Kaneva mixes social networking with 3D virtual world
By Vivek | December 21st, 2006 at 11:50 pm ET
Kaneva seems to be a cool startup shaping up well, providing users with a social networking as well as virtual world platform. The Atlanta, Georgia based company is founded by Christopher W. Klaus who also founded and served as the Chief Security Advisor of Internet Security Systems, Inc. (ISS), a company he created in 1994 and sold to IBM at a total value of over one billion dollars in October 2006.
Kaneva has 2 sides to it - Social Networking and 3D Virtual world. Kaneva provides users with a wide variety of tools to manage their profile. You can upload photos, videos, define your interests, change page layout, maintain your blog, invite friends, get a quick list of people who visited your profile, and many more of those things from networking world. Kaneva lets you upload media files including videos, music, and photos with sizes limitation of 100 MB or 10 minutes in length. Users have the ability to create their own channels, which again is pretty solidly built, which can be completely customized in terms of layout and design. Each channel can have its own media library, blogs, music catalog, forum, events, game catalog, and admin section for the channel owner. Comments, raves, sharing is sprinkled all over the site where you would expect them to be like photos, blogs, videos, profile,….Kaneva provides the typical privacy options including the ability to make their media uploads public/private, and make your channels public/private.
I didn’t get a chance to try out the Virtual 3D World at Kaneva since it is under private invite only beta right now and will launch in 2007. Kaneva does say that the 3D world is free to join with premium Secondlife like features being available in case you to upgrade your apartment, buy cool stuff, and send gifts to your friends. Users can create their 3D persona using Kaneva’s avatar creator and customize it with clothes, hair, eyes, and skin(bones seem to for free). Kaneva avatars are supposed to be in a persistent and expanding world, which allows players to develop their own characters, attributes and possessions over the course of play(not sure how that plays out in real). Social networking aspects in 3D world still remain the same.
Having said all the good things, I will like add one highly eccentric behavior I have seen at this site. In the couple of hours since in signed up, I have received 3 friend requests and 6 comments on my profile which sound pretty much same in lingo, and I am not the only one who thinks in this direction. Guys it is good to have activity on your site, but this is getting too much. Need to rein in you bot. On the whole idea might not be original but implementation is pretty good.
Links:
Kaneva
on December 28th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Hello and thanks for your take on Kaneva and World of Kaneva. To answer some questions:
We are currently in very limited testing for the virtual world part of Kaneva. We will be opening it further in the first part of 2007, so stay tuned!
There aren’t any bots associated with the Kaneva website. We have a lot of very passionate users that pay close attention to new profile signups and they tend to welcome folks pretty quickly.
Feel free to contact me with any question you might have.
Thanks!
Rich “Tisirin” Weil
Community Relations Director
Kaneva
on January 8th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
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Lord knows I need advisory. Todays world in the sheepherding trade is wool or be wool.
on February 8th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Ok, I have been on Kaneva for 3 months now and just got invited to try out the Virtual World beta about a week ago. I can vouch that there are NO bots on this site! Everyone wants to get invited to to Virtual World and that’s the only way to get invited. This is why as soon as you sign up, you get lots of friend requests, comments, and raves! We’re not bots, we’re just doing what we are required to do to get into the Virtual World, and trust, it’s worth it!
on February 26th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
I am Tech_Henderson. As one of the first Beta Testers invited to join outside of Kaneva employees and their family I have seen how well the entire team at Kaneva responds to user feedback. So far things are coming out great and the team is always looking for how the community likes/dislikes particular aspects. I am personally trying to break/exploit everything I can to report another bug, but it is hard as I feel the platform is very solid to play on based on my experiences.
Kaneva indeed brings together a myspace/facebook appeal to a 3D MMO Virtual World with a solid built-in Kaneva Game Platform, and topped it all off with a Flickr/Photobucket photo community and even a YouTube/(insert search engine here)-Video community. So yeah, think swiss-army knife of internet entertainment, and if you seem interested come check out what it is all about.
For starters, the Myspace/Facebook appeal of Kaneva. I have my own profile with multiple pages that I can customize without needing to Hack the “About Me” section. Its all my own and my choice to what goes into the pages.
Then there is the Flickr/Photobucket appeal of Kaneva. I get to host my own photos and images on the Kaneva server so I do not need to worry about hosting elsewhere for my profile images, as well as create my own page of pictures I can share with family.
Lets not forget the YouTube/”____” Video appeal of Kaneva. Not only do I get to upload pictures, and share pictures, but the same goes for videos. I get the opportunity to upload videos to the Kaneva servers to add to my profile page.
And there are communities. You can create your own community that could be another step in hosting your own videos/photos or a discussion board for a particular subject and more. As I am typing this I just thought of a new way to utilize the communities… Guild/Clan forums for the video games I play and lead.
Then there is the Virtual World of Kaneva. Take everything from the profile, photos, videos, and communities and turn it 3D. Your own apartment can show a playlist of your video’s that you uploaded to visitors who come to your place. You can hang pictures on the walls, floors, anything really. Your communities get their own 3D space to play with as well. Then throw in the whole MMO Virtual World aspects like Secondlife, and for those who are not up to speed with the analogy think The Sims 2 “online” with more control but only one character to manipulate.
Kaneva has everything and I am glad to be a part of it. Oh and for the raves and friends requests they are all real people trying to meet new friends that they would not have normally, and in return having a better chance to be invited to the World of Kaneva Beta.
Respectfully,
T_H
on March 15th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
[…] Kaneva, the platform offering both social networking + metaverse in once place that I had written about last year, is now open for everyone to register and try it out. I haven’t gotten a chance to play with Kaneva’s virtual side of things and will trying getting to it sometime soon. However the initial reviews for 3D world don’t seem to rate it well. Other than that you can read a long comment from one of the “beta tester” at Kaneva to get a different pre-release view point. […]