We haven’t had a new blog entry in over a week so we thought we should update you guys on what’s going on with the site and some the changes we decided to do.
First off the beta opening is going to be coming up very soon! We been working hard spreading the news about MyLifeRank and so far we had some good reviews from both journalists and internet gurus. But the main concern they have is and I’m sure most of you guys reading this blog also have is without trying out the site it’s hard to see how the site is going to flow and how it’s going to work in practice. So we decided to hold off on the mobile app and challenges for now and concentrate all our efforts in getting the site complete so that we may open it up for beta testing. The beta testing will be interesting, we of course want as much feedback as we can from the beta testers but also we don’t want to overload the server, so we will be limiting the number of available spots. The beta testing will include our friends, family, and invites for journalists, internet gurus (vcs), and invites from either party.
If you want to be added on the mailing list for beta testing, email us at MLRCreators@gmail.com.
Now we mentioned we are going to hold off on the mobile app and challenges and you might be asking why, well the main reason is time. The mobile app is going to be a huge part of MyLifeRank and we are certainly not giving up on it but due to the complexities of getting challenges to work with the mobile app which includes all of our location based features, we decided to hold off until we went to beta first. Our main priorities at this point is getting the beta out so we are able to gather information from the users on how everything feels and flows and hopefully gather some interest from VCs and investors. If we achieve what wanted with the site and with gathering interest from investors, then its full speed ahead for MyLifeRank. If not, then we will have to sit down and relook at what needs to be changed and what we might have done wrong.
In terms of the site design, we originally started out with a cartoonish style layout with the graphics because we felt it would give the site a more “game-like” feel. We now decided that we are going to polish things up a little bit with more professional style layout and we must say it looks much better. We showed our new title banner to a couple of close friends and it blew their minds Just from the simple title banner change, the site feels a lot more polished already. As time goes on and we replace all the graphics with more professional looking graphics, we believe we will “wow” the world when we go into beta testing.
That’s all for now, be sure to sign up for beta testing so your one of the first ones and have a nice weekend!
Friday, July 16, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
The World With MyLifeRank
Milos and I have a grand vision of how MyLifeRank can change the world and we thought the best way to show you our vision is write about it in detail on how MLR can be incorporated into a person’s daily life. We will go through four different scenarios (blog entries), each vastly different from each other and we will show how effective and how fun MyLifeRank is within their daily lives.
Casual Student:
“…I have 3 finals today and I didn’t get any sleep at all, I’m so dead tired! I hate math, I hate science and I hate history, I guess I just hate school all together. I mean what’s the point I don’t even know what I want to do when I grow up. My stupid parents took away my internet away so I wouldn’t get distracted but they didn’t take away my phone, I was on it all night lolz! I love my iPhone, I got everything I need like my Facebook and my MLR app and I can do whatever I need to without being on the computer. My friends’ status on FB were all about bitching about the finals, no new pictures of wild parties or anything fun, it was quite depressing …so I decided to see what’s up on MLR. I saw all these achievements from Becky, Jordan, Katie, Matt about how they were done studying…give me a break I bet they didn’t even open the book! I then saw a notification pop up in my inbox, I got a challenge from Dave to a math question, wtf….I accepted and I had no idea what I was doing because that problem was freakin hard. Good thing Dave didn’t know it either so we both took our times looking it up in the book, I put in my answer and submitted and I won! I never thought doing a math problem could be considered fun….I then realized it was getting late and I needed to study. I sent myself a goal to read the chapters I needed to and got to reading. A few hours later I logged back in and saw how Becky and Jordan are now level 10…wtf I’m not even level 5 yet how the hell did they level so fast! I spent the next hour finishing up goals and I got to level 7….when I’m done studying I’ll show those losers….”
