7 Billion Friends

Reason Number 1,337 Why Everything Is Awesome: Virtual Turtles And Crowd Controls Maps

When LOVELAND first went online, the earliest inchvestors were friends of mine, and then it started spreading out to friends of friends or people who know me by reputation. And then it started flipping over to people I don’t know at all, and that’s awesome.

A little while back someone from Hoboken, New Jersey bought a square foot of Plymouth (144 inches). I wrote back to say thank you and welcome aboard, and that I wanted to meet to talk about the project next time I was in New York. Well I just got back from meeting up with Matthew who, it turns out, used to work for MTV’s virtual worlds department and now […drum roll…] makes and sells virtual turtles in Second Life (that hatch and mature and interact and replicate and stuff). His company, Petable, celebrates its six month anniversary tomorrow. So expect to see virtual turtles in Detroit in the months ahead. :)

Would you buy a virtual turtle from this man?

turtle picture by ♥ Codie ♥

That just blows my mind. LOVELAND is like a box of chocolates. And that’s all I have to say about that.

And, as fate would have it, while walking into the coffee shop to meet Matthew I bumped into my friend Brian Chirls who I haven’t seen in a long time. He’s got 16 inches in Plymouth so we all caught up together.

A while back Brian created his own custom map interface for independent filmmakers, where fans who wanted to see a film come to their city could leave their mark on a world map, showing where there was enough interest to do a screening. In fact, that’s how we met, when I got in touch with him and the creators of Four Eyed Monsters to see if they’d do a screening in Second Life back at the beginning of 2007.

Well, since then he’s formalized the system for other people to use, which is now called Crowd Controls and in private beta. Some of you may remember a while back that we had a world map of where all the inchvestors are coming from, but it got too labor intensive with everything else so I took it down until we could find a better solution. Now it looks like maybe we have one. We’ll definitely take Crowd Controls for a spin so we can show where in the world everyone is coming from.