: Virtual social objects called Digital Thingies. With the explosion of location services, we wanted to enhance the check-in experience by connecting them to Thingies. This gives people ways for their notes and stories to be connected to not just to a place, but to travel as a chapter in the adventures of a Thingie – for others to find creating new ways to connect people together.
In October of 2011, we released our second prototype version of Collectivus. It was more mobile friendly and integrated with other social services. Through no promotion outside of Twitter and Facebook, friends old and new have been moving Digital Thingies all over the globe.
So what’s in store for year three?
We’re taking the feedback and test data from our wonderful prototype testers and revising the application. We want to make it easier to find, use, and post encounters, as well as a number of other surprises we have in store.
From the entire Collectivus team: Thank you for your support!
Happy Collectivus Day!
Happy Holidays everyone!
We’re closing out the 2011 with some changes to sharing. We’re also planning a number of enhancements and revisions to the Collectivus service in 2012.
Gowalla
As you probably already know, Gowalla’s team was acquired by Faceboook and the service will be shut down at the end of January. In preparation for that, we’ll be converting all of your Gowalla connections over to Collectivus ones so they aren’t lost when they turn off the lights.
We’ve also disabled connecting Collectivus and Gowalla accounts. If you already have your account connected, you can continue to use it and share as you have been. Sometime in January, you’ll see Gowalla sharing options removed from the app.
foursquare
Connecting your foursquare and Collectivus accounts, gives you a few additional benefits to both your foursquare and Collectivus experience:
- Option to check-in on foursquare when you post your encounter.
- Create or check-off “done” on a Thingie tip at that location, letting other people using both foursquare and Collectivus know that Thingies may be available there.
- Get notifications when you checkin somewhere Thingies are nearby. We’re starting with email, but hope to add other notification types soon.
That last one is a new feature to Collectivus. People use different apps to log their location activity and many, like Collectivus, leverage Foursquare place data. So if you check-in using an app like Path, we don’t want you to have to change apps in your quest for Thingies. With the Thingie alert option set, we will periodically poll your latest foursquare activity. If there are Thingies in the vicinity, we’ll send you a notification. You can then leap into action and fire up Collectivus to encounter them.
Of course, we’re more than happy to see you use Collectivus as your main app for posting your location. We currently support posting geotagged tweets to Twitter, wall and places check-ins to Facebook, and of course: foursquare check-ins.
We appreciate all the feedback and effort put in by the community this year. We launched this prototype less than three months ago and have a mountain of data we’re sorting through. We look forward to bringing you new features and updates in 2012.
Have a safe and Happy New Year from the entire Collectivus team!
When we started rebuilding the Collectivus platform, two things on the to-do list were:
- Integrate and connect with popular social and geosocial services (Facebook, foursquare, Gowalla, & Twitter)
- Save everyone the pain of having to import the same friends to yet another app
You put the two together and we came up with this idea: Automatically make and connect people on Collectivus who are already connected to each other on the social and geosocial services we’re already integrated with.
On paper: Genius. In practice, as many of you know: Not so much.
First, there were the issues of keeping the connections between Collectivus accounts and the other services. Friends were also appearing and disappearing, seemingly at random. We think we’ve mostly got those bugs worked out, except Gowalla, which is partially out of our control and would require a blog post all its own.
Second, people were discovering each other on Collectivus and had no direct means of connecting with each other. In plain English: No "Add as Friend" button.
A third issue that came up: Twitter has an asynchronous social graph. In less geeky terms, this means that I can follow you and you don’t have to follow me back. This led to confusion and questions about how Collectivus defined a "friend." Additionally, other services are adopting this model for some or all of their connections. A good example of this is foursquare, where certain user accounts (like Collectivus) can be followed and not friended.
So basically, our testers sent us back a "WTF?" Thingie of their own, asking for an easier way to give Thingies to others. We listened and have now updated the social connections on Collectivus to use a follower/following model instead of a friend one. Here’s how it now works:
New People Listings
- We still try to automagically connect you to people you’re already connected to on other services. If you’re curious, we check based on the order you connected them. So, for example, if you are connected to someone on both Twitter and Facebook and connect Collectivus to Twitter before Facebook, that person will be a Twitter connection.
- You can follow any person in the system. People listings and profiles now have a button to follow (or unfollow). If you follow or unfollow, they become a Collectivus follower and any connection on other services is ignored.
- You can see who is following you as well in a new tab in the people section. We figured it’s fair for you to see who’s got you on speed-dial to send you Thingies.
New People Navigation
Now, while we hope we have the kinks worked out for people connections, please continue to send us feedback if you see something odd.
Next, we move onto other features and feedback notes from our early adopters. You should also expect at least one new Thingie to pop-up this week.
Happy connecting!
P.S.: We recommend following Collectivus on Collectivus.