Person Trying to Lose Weight:
“….I couldn’t wait to wake up this morning since today was my weigh day. I haven’t weighed myself in over a month and I couldn’t wait to see my progress. I already knew I lost weight since my clothes were much looser and I looked much better in the mirror. In either case, I wanted proof and to see for myself on the dreaded scale. After stepping on the scale my eyes watered up. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing - an 18 lb loss in weight! I got pretty emotional because I’ve been struggling with weight loss for a long time now and nothing worked. But then I found something that motivated me and kept me on track. Back in the day I never had to worry about my weight. I always ran around enough to make up for the eating but the past few years have been different. I now have a 8-5 job, a mortgage to pay, and kids to worry about. I simply don’t have the time I used to. My friends introduced me to MyLifeRank - a website that motivates people to do things through achieving goals. At first I thought it was kind of silly to join a website for weight loss but I found the tools it provided was a great help. The whole social thing and the fun spin they put on things really kept me motivated. Every week I created goals for myself whether it was to run a mile or hit the gym. Once I achieved it, my friends were able to see it and congratulate me. The more praises I heard about me achieving my goals, the more I got motivated. Another cool feature I used on MLR was the goal search feature. I would be able to find goals other members have created for certain outdoor locations. For example, last week I was taking a walk thru the forests preserve with my 4 year old. I logged into MyLifeRank on my phone and searched for goals within the area. There was a user created goal of “Reach the old mill house northeast of the yellow trail.” I followed the trail until I hit the old mill which turned out to be some kind of historical figure. I had a great time walking there with my son and I was able to take a picture and post it as an achievement. My friends were all interested in the place after seeing me achieve it, now they all say they want to do it. Honestly, I don’t know if I could have kept myself motivated and interested in weight loss if it wasn’t due to the social motivation and tools MyLifeRank provided.”
A Pizza / Pub Owner:
“…Ever since a few years ago I noticed the other restaurant owners from around the area have been going with online advertising. I’ve considered doing the same for a long time but never thought it was worth it. I looked into advertising in the yellow pages and had some marketing people come in but both options were very expensive. I wanted something that was cheap or possibility free with instant results (don’t we all) and my kids told me with the internet anything was possible. My kids helped me start a Facebook page and also got me a Twitter page for my place but neither one really seemed like it brought in any additional customers. I encourage customers to go to our Facebook page and post up positive things they like about the place. Many do and many give me the “like” push but it seems like the customer has to come in first before visiting and not vice versa. I’m also having a hard time keeping up with Twitter, I post up messages which no one seems to be viewing and I was limited with what I could say. Luckily one day, I had someone come into the store and ask me if I was interested in getting into something new and free called MyLifeRank. I gave the sales guy 5 mins to do his pitch and I liked what I heard. Basically, it seems like MyLifeRank is built like Facebook where users and businesses can interact but MyLifeRank implemented a gaming system within the site that encourages people to send and receive goals to complete which includes businesses. They said to me that I would be part of their location-based app so that users within the area can find me when searching for goals, all I have to do is create goals for people to achieve. The sales guy gave me examples and said that I should have incentives that people will want to take advantage of, like “Try out our new beer and get a 10% discount off of a pizza” or “Join our mailing list for special weekly coupons.” I decided to give MyLifeRank a try, I had my kids create a page for me and then set up a few goals with incentives for customers. At first I didn’t see anyone come in but as time went on I started to see people gradually coming in and achieving those goals I set. The set up MyLifeRank has for businesses is the best I seen so far, it provides a direct way for businesses to attract customers and giving customers and incentive to do them. Thanks MyLifeRank.”
