Cute BuddyPoke Wins Hearts of The Social Web
BuddyPoke is conquering the hearts of millions around the world. The application, available on the social networks Orkut, MySpace, Netlog, Hyves, Hi5, Friendster, Que Pasa and Lokalisten, let’s you create a 3D avatar with the same physical characteristics as you.
Hug, kiss, tickle, or punch your friends with your own personalized 3D avatar
With BuddyPoke You can customize your appearance e.g. your hair, eyes, bodycolor, freckles, mouth, moustache or beard. Furthermore, you can change your mood (happy, in love, hopeful) of your “Poke” and interact with other “Pokes’ (give kisses, flirting, send flowers).
Randall Ho and Dave Westwood, who co-created BuddyPoke, leveraged their 3D skills to tap into the Poke popularity to take the human interaction on social networks to an entirely new level of interactivity and engagement. In early April 2008 Randall and Dave first released Buddypoke on MySpace. Other social networks followed later that year.
The key to BuddyPoke’s success rests on its built-in virality coupled with sophisticated interactivity. If you are hugging a friend, you actually see two friends that are hugging, that’s much more engaging. To monetize Buddypoke Google Adsense ads ($1-2 CPM) are shown on Orkut.
Some figures of Buddypoke’s success: over 1 million installs on Netlog and 17.8 million visitors (February 5, 2009), 1.1 million active users on MySpace (February 8, 2009), 1.3 million users (16% of total users) on Hyves (February 8, 2009) and listed most popular in the Orkut Application Directory.
BudyPoke installs between May and August 2008
Netlog installs by language on December, 2008
The application is thus far most popular in Brazil, The Netherlands and Italy. When it will be released on Facebook is not yet known. But if the application becomes as popular as on other social networks, they’d better have a scalability and monetization plan prepared for a sudden user influx.
Many thanks to Steven Kraal of Netlog for providing the BuddyPoke data.
Source: Wikipedia, Ning, Google Code, SlideShare, YouTube
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[...] is soooo Netlog Ik las via de Twitter van Netlog een bericht op Viralblog over BuddyPoke. Een applicatie die je ook op Netlog kunt draaien om je vriendjes met een [...]
Great website, thanks for the info!
[...] Esta postagem do Viral Blog (em inglês) trata da dimensão que os aplicativos, avatars em 3D que servem pra auto-identificação e interação, estão mais do que propagados no Orkut, MySpace e mais seis plataformas de redes sociais -sem data ainda para invadir o Facebook. [...]
There are other plenty of avatar sites like http://www.smallworlds.com
and http://www.supersecret.com
They are worth checking out too!
verry cool here! that buddypoke video is so cute!!