Thanks!

I especially appreciate your observation that there can be great value in imposing barriers in social contact. A huge hole in the vision behind almost every social Web site has been this extremist “walls=bad” assumption – The unexamined conclusion that because digital networked services -can- operate without such barriers, they always -should- operate that way. But that flies in the face of the way most humans operate in the offline world.

I think barriers to social contact were core to what (semi-accidentally) drove Facebook’s early success, and I’m interested to see what happens now that they’ve thrown them away…

(Funny to think of the parallel universe of video games, whose creators have chugged along all these years embracing barriers and inventing challenges, seeing that’s what players want.)

I -still- think there’s phenomenal unexplored opportunity in combining the benefits of offline barriers we all use everyday, with online social networking services… There’s gold in those hills.

Anyway I’m intrigued to hear about iilwy and look forward to checking it out. Thanks for the writeup.

Thanks for your very detailed and thoughtful response. I’m looking forward to seeing some of the changes you mention. I’m not sure if you would want to shed the dating aspect entirely, but one thing I didn’t mention was that the visual design of the site, while fun and pleasing, made me think it was targeted at teenagers and was a big reason why it took me a few weeks before I joined. Numerous others I’ve invited have said the same, “I don’t think this site is for me.”

In any case, I could go on and on but for now, looking forward to seeing some of the changes you mentioned.

Excellent post. You are most absolutely correct.

We are actually in the process of revising our image. We are trying to shed the whole “dating” take on things and broaden the service to apply to everyone. Since the beginning, we never wanted to be a “dating” site. We’ve been been extremely happy with the way the system has been used so far. We are working very hard to accommodate everyone on the site.

I’minlikewithyou is for everyone. Obviously, at least for now, the games are the centerpiece on the site. However, many of our users just want to browse around and look at the interesting games and the responses by other people. Its quite fun just to sit back and to watch people.

We will be adding a good set of new features that include: much better, more interesting messaging between your friends // privacy controls for media // much better usability // as well as some other bells and whistle type features.

Regarding inflation: you are also very correct. To be totally honest, the original design of the economy is not in place now. We thought that having too many point “sinks” or costs would be too restrictive and discourage activity, especially given the fact that we didn’t know exactly how people would use the site. Now, we have a much better idea of how the economy needs to be revised.

For example, in the very near future, when a game winner is chosen, points will be awarded to both the host and the winner. Non-winning bidders will only get a % of their bids back (though a high percentage), and the difference will be split between the host and the winner. Therefore, the winner and host are incentivized, and non-winning bidder’s payed a small cost.

Our primary objective is to make a really fun and engaging way for people to interact with each other. We are 5 people (all developers) in a small office in New York with very limited resources. Because we are small, we can adapt and make changes to iilwy as we hear feedback, which is really gratifying. We are pretty proud of what we’ve created so far. However, we are nowhere near our vision, and we have a lot of work to do!

Thanks for the thoughtful post on us. We appreciate it.

Charles Forman
iminlikewithyou // founder