Online Gamer:
“…it’s starting to get boring on my favorite MMORPG. All my friends and my guild members left. All I can do is play with noobs these days. I remember playing with my buds 24/7 but after they reached Level 80 they all got bored and didn’t want to pay for monthly fees anymore. I haven’t touched my dwarf hunter nor my elf knight in over a month and I’m thinking about cancelling too. I recently discovered another type of game. Well it’s not really a game but sort of?? MyLifeRank claims they are the world’s first RLG (real life game) , I guess that means it’s like a MMORPG but you’re playing yourself because that’s what it is, it’s like a site dedicated to yourself. I found this site by accident when searching for new games online and after I joined, it was kind of interesting. It’s like any other site, all the new user registration crap but then I was given a level, rank, attributes, etc…I had no idea on how to actually level or anything since there was nothing to kill or hunt but I discovered thru the site goals within my mailbox that the point of the game is to achieve goals, like real life goals. I’m like ok, I’ll just start creating goals for myself and achieve them…but then I found out if there are no friends to vote on your achievements, then you don’t get any scores…smart of them to do that! I had to get some of my old buds to join and I also found some new friends within the site and we started our adventure. We created goals for each other and challenged each other thru the site and later we discovered we can challenge each other thru the mobile app which is totally cool. Now we are always searching for new goals to do so that we can be the first ones on the site to level 60. Seems like most people on the site are pretty legit or MyLifeRank has found a good way of stopping cheating because no one seems to be moving fast on the rank scale. I also love creating goals for some of the local joints I hang out at, after all it’s my hood. Overall my friends and I are having a blast and I hope MyLifeRank can continue on and add new features so we don’t get bored. That would probably take a long time though since I can go anywhere with this app and always find something new to do!
Casual Student:
“…I have 3 finals today and I didn’t get any sleep at all, I’m so dead tired! I hate math, I hate science and I hate history, I guess I just hate school all together. I mean what’s the point I don’t even know what I want to do when I grow up. My stupid parents took away my internet away so I wouldn’t get distracted but they didn’t take away my phone, I was on it all night lolz! I love my iPhone, I got everything I need like my Facebook and my MLR app and I can do whatever I need to without being on the computer. My friends’ status on FB were all about bitching about the finals, no new pictures of wild parties or anything fun, it was quite depressing …so I decided to see what’s up on MLR. I saw all these achievements from Becky, Jordan, Katie, Matt about how they were done studying…give me a break I bet they didn’t even open the book! I then saw a notification pop up in my inbox, I got a challenge from Dave to a math question, wtf….I accepted and I had no idea what I was doing because that problem was freakin hard. Good thing Dave didn’t know it either so we both took our times looking it up in the book, I put in my answer and submitted and I won! I never thought doing a math problem could be considered fun….I then realized it was getting late and I needed to study. I sent myself a goal to read the chapters I needed to and got to reading. A few hours later I logged back in and saw how Becky and Jordan are now level 10…wtf I’m not even level 5 yet how the hell did they level so fast! I spent the next hour finishing up goals and I got to level 7….when I’m done studying I’ll show those losers….”
Person Trying to Lose Weight:
“….I couldn’t wait to wake up this morning since today was my weigh day. I haven’t weighed myself in over a month and I couldn’t wait to see my progress. I already knew I lost weight since my clothes were much looser and I looked much better in the mirror. In either case, I wanted proof and to see for myself on the dreaded scale. After stepping on the scale my eyes watered up. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing - an 18 lb loss in weight! I got pretty emotional because I’ve been struggling with weight loss for a long time now and nothing worked. But then I found something that motivated me and kept me on track. Back in the day I never had to worry about my weight. I always ran around enough to make up for the eating but the past few years have been different. I now have a 8-5 job, a mortgage to pay, and kids to worry about. I simply don’t have the time I used to. My friends introduced me to MyLifeRank - a website that motivates people to do things through achieving goals. At first I thought it was kind of silly to join a website for weight loss but I found the tools it provided was a great help. The whole social thing and the fun spin they put on things really kept me motivated. Every week I created goals for myself whether it was to run a mile or hit the gym. Once I achieved it, my friends were able to see it and congratulate me. The more praises I heard about me achieving my goals, the more I got motivated. Another cool feature I used on MLR was the goal search feature. I would be able to find goals other members have created for certain outdoor locations. For example, last week I was taking a walk thru the forests preserve with my 4 year old. I logged into MyLifeRank on my phone and searched for goals within the area. There was a user created goal of “Reach the old mill house northeast of the yellow trail.” I followed the trail until I hit the old mill which turned out to be some kind of historical figure. I had a great time walking there with my son and I was able to take a picture and post it as an achievement. My friends were all interested in the place after seeing me achieve it, now they all say they want to do it. Honestly, I don’t know if I could have kept myself motivated and interested in weight loss if it wasn’t due to the social motivation and tools MyLifeRank provided.”
