Collective Detective Blog Archives

Happy Collectivus Day 2012!

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!

Collectivus Sharing and Notifications Update

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!

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.