Vivaty access through Facebook or AIM, pick your poison

Yesterday I tried — and failed — to quickly and easily access Vivaty through AIM. Vivaty describes itself as:

Vivaty is a fun way to socialize and share your web stuff in a personal virtual scene. No big downloads — it’s all in the browser. Try it with your friends!

Before I can try it with my friends, I had to try myself. Too damn many applications/services these days make the unwise assumption that we want to share everything with our friends, sight unseen.

Uh oh.

Simply getting to the point where I could try didn’t prove to be a smooth and easy process.

Firstly, I didn’t have AIM installed and don’t use AIM so I had to install that. During the install process AIM tried to make itself the default for everything: my search engine, to load when Windows starts up (no, no, no!), yadda, yadda. Had to go the ‘custom’ route and turn everything annoying off. When AIM finally did load in my 1920×1200 resolution it hogged 8% of the right menu with a big brown ugly spot. There is a floating window option somewhere, right?

Enough of Annoying Instant Messenger, I downloaded Vivaty, selected ‘male’ and then clicked launch. Vivaty is in beta so problems are to be expected but I couldn’t get Vivaty to launch in AIM. The launch screen (below) indicated I was "almost there" but I never got any further in the process. Close, restart application, try again, same result.

Uninstall AIM and try option #2: connecting through Facebook.

Bummer, IE only. Ok, fire up IE and be prompted to approve two different active-x controls. Then a prompt to install the "vivaty player" — hey, what about the "no big downloads" part? You still need to run IE which is no small program and you need to run the Vivaty Player. I’d say makes their claim questionable.

Once you agree to all this and install and run everything mentioned, you can finally see something in your browser window.

From here begins your quest to customize and learn about the Vivaty interface. I skipped the part where it involved subjecting my friends to this process. Have to play around some more and see if it’s worth the effort or energy.

I just wanted to see if this was something close to competition for Second Life. Doubtful.  Would have been easier — and better — as a Flash program. Or something that worked in Firefox and required no separate download. The end user probably doesn’t care too much about having a single download, but you make them change away from their favorite browser and start approving programs to run on their computer will make them wary.

And you want us to invite our friends to do this? Pass. I’d sooner share Lively with friends.