A Pizza / Pub Owner:
“…Ever since a few years ago I noticed the other restaurant owners from around the area have been going with online advertising. I’ve considered doing the same for a long time but never thought it was worth it. I looked into advertising in the yellow pages and had some marketing people come in but both options were very expensive. I wanted something that was cheap or possibility free with instant results (don’t we all) and my kids told me with the internet anything was possible. My kids helped me start a Facebook page and also got me a Twitter page for my place but neither one really seemed like it brought in any additional customers. I encourage customers to go to our Facebook page and post up positive things they like about the place. Many do and many give me the “like” push but it seems like the customer has to come in first before visiting and not vice versa. I’m also having a hard time keeping up with Twitter, I post up messages which no one seems to be viewing and I was limited with what I could say. Luckily one day, I had someone come into the store and ask me if I was interested in getting into something new and free called MyLifeRank. I gave the sales guy 5 mins to do his pitch and I liked what I heard. Basically, it seems like MyLifeRank is built like Facebook where users and businesses can interact but MyLifeRank implemented a gaming system within the site that encourages people to send and receive goals to complete which includes businesses. They said to me that I would be part of their location-based app so that users within the area can find me when searching for goals, all I have to do is create goals for people to achieve. The sales guy gave me examples and said that I should have incentives that people will want to take advantage of, like “Try out our new beer and get a 10% discount off of a pizza” or “Join our mailing list for special weekly coupons.” I decided to give MyLifeRank a try, I had my kids create a page for me and then set up a few goals with incentives for customers. At first I didn’t see anyone come in but as time went on I started to see people gradually coming in and achieving those goals I set. The set up MyLifeRank has for businesses is the best I seen so far, it provides a direct way for businesses to attract customers and giving customers and incentive to do them. Thanks MyLifeRank.”
Online Gamer:
“…it’s starting to get boring on my favorite MMORPG. All my friends and my guild members left. All I can do is play with noobs these days. I remember playing with my buds 24/7 but after they reached Level 80 they all got bored and didn’t want to pay for monthly fees anymore. I haven’t touched my dwarf hunter nor my elf knight in over a month and I’m thinking about cancelling too. I recently discovered another type of game. Well it’s not really a game but sort of?? MyLifeRank claims they are the world’s first RLG (real life game) , I guess that means it’s like a MMORPG but you’re playing yourself because that’s what it is, it’s like a site dedicated to yourself. I found this site by accident when searching for new games online and after I joined, it was kind of interesting. It’s like any other site, all the new user registration crap but then I was given a level, rank, attributes, etc…I had no idea on how to actually level or anything since there was nothing to kill or hunt but I discovered thru the site goals within my mailbox that the point of the game is to achieve goals, like real life goals. I’m like ok, I’ll just start creating goals for myself and achieve them…but then I found out if there are no friends to vote on your achievements, then you don’t get any scores…smart of them to do that! I had to get some of my old buds to join and I also found some new friends within the site and we started our adventure. We created goals for each other and challenged each other thru the site and later we discovered we can challenge each other thru the mobile app which is totally cool. Now we are always searching for new goals to do so that we can be the first ones on the site to level 60. Seems like most people on the site are pretty legit or MyLifeRank has found a good way of stopping cheating because no one seems to be moving fast on the rank scale. I also love creating goals for some of the local joints I hang out at, after all it’s my hood. Overall my friends and I are having a blast and I hope MyLifeRank can continue on and add new features so we don’t get bored. That would probably take a long time though since I can go anywhere with this app and always find something new to do!
