We believe that the mig33 of the future is a quality, simpler and lighter service that genuinely scales and is available on all platforms, and is available to a more mainstream audience. We want our community members to be stars and recognizable for what you do to build the community and entertain your friends. I won’t indulge too much into the details but the new framework opens up a wide range of options for games and play. We also intend to bring artists and media programs to mig33. Working with other people and organizations in the business of entertainment and audience building, is about giving mig33 community members more things to do. We currently have a dozen and a half or so verified accounts now. We intend to grow this several folds by Q2 2014, and aim to have several thousands by the end of 2014.
On features, mig33 was born out of IM integration, chat, chatrooms and a cheap voice calling and sms feature. mig33 was designed to work on older phones such as the nokia n70. Through that, we built a great community, mostly around chatrooms. By 2010, we tried a range of features including blogs, wall posts, forums, etc. but all in all, mig33’s core has always been about having fun with friends (old and new) in chatrooms, the flexibility with being who you want to be, and reputation (as an Admin, and in recent years with miglevels and colored IDs). Things like voice calling, sms, buzz, lookout were only ever used by a few hundred users per day. The older blog and forums were polluted and also with little or no traction, lots of spam and the services were inflexible. We know there are some vocal users who want some of these services back, but again many of these services were only in user by a small handful of users. If we provide any of those services again, it will be a contemporary version as the world has long since moved on.
Going forward, it’s not just about mobile anymore. It’s about being able to be part of the community everywhere. Part of that means having a new leading mobile client on Android, and a presence on WAP/WEB. We’ve simplified messaging and added chat sync which means that even if on an older phone you disconnect, you don’t lose messages. It does mean the variety of messaging between users becomes simpler (mutual following let’s you private message each other, and if you want to message someone who isn’t following you back, you can still send them a virtual gift with a message on it). All the other places outside of instant messaging and chatrooms, we’ve ushered into miniblog (that’s walls, forums, etc). Miniblog is a much more accessible, flexible and free form format that let’s us do everything from replacing the walls to providing new public forums (beyond chatrooms) for users to play with. The simpler format is in readiness for us to start loading things like photos, videos, voice messaging, and lots more. All these are coming in 2014 and you’ll have the flexibility to move things between chat and miniblog easily. We’re also updating the artwork around stickers, emoticons, gifts and others for all the formats (android, web, wap, and yes .. the two polar opposites IOS and J2ME). And our gamification engine has also been updated. So rather than wait for long dated contests, we can build them hundreds of them on the fly without waiting for months of development.
2014 is going to be a truly exciting year for mig33, for our community, our staff, our partners, and our shareholders. look forward to sharing it with you all.
Steven Goh
CEO & Cofounder
@crazygrape
No comments:
Post a Comment