Proud to announce: The Twenity Dashboard
We are very grateful for all the feedback we've received about Twenity on various channels. We were all ears and the results are finally here. As you probably know, Twenity is intended to behave like an adventure on top of you Twitter activity. While this may have been our plan, some players were still having problems: Where is the adventure? What do I have to do here? Well, guess no more - the newly introduced Dashboard solves most of these issues, with style.
Timeline
The timeline makes Twenity even more social. It allows you to see how people you follow perform on Twenity and when they made their calculations, unlocked badges and went level-up.
Latest friends
Once you start playing Twenity, it's hard to see any new friends that also started the game. The Latest friends module displays the last five people you follow that have registered to Twenity.
The advanced profile
The Dashboard displays your profile with a bit more data than it's available on the general profile page. We wanted to show you more - how many calculations you've made, how many badges you've unlocked in total, and how many #twenity tweets you've sent to the world.
Challenges 1: badges
Twenity allows you to unlock badges and go through different levels. While you can always browse other people's profiles to see what you have to do for the next badge, we've decided to make it a bit easier. The Challenges module displays the next 5 badges we think are the easiest for you to unlock, helping you conquer the world of Twitter (and Twenity).
Challenges 2: proximity battles
The are people you know who scored similar than you did on Twenity, some of them better, some of them worst. We know what you want to do with them – beat those in front of you, and run away from those behind you. Two of each are shown here, more are available on your profile leaderboard (friends – proximity). So you always know who you're competing against.
Challenges 3: additional
Besides the main challenges, Twenity will be giving players some additional badges. The first group of these badges has been available since our launch, the promoted badges for following accounts on Twitter. Since these have become quite popular, we wanted to make sure you don't miss them.
Dashboard 2.0
There are a few other things coming up on the Dashboard, which we'll be publishing as we go along, but we had to start somewhere. Thank you again, because of your interest and feedback, Twenity is evolving at a really fast pace, and we hope you like the newest updates as much as we do.
Is Twenity an Adventure or a Role Playing Game (RPG)?
One of the most important things we were trying to achieve with the concept of Twenity, was to make a real-life Role Playing Game based on your online activity. Something that would be able to portray a person on Twitter as a charachter of some sort, together with its race, class, and the world this character lives in. This character would gradually evolve, becoming stronger and gaining artifacts on its path.
RPG?
This is still our vision. But we were cautions about going all-in with the RPG part. Role Playing Game is a strong word, which also suggest different fantasy scenes, dragons, princesses and advanced character definition. Since quite a few of our players are probably gamers, this expectation could leave them dissapointed and would overpromise in a way. That's why we have decided to use »adventure« instead of »RPG« and work hard on polishing the service in such a way that perhaps someday it will be worth calling a real-life RPG.
RPG!
But that doesn't mean we haven't managed to successfully implement a few Role Playing Game elements. On Twenity, you start off as a rookie (level 1), but as you play, you unlock other levels, and 3 people are already in the highest, 5th level. You receive prizes which are both your artifacts and your attributes; badges, which you are awarded for various reasons. You can determine the world you play in, which is currently defined by your Twitter timezone. You can choose your race in the form of a user type (currently Person, Brand, Public Figure, Media). And you can put yourself in two different industries, which are analog to RPG classes.
Our goal is to go even further in this direction, hopefully one day we will be able to make an even more detailed and advanced alternative profile of your online presence.
The two basic components of Twenity: the score and the adventure
We have designed Twenity to be as intuitive as possible. Based on the initial impressions of our players, we've done a pretty good job. But a few words concerning the two major elements of our service won't hurt, so everybody will be able to understand how the concept behind Twenity works. A game that helps you discover your social capital while competing with your friends.
Your Twitter profile
Based on the data it recieves from your Twitter profile, Twenity does two different things:
- The score (calculation) component: it determines your Twitter influence based on the amount of followers, mentions, retweets you have and lists you appear on, giving you a score
- The adventure (game) component: it makes an alternative portrait of your Twitter behaviour, which is displayed by your level and badges
Developing the game
Twenity started off as a plain calculation, which determines your social capital (we will be revealing how it works in some other post). At that time, it was called Twitfluence. But we knew this wasn't enough, so we've begun flirting with gamification, trying to bring gaming mechanics to the scoring. This lead us to designing a real-life adventure that contains challenges, levels and achievements (badges).
From score to adventure
The score you receive on Twenity is fully independent from the adventure. It is not influenced by your level, badges or any other things in the game, it is calculated purely on your Twitter activity (followers, tweets, lists). On the other hand, the adventure part (levels and badges) is sometimes dependent on the score. While some badges are rewarded for different Twitter achievements (number of followers, retweets, etc.), others are unlocked with Twenity activity and information (days on Twenity, the score you receive, etc.).
Even though Twenity is a game first, social influence measurement tool second, the score is its core, and the gaming part is wrapped around it. You need to have a stable foundation for advanced features, and the calculation provides just that. But it's the adventure part that makes is so much fun and different.
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