Friday, July 2, 2010
Gamers + Social Networkers + Self Improvers = RLG?
We have been getting some good feedback about what we have shown so far but we get the feeling a lot of people still don’t understand the core of MyLifeRank. We believe with what we have posted so far, people are only understanding “why” and “how” but not “who”. So for this blog entry we will concentrate on the three target audience that MyLifeRank is specially catered to: the gamers, the social networkers and the self-improvers.
For Gamers:
Generally people play games because they are fun and the sense of accomplishments are rewarding and we decided those two elements are exactly what we need to motivate players on MyLifeRank. We are trying to make the gaming system robust enough so that players ranging from casual to hardcore can all enjoy MyLifeRank equally. The reason we feel we can do this is due to the fact that MyLifeRank will be the first “Real Life” RPG game or as we like to call it RLG. For those not-familiar with RPGs (Role Playing Game), they are games where players control a fictional character with special abilities and attributes. As the character does things in the game such as kill monsters or complete quests they gain experience points and level up. After leveling, the character gains new attributes, more special abilities and is able to complete more quests. There is really no end game for RPGs since it’s a virtual world that your fictional character lives in. Even if you reach the highest level or complete every single quest, there are still fun things in the game for you to do. MyLifeRank’s RLG is based on the same concept with a twist; players will not be playing fictional characters, the users will be playing a character based on their own lives. The characters will follow in the footsteps of what the player is doing in REAL LIFE. The quests that the characters are striving to complete are created by the player or by the players’ friends and family members. Cool huh? Just like in a RPG, RLG’s players will start every new player equally at level 1 with the same attribute points so that every player starts on the same playing field.
Players will receive experience points and attribute points for every achievement; experience points are varied and attribute points are not. Experience points are varied because for every achievement a player has, it has to be voted upon by friends otherwise the player gets no points at all. We like this system because we don’t want people to abuse the system by posting up hundreds of worthless achievements; we want hard working and great achievements to be posted! Every achievement can be voted from a scale of 1-10 stars and has a time limit of 7 days for votes. Friends can only vote once and the total experience points earned will be based on the number of players that vote and the score that they give. Levels are based on a predetermined amount of experience points, once a player crosses the threshold, they move up in level. Attributes on the other hand will not vary and will be based on a set amount per achievement. When an achievement is posted, the attribute it relates to will give X amount of points towards that attribute. To add in a bit more fun and challenge, achievements will not only be based on a player’s own goals but also goals and challenges created by friends, peers of the players and MyLifeRank’s system goals as well.
Some might be thinking if the characters are based on the player’s real life then why does everyone still start out the same way? Shouldn’t they start out differently? We also thought of the same problem. We originally wanted to start every player out differently based on their current standing in life but there were a few problems we thought of that at this point we are just not ready to tackle. First off, if we truly wanted to start people off differently, it would require us to collect an enormous amount of data from the player and we are not sure players are ready to give it up, nor would there be any way for us to be able to verify that information. Things such as education background, current job/salary, family history, medical history are just a few are things that players would require to give up and we would have to find a way to verify them….we feel things would just become difficult and messy. Another reason why we thought starting players off on a different level would be bad would because we feel some might be discouraged by it. Players signing on the site might find it unfair that they start say with a level 10 while others start out at 20 or 40 and would discourage them from even trying. After all MyLifeRank is supposed to motivate and we thought this would be a big problem. We decided that even though the RLG is based on real life, we would base it on what we consider a players true core including socialness, values and drive. We hope even if the player lacks in any of the three things, MyLifeRank will hopefully motivate them to improve thru our RLG.
