Linden Lab Acquires Avatars United
The company behind Second Life, Linden Lab, has just announced it has bought Avatars United, a Stockholm Sweden online community for avatars (see our previous story here and here).
Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon tells that when they talk to the users who sign up but then decide not to stay, they say they left, in part, because they had a hard time finding people to hang out with. Either their friends weren't there, or they have a hard time meeting new ones inworld, or sometimes both. Now Avatars United should fix this. I haven't looked at Second Life in a while, but if its anything like it has been before, I think Linden Lab needs much more than just Avatars United to make it work.
Enemy Unknown Relies On Open Social And Sees Gaming Business Lucrative
I managed to have a chat with Thor Olof, the CEO of Enemy Unknown a while back. Despite being a simple chat between two people, there was a lot of good about the business of online games and decisions they have taken as a company that I thought I'd share with you. Enemy Unknown is the company behind the service Avatars United. Avatars United in turn is a service - let's put it this way; it's Facebook for in-game avatars.
Enemy Unknown has taken the slightly different and perhaps not that common approach with their technology. They have adopted the Open Social initiative as part of their technology. Open Social, as you may know - is a single standard of an API that has the bigger idea of making sharing data between sites faster and easier to come by (as developers don't have to learn propietary APIs from different sites).
Avatars United Connects In-Game Friends
Avatars United is a Stockholm Sweden based service that enables you to connect to your in-game friends or avatars. The service resembles pretty much the basics of any other social network, except in this case you are using your in game person to connect to others.
There is very limited information about the company behind the service, Enemy Unknown. All the data on the internet, such as no wayback machine data available, little data from Compete.com and Alexa, suggest that the company and the service itself are relatively new.
There are no other growth figures available from the company, except for Compete.com giving them close to 6k unique visits in September 2008. Avatars United also reveals on their developer page that they are looking to create an application platform to enable third party apps on their site.
Interesting concept, which brings about a few questions to my mind. First of all, if you are an active gamer that would take advantage of such a site as Avatars United, you probably play lots of different games. This of course brings in the difficulty of keeping all your avatars up-to-date on the site if you have to log in with each of them as a single user. Secondly, some game houses have also seen the urge to create a similar service - such as Warcraft Social by Blizzard.
Lots of potential for Avatars United, if they manage to bring together the real value of hosting all your avatars in one place. There is a lot of potential in this genre despite the tought competition. Glad to see some initiative being taken to grasp that opportunity.
