Collective Detective Blog Archives

Collectivus: The First Sixty Days

On January 26^th we flipped the switch and released Collectivus. We wanted to provide an update of some of the happenings since our 15^th day report.

Photographs

As mentioned in our last post, the percentage of people taking and posting pictures with their Thingie encounters is higher than we thought. We’re going to work to make it easier to add photos to encounter entries.

Traveling Companions

People are fond of their Thingies. Many people are wary to give them to someone or leave them somewhere, but instead carry their Thingie around and post about their ongoing adventures together. We’ll look at adding a new encounter type (saw, received, gave, etc.) to better categorize this kind of activity.

We dropped off a whole bunch of Thingies in Austin last week and as people return home to places all over the globe, they’re bringing those Thingies home with them.

Thingies have traveled as far as Europe and Australia already!

Inventory

In the excitement to share Thingies, people were leaving them places or giving them to people without posting the encounter first. This lead to an issue where the code needed to enter the encounter was no longer in the person’s possession.

To help with this, when you receive or take a Thingie, we add it to an Inventory drop-down. To enter an encounter, you can just select the Thingie instead of having to re-enter the code. When your Thingie moves on, it is removed from Inventory.

Bug Fixing

We’ve fixed quite a few bugs and are working on addressing other known issues. We appreciate everyone’s patience while we work out the kinks. While containing a cute picture to look at, we know that landing on the error page is frustrating.

What Next?

Without getting too specific, we have a couple of items we’re still working on as part of this first set of features.

We’ve also begun the design phase of the next part of the roadmap. You’re going to see a lot of your feedback implemented and we’re going to take the wraps off of the next part of our vision for Collectivus.

As we mention often, the Collectivus you’ve seen so far is just the start. We’ve done maybe 5 percent of what we’ve got planned so far.

Will There Be More Rubber Duckie Thingies?

All of the Series One Thingies have not yet been released, so there’s still a chance to get your hands on some that have a "new duckie" smell. We’ve been working on some wildly different concepts for the second series; we’ll keep you updated.

We did get some very helpful feedback on what information and format to use for the instructions and codes on the Thingies. The layout and information for series one was part guess, part dictated by the design and material of the Rubber Duckie Thingies; series two will be a different design.

Thank You

We want to thank everyone for the comments, feedback and support. We’re happy so many of you are enjoying Collectivus and we’re very appreciative of that. We’re working hard to make Collectivus a fun, social location experience. Stay tuned for more news and announcements.

Photogenic Thingies Now on Flickr

One of the things that’s caught us by surprise is how popular taking pictures with Thingies has turned out to be. Of course, one of the reasons we launched Collectivus so early was to learn things like this, so we know what kinds of features to focus on as we iterate.

So while we work on that, we want to point out that all you shutterbugs can now also add your photos to our newly created Collectivus group on Flickr. Here you can add photos to the pool and share with other’s your made skills with the camera. Tagging photos with "collectivus" and "thingie" will also help everyone track them down.

Join our Collectivus Flickr group today and help us get started in creating a photo collection of Thingie encounters.

Collectivus Coverage in Local Business Blogs

We’re playing catch-up with news and email now that we’re back from our trip to Austin and realized that we didn’t post about some recent Collectivus coverage by two Central PA bloggers and business people.

Will These Little Rubber Duckies Revolutionize Marketing?

Kelly Watson, of One Woman Marketing, gave a nice overview of the opportunities for Collectivus in the marketing space. Our favorite quote:

While Collectivus is still feeling its way, they’ve injected fun back into marketing at a time when traditional ads are leaving people jaded.

Silicon Pasture Week: what in hell is Collectivus?

John Caddell, of Caddell Insight Group, blogged an overview of Collectivus from the user perspective. Our favorite quote:

…Collectivus, as Twitter has demonstrated, will become what its users make it to be. The Collectivus team has created a wide-open platform to explore movement, giving, and attachment to objects. Time will tell how it ends up. Perhaps people will be registering encounters with battered thingies twenty years from now.

Thanks to John and Kelly for the kind words. If you see anyone talking about Collectivus out on the Interwebz, please drop us a line.