For Social Networkers:
So we just talked about how MLR caters to the gamers, next up would be the social networkers. Nowadays it’s hard to find anyone that isn’t using some sort of social networking tool. The big ones of course are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, but even the location based sites like FourSqaure, Gowalla, BrightKite and connection sites like Linkedin are considered social networking. Social networking is a very general term that basically can be summed up as a group of people aiming to build relationships with similar interest or backgrounds on the internet. Even bloggers with followers or internet forums can be considered social networking. There are countless forms of social networking that I haven’t even mentioned. You get our point, social networking is a big part of people's lives these days and MyLifeRank is of course built with social networking in mind. We built MyLifeRank with all the features most people are already familiar to limit any new learning curve, having a personal account with profile and background information, the ability to email and receive notifications, and the ability to search for friends and get status updates from them.
We added on the gaming info within the profile to show the players, level, rank, attributes, and medals, and navigation tabs show the players achievements, goals, challenges, in addition to friends and settings. We tried to make things flow as smoothly as possible. Under the achievement tab players are able to manually add in any achievements they have and they are able to see all the past achievements. Under the goals tab, players are able to create new goals for themselves or for others and have the ability to see what goals the player is currently working on and see the goals that the player has created. Challenges tab has almost the same features as goals, a player can create challenges for other people and can see current challenges and challenges the player has created in the past. The profile will also have a Recent Updates wall on the left side which shows all the new achievements, goals and challenges from the player’s friends or for important site messages.
One big difference with the Recent Updates wall and all the other status walls out there is there are no random or pointless status updates. Players do not have the ability to just type in whatever they feel like, it is only used for showing you what your friends have on their plate in terms of what goals they accepted or quit, or shows their results in some form or another. Players will have the ability to comment, vote and join status updates they see from their friends. Comments cause the usual praise or embarrassment from friends and we know people are used to the casual “like” button Facebook implemented, but voting is a very crucial thing for MyLifeRank players. Without votes players do not receive the experience points for their achievement so we wanted to stress for all players to vote. We don’t stress that the votes have to be high in score, in fact if the achievement is something ridiculous like “I threw a stone into the lake,” it should be voted very low. The voting system is in place to reward those with great achievements and punish those who don’t. A very cool thing about the join ability is that if a player sees his/her friend is attempting to do a goal the player likes, the player has the ability to join the goal. We believe this in itself will motivate players to get involved with goals they never would have in the first place.
For Self-Improvers:
Now on to the last target group for MyLifeRank, the self-improvers. We don’t know anyone in this world that is perfect. There is always something everyone is trying to improve on. The self-improvers might be the biggest target group we're going after because MyLifeRank is in fact what we like to call a social motivation site. The site is built to help people achieve their life goals. We built the site with gaming elements as well as social networking elements to help promote fun motivation and we believe it is much easier to achieve something with a group than by yourself. Of course if there are some things that a player finds easier doing by himself/herself we certainly won’t limit it, the player can use MyLifeRank as his/her life tracker. The whole system of adding and showing your achievements as well as status updates on new goals and challenges just adds in a type of social motivation that blogs and forums just can’t compete with. Add in the fact that you can instantly join your friends with their goal and vice versa, and see goals by peers sorted by location just make the whole experience even easier. Other social networking sites provide a means of connecting with other people via online communication and status updates, however, none of them provide the framework to support actually going out and doing things together like MyLifeRank does. We don’t believe there is a better system out there than MyLifeRank for social motivation.
As a bonus feature, MyLifeRank will store all your achievements and later on we will have a one page display that you can use to print out or show online all the things you accomplished within your life. Are you scratching your head thinking “why would we want this?” This is something our mutual friend came up with and we really like this idea. Why not have a feature where you can use your information on MyLifeRank as a reference for your character on job applications, service nominations, or anything else you would need it for. We won’t have this initially since there wouldn’t be enough information anyways, but down the road we like to have a “make reference” link somewhere in player’s profile that creates a one page document of all the past achievements nicely put in a reference list format. We would have options of sorting the achievements by attribute, date, etc. There would be options of posting pictures on there as well as all the other elements you would want to include in a reference letter. It can be printed or be passed on and shown to anyone with the link provided.
