Whyville: A Viable MySpace Alternative?
June 12th, 2006
Suddenly, Whyville is popping up all over my radar. A recommendation from a colleague. This article in Adotas. Today’s article in C|Net. The timing certainly seems right for a MySpace alternative that’s safe for kids, though the site seems to be more like NeoPets than MySpace. There are sites like this one for Whyville cheats (always a good measure of a site’s viability) and trusted brands like Adobe and the J. Paul Getty Trust are involved … but something’s not quite passing the smell test.
This Virtual Worlds Review page on Whyville says the site launched in 1999, and was averaging 22,000 visitors a day in 2003. But the site itself looks like it was designed in 1999, with not much attention paid to the look since then. The current flurry of articles about Whyville seems to be the first news generated by the site in several years, which makes me wonder: Is piggybacking on the MySpace furor to get stories a last gasp for breath before shuttering the site? And when you go to visit the site of the company that launched Whyville, you’re taken to what appears to be a keyword advertising link farm. Hmmmmm.
JUNE 16 UPDATE: Be sure to click on the comments link below. I appreciate Whyville CEO Jim Bower taking the time to post. His note begs this takeaway for marketers, too: DNS issues can make you look really bad.
June 12th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
It is a surprise to us that Whyville has just hit your radar, as you mention, we have been one of the more popular sites for young adults for more than 7 years with more than 1.7 million registered users. It is not, however, particularly surprising that growing concerns about safety on the Internet at sites like MySpace would raise Whyville’s visibility. Whyville was designed from the outset with young adults as our demographic, and for that reason, Numedeon has taken user security seriously from the outset. We even have a patent pending on the system we have developed (filed 5 years ago). In other words, the security features in Whyville were put from the outset, they are not a response to the current furor. It also may be worth pointing out that both our internal data, as well as studies conducted by the National Science Foundation have made it clear that it is the quality of a young person’s experience on Whyville, and not the graphics that drive its use. In our opinion, kids have enough exposure to trendy graphics, at Numedeon we are more interested in substance. Besides, the largest energy committed to the site graphically, is the effort our users themselves spend on designing their face parts. With more than 2 million designs in our database, this user generated content is by definition as contemporary as you can get. Finally, Whyville has existed for 7 years — starting pre bubble, enduring the bubble burst and the post bubble dry years, and now very strongly coming into its own. I can assure you, Whyville is here to stay —
Happy to provide any more information you desire — better yet, we can have a virutal conversation, if you would like, in the Numedeon front office.
Jim Bower
CEO Numedeon Inc.
p.s. Odd coincidence, but it turns out that our domain name server messed up, and generated the wrong link over the weekend for Numedon.com. Should be fixed shortly –
June 15th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
I think anyone that takes the time to check out the Whyville community and really gets a feel for what the kids are doing there will see just how sustainable and vibrant this kids’ community really is.
The negative publicity surrounding hype-behemoth Myspace right now has certainly garnered Whyville a bit more press than usual, but offering a safe and healthy alternative to a tarnished brand seems less like a “last gasp” and more like a bit of being in the right place at the right time. And the fact that the virtual place that Whyville now resides at was reached via a very long and organic road seems all for the better – with or without the hype.