Zwinky Builds Virtual World For Toolbar Avatars
With 4.7 million “active users,” Zwinky lets you create and share avatars, emoticons, cursor icons and other stuff that teens seem to love, all from your browser’s toolbar. Now, IAC, the company behind Zwinky, hopes to lead those millions of users into its new virtual world. Known as Zwinktopia, the world “will provide Zwinkies a social community with 29 unique locations and dozens of games and activities,” including shopping, chat, games, events, and hanging out in dorm rooms. As in worlds like Club Penguin, users can earn a virtual currency, called Zbucks, and buy clothing, furniture, etc.
As a virtual world, Zwinky looks like nothing special. But it’s interesting that creating at least a 2D Flash-based multiuser environment like this has now become simple enough that you can just add such a service on top of one that’s already been adopted. Are these kind of virtual world services going to proliferate? What will be more interesting is when Web sites start to have these kind of “presence-based” services associated with them, almost like a Gabbly with avatars that an move around. I don’t think I’ve seen one yet, though Me.dium comes close.
Feeds
[…] I have been wondering about the fact that there are Zwinky ads airing during prime-time TV shows already — I caught one last night at 10pm. Now I see that they are gearing up to layer a virtual world on top of their avatar system. Their avs are, well, kinda ugly, but they do seem to have had a fair amount of adoption. […]
[…] I have been wondering about the fact that there are Zwinky ads airing during prime-time TV shows already — I caught one last night at 10pm. Now I see that they are gearing up to layer a virtual world on top of their avatar system. Their avs are, well, kinda ugly, but they do seem to have had a fair amount of adoption. […]
It’s pretty amazing how many people are in Zwinktopia. I signed up one night and was talking to so many different people. I must have been on there for about 6 hours straight. I recommend it to anyone trying to kill some time.
How can we sign up?
hey what if you have a zwinky,but you just want to login?????
brittany xoxoxo!