We think we achieved our goal of explaining the three target groups of MyLifeRank, the gamers, the social networkers and the self-improvers, now hopefully when the site is up and running, you guys can vote on how we did! :) We purposely left out location-based explanations from our previous entries about challenges, locations, app, etc…we will explain it in full detail on our next blog entry. Stay tuned!
For Gamers:
Generally people play games because they are fun and the sense of accomplishments are rewarding and we decided those two elements are exactly what we need to motivate players on MyLifeRank. We are trying to make the gaming system robust enough so that players ranging from casual to hardcore can all enjoy MyLifeRank equally. The reason we feel we can do this is due to the fact that MyLifeRank will be the first “Real Life” RPG game or as we like to call it RLG. For those not-familiar with RPGs (Role Playing Game), they are games where players control a fictional character with special abilities and attributes. As the character does things in the game such as kill monsters or complete quests they gain experience points and level up. After leveling, the character gains new attributes, more special abilities and is able to complete more quests. There is really no end game for RPGs since it’s a virtual world that your fictional character lives in. Even if you reach the highest level or complete every single quest, there are still fun things in the game for you to do. MyLifeRank’s RLG is based on the same concept with a twist; players will not be playing fictional characters, the users will be playing a character based on their own lives. The characters will follow in the footsteps of what the player is doing in REAL LIFE. The quests that the characters are striving to complete are created by the player or by the players’ friends and family members. Cool huh? Just like in a RPG, RLG’s players will start every new player equally at level 1 with the same attribute points so that every player starts on the same playing field.
Players will receive experience points and attribute points for every achievement; experience points are varied and attribute points are not. Experience points are varied because for every achievement a player has, it has to be voted upon by friends otherwise the player gets no points at all. We like this system because we don’t want people to abuse the system by posting up hundreds of worthless achievements; we want hard working and great achievements to be posted! Every achievement can be voted from a scale of 1-10 stars and has a time limit of 7 days for votes. Friends can only vote once and the total experience points earned will be based on the number of players that vote and the score that they give. Levels are based on a predetermined amount of experience points, once a player crosses the threshold, they move up in level. Attributes on the other hand will not vary and will be based on a set amount per achievement. When an achievement is posted, the attribute it relates to will give X amount of points towards that attribute. To add in a bit more fun and challenge, achievements will not only be based on a player’s own goals but also goals and challenges created by friends, peers of the players and MyLifeRank’s system goals as well.
Some might be thinking if the characters are based on the player’s real life then why does everyone still start out the same way? Shouldn’t they start out differently? We also thought of the same problem. We originally wanted to start every player out differently based on their current standing in life but there were a few problems we thought of that at this point we are just not ready to tackle. First off, if we truly wanted to start people off differently, it would require us to collect an enormous amount of data from the player and we are not sure players are ready to give it up, nor would there be any way for us to be able to verify that information. Things such as education background, current job/salary, family history, medical history are just a few are things that players would require to give up and we would have to find a way to verify them….we feel things would just become difficult and messy. Another reason why we thought starting players off on a different level would be bad would because we feel some might be discouraged by it. Players signing on the site might find it unfair that they start say with a level 10 while others start out at 20 or 40 and would discourage them from even trying. After all MyLifeRank is supposed to motivate and we thought this would be a big problem. We decided that even though the RLG is based on real life, we would base it on what we consider a players true core including socialness, values and drive. We hope even if the player lacks in any of the three things, MyLifeRank will hopefully motivate them to improve thru our RLG.
For Social Networkers:
So we just talked about how MLR caters to the gamers, next up would be the social networkers. Nowadays it’s hard to find anyone that isn’t using some sort of social networking tool. The big ones of course are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, but even the location based sites like FourSqaure, Gowalla, BrightKite and connection sites like Linkedin are considered social networking. Social networking is a very general term that basically can be summed up as a group of people aiming to build relationships with similar interest or backgrounds on the internet. Even bloggers with followers or internet forums can be considered social networking. There are countless forms of social networking that I haven’t even mentioned. You get our point, social networking is a big part of people's lives these days and MyLifeRank is of course built with social networking in mind. We built MyLifeRank with all the features most people are already familiar to limit any new learning curve, having a personal account with profile and background information, the ability to email and receive notifications, and the ability to search for friends and get status updates from them.
