Collective Detective Blog Archives

Collectivus: What a Month!

We started flipping over to version 2 of Collectivus a little over a month ago with a goal of field testing some of the current functionality. The only way you would have known we’d updated was if you followed this blog, the Collectivus Twitter account, the Collectivus page on Facebook, or knew someone who did.

We thought we’d get a dozen or so people to help us out — at most. Friends, family, Alan Shaw. I mean, when you put right on the site that it’ll break a lot, you figure a lot of people would go: "pass."

We got many, many more than a dozen.

So the past month-plus has been what we expected, but in front of a much larger audience than we expected. Server crashes, busted functionality, interesting uses of features, and a lot of data to sift through.

So let me pause here to thank everyone for giving Collectivus a whirl. We’re working hard to build you something to enjoy long-term and appreciate the short-term patience you’ve had. As I mentioned in one email, someday you’ll tell people: "I’ve been using Collectivus since before it worked."

So what next:

• Making it easier to find and make (and hold onto) friends
• Making it easier to go back through older encounters.” Pagination” for you techie types.
• Figuring out WTF is the deal with keeping Gowalla connected.
• More stats about your activity and your Thingies
• More Thingies
• Lots of other refinements and improvements

We’re hard at work on all of the above. There’s also a number of other features planned. Many of those will help answer some of the questions on how to "play" Collectivus.

As always, keep an eye on our Collectivus Twitter and Collectivus Facebook pages for updates and info. Please keep the feedback coming as well on our Community page.

Meetup with Collectivus in PA

On Monday, November 7^th at 7:00PM, Collectivus will be demoing and holding a Q&A at the New Tech Meetup of Central PA. The meeting will be held at the Harrisburg University.

We’ll be talking about the past month and where Collectius is heading next.

If you’re in the area, we hope to see you there. If not, check out what Meetups are going on in your area.

Happy Halloween!

We got a surprise note from Lili Troy the other day. She’s the brilliant designer who is responsible for the style of our Digital Thingies and has created many of them you’ve seen already (and some you haven’t). She wanted to know if we could release some Halloween-themed Thingies she cooked-up on short-notice. We never say "no" to Lili.

The cat we’ll keep year-round. The pumpkin may only be available for a limited-time.

So if you like these new Thingies, or in fact any Lili-designed Thingie, feel free to drop us or her a a tweet or a note. You also may or may not be the first to learn clues about upcoming Thingies by following her. If you’re in the Denver-area, she’s your local hook-up for Thingies too. She also does freelance work; we obviously highly recommend her.

Two other notes to pass on:

• We started circulating another orange Thingie today, but you’ll need to go through a lot of yellow to Encounter it.
• We started testing condition modifiers (also designed and created by Lili) on a few Thingies. Eventually, they will be rolled out to all Thingies.

Happy Halloween from the entire Collectivus team! Be safe out there trick-or-treating and be sure to treat someone to a Thingie today.