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”

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