We added on the gaming info within the profile to show the players, level, rank, attributes, and medals, and navigation tabs show the players achievements, goals, challenges, in addition to friends and settings. We tried to make things flow as smoothly as possible. Under the achievement tab players are able to manually add in any achievements they have and they are able to see all the past achievements. Under the goals tab, players are able to create new goals for themselves or for others and have the ability to see what goals the player is currently working on and see the goals that the player has created. Challenges tab has almost the same features as goals, a player can create challenges for other people and can see current challenges and challenges the player has created in the past. The profile will also have a Recent Updates wall on the left side which shows all the new achievements, goals and challenges from the player’s friends or for important site messages.
One big difference with the Recent Updates wall and all the other status walls out there is there are no random or pointless status updates. Players do not have the ability to just type in whatever they feel like, it is only used for showing you what your friends have on their plate in terms of what goals they accepted or quit, or shows their results in some form or another. Players will have the ability to comment, vote and join status updates they see from their friends. Comments cause the usual praise or embarrassment from friends and we know people are used to the casual “like” button Facebook implemented, but voting is a very crucial thing for MyLifeRank players. Without votes players do not receive the experience points for their achievement so we wanted to stress for all players to vote. We don’t stress that the votes have to be high in score, in fact if the achievement is something ridiculous like “I threw a stone into the lake,” it should be voted very low. The voting system is in place to reward those with great achievements and punish those who don’t. A very cool thing about the join ability is that if a player sees his/her friend is attempting to do a goal the player likes, the player has the ability to join the goal. We believe this in itself will motivate players to get involved with goals they never would have in the first place.
For Self-Improvers:
Now on to the last target group for MyLifeRank, the self-improvers. We don’t know anyone in this world that is perfect. There is always something everyone is trying to improve on. The self-improvers might be the biggest target group we're going after because MyLifeRank is in fact what we like to call a social motivation site. The site is built to help people achieve their life goals. We built the site with gaming elements as well as social networking elements to help promote fun motivation and we believe it is much easier to achieve something with a group than by yourself. Of course if there are some things that a player finds easier doing by himself/herself we certainly won’t limit it, the player can use MyLifeRank as his/her life tracker. The whole system of adding and showing your achievements as well as status updates on new goals and challenges just adds in a type of social motivation that blogs and forums just can’t compete with. Add in the fact that you can instantly join your friends with their goal and vice versa, and see goals by peers sorted by location just make the whole experience even easier. Other social networking sites provide a means of connecting with other people via online communication and status updates, however, none of them provide the framework to support actually going out and doing things together like MyLifeRank does. We don’t believe there is a better system out there than MyLifeRank for social motivation.
As a bonus feature, MyLifeRank will store all your achievements and later on we will have a one page display that you can use to print out or show online all the things you accomplished within your life. Are you scratching your head thinking “why would we want this?” This is something our mutual friend came up with and we really like this idea. Why not have a feature where you can use your information on MyLifeRank as a reference for your character on job applications, service nominations, or anything else you would need it for. We won’t have this initially since there wouldn’t be enough information anyways, but down the road we like to have a “make reference” link somewhere in player’s profile that creates a one page document of all the past achievements nicely put in a reference list format. We would have options of sorting the achievements by attribute, date, etc. There would be options of posting pictures on there as well as all the other elements you would want to include in a reference letter. It can be printed or be passed on and shown to anyone with the link provided.
We think we achieved our goal of explaining the three target groups of MyLifeRank, the gamers, the social networkers and the self-improvers, now hopefully when the site is up and running, you guys can vote on how we did! :) We purposely left out location-based explanations from our previous entries about challenges, locations, app, etc…we will explain it in full detail on our next blog entry. Stay tuned!
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