Gaia Online has launched a new Gaia Instant Message (GIM) service with, it seems, great appeal to its users. In a test launch on September 18, the first six hours drew 1 million messages. After the full launch earlier this week, the service is averaging 2 million messages per day.
“The primary reason is we are going the extra mile to foster the community, where people get more ways to interact and more reasons to interact,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, VP Product Management & Engineering. “One of the things we are trying to do for our audience is that they understand they can access Gaia from a variety of different computers and places. If they have access to a browser and the Internet, they can access Gaia. GIM falls into the same category: it's all browser-based. They've already made friends, so the IM pulls in all your friends and makes them part of your buddy list. You just walk onto the site and you're connected.”
Users can also communicate with their friends when not logged in directly to Gaia. When they navigate away from the virtual world, a separate window remains open, letting them stay in touch while browsing the rest of the Web. Ramamurthy said that makes it hard to tell exactly how users are adopting the service, but he's pleased either way.
"We didn't want to have them install it on their laptop or desktop, but have the Gaia presence available at all times. With how often they send messages—and they seem to be pretty continuous—we know they're either spending extended amounts of time in Gaia, which is also great, or using it when they're out of Gaia as well," he explained.
That ability to stay connected, even when away from the community, is getting to be something of a trend. At the Virtual Worlds Expo earlier this month, There.com launched its own ThereIM and Linden Lab announced SLim for Second Life. Both of those are downloadable clients that offer lighter alternatives to the downloadable worlds, but Linden also intimated future plans for Web-based ways to stay connected.
Gaia's instant messaging client is built on an AOL Instant Messenger backend, though, and plans are in the works to offer AIM integration. It sounds like the focus is still on a Web interface, however.
"We are working on it right now to give them the option to link their AOL account back in," said Ramamurthy." It's great for our users. They can now have a unified buddy list with their AOL buddies and Gaia friends. And, honestly, it's a great opportunity for us to grow. Now you have non-Gaia, AOL friends who see you online and they can join you. And AOL, obviously, has a huge user base. That's definitely in our plan. We'll launch that in the next few months."
For Gaia's own community, now averaging 7 million unique visitors/month, GIM offers other ways to connect. Ramamurthy calls it a fully integrated experience: users can view headshots of their friends' avatars, teleport to join them whereever they are in world, earn Gaia Gold for using it (an average user would pull in 6,000 gold/month through GIM), and, soon, use it as a group messaging tool that may prove especially attractive for its upcoming casual MMO, zOMG!
"We just pushed it live, and as the word spreads and more and more users use it," said Ramamurthy. "In the next couple days, we'll turn on the feature that if you belong to guilds, you can instantly message all of them. When zOMG! rolls out, it'll be packaged in there as well. If you have 10 members of a clan and 1 is hanging out elsewhere on the site, you can send out the message and have them all join you and go on a mission."
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Posted by: haahah | September 29, 2008 at 11:16 PM