Some general updates filtered through last week, our first all-round upgrade since Jan 1.

Mostly, this round contains lots of bugfixes for issues that you’ve kindly drawn to our attention in the last couple of weeks. Lots of stability and UI fixes are scattered throughout the release.

We’ve also been listening to your requests for new features.

As of last week, those who’ve been around for a while will notice the new list of online users, which you’ll find under Populated Spaces in the Home tab. Under Explore, you can now also sort by whether a space has any online users now.

More coming soon; Happy February!

Today we’re opening up Just Leap In to a public beta group. After an engaging private beta, and thousands of stunning, media-rich 3D worlds on the web (thanks to an amazing beta group: You. Guys. Rock), we figure it’s time to kick the tires a little harder.

... and hey, to show the world how much liveliness there is in 2009’s Fellowship of Virtual Worlds. Our industry’s Boromir may have fallen, but even the smallest person, we hear, can change the course of the future.

Just Leap In?

Just Leap In (JLI for short) aims to broaden the appeal of web-based 3D for a mainstream audience, especially – early on – the kind of audience that uses a lot of social media tools: Facebook, Flickr, Friendfeed, YouTube, you name it.

Goals

We’re focused on delivering

• • a simple, great experience of Web-based 3D media sharing
   (photos, videos, music)
• • useful social interactions (comments, chat, networking)
• • ease-of-use (everything is drag-and-drop)
• • a jaw-drapping 3D environment for web browsers on Mac & PC platforms.

We’re not (just) another virtual chatroom. Uniquely, we offer an RSSable newsfeed that syndicates 3D events ‘off-world’. While we’re delivering full game-state networking, we’re also after an asynchronous browsing experience, in order to make a 3D world function like a YouTube embed—or like any personal/corporate blog or webpage.

Mainly, though, we seek to ‘grow the pie’ for true 3D worlds on the Web, and appeal beyond an already-experienced 3D audience.

Mission

The first day I leap into 3D to find a friend or watch a film, and I forget it’s a “virtual world,” on that day the virtual worlds industry has grown up.

In that spirit, we’re aiming to make 3D part of the lifestream of the social web.

Who’s using this thing?

Most our private beta users are around the peak social media demographic (18-34), haven’t spent much time in a virtual world before, but are avid users of tools like Flickr and YouTube who are totally interested in swapping to a 3D environment. If you listen to those kinds of users, they want to do stuff like browse for friends and share photos and videos online. Other virtual worlds don’t actually make that stuff easy to do. So we’ve grown organically to make those key activities as simple as possible.

How do I get started?

It’s a free public beta—hop in over at JustLeapIn.com, create a 3D space, share it anywhere on the web, and let us know what you think.

Happy New Year to all!

The first week of the expanded early beta is going great! We’ve been checking out all the interesting spaces people have been building with JLI, and hearing some great feedback from the community. So far the response has been very positive among our rapidly growing group of beta testers. We’ve even seen more than 1000 hits on a YouTube video about JLI:

It’s a very exciting experience for us, watching the rubber hit the road for the first time. We’re very happy to see people having fun with all the stuff we’ve put in our toybox over the last several months. We’ve also been pleasantly surprised to see people using objects in ways we hadn’t thought of to achieve effects we hadn’t foreseen. That’s what’s so exciting about this kind of project; the community is always ready to innovate and help us create something bigger than the sum of its parts.

We’re also happy to be weathering the new load on our servers without any suffering any major earthquakes. We’re adding accounts everyday as we increase the size of the beta test, and busily working away at the list of upcoming features:

• - Multiple spaces per user
• - Controllable human avatars (followed by full customization and other enhancements)
• - Comments and “notes”
• - Total custom surfacing for objects & spaces
• - Uploadable audio
• - Deep social network integration
• - The obligatory “much more”

In the future, we will also be integrating 3D user-generated content – with a commitment to open standards – and looking for contributions from third-party developers. If you’re interested in testing these particular features when they’re ready, please get in touch.

The user AngryBeth posted this image on flickr yesterday. Well, gosh. That’s how we feel about you, too.

Thanks to all of you for helping this beta go so well. Great things are still ahead.

“Infirmo”

Community Guide
Just Leap In