Firstly, we’d like to thank everyone for their input on the blog; there was a lot of it! We’ve carefully read your questions and concerns and have compiled a list of questions and answers below.

Q. Why does it take so long to open MiniHomes?
A. We’ve recognized a few of the problems. These were primarily with created items that were too large in file size. We’ve already reduced the file size by 50% on average and are working on reducing it further. We’ve also improved the way items are loaded into the MiniHome. This will speed up the processing time. We’ve implemented a proper caching system. This means that all items are cached and once you’ve downloaded it the first time, you should not need to download it again. These things have already been done. There are also 2-3 other things that we are working on right now to help speed up MiniHomes (and overall site performance).

Q. Can we have some kind of “neighborhood” feature?
A. This is an excellent idea. First, we would like to say that this has a lower priority than performance, but we will definitely begin working on it very soon. We realize that there are existing communities on MyMiniLife (eg. Nottington, Rainbow County, Sliders Inc, WWF, New Artist League, Black Village). We see neighborhoods as an opportunity to give these communities an official place in MyMiniLife. Right now, we are exploring interesting ways to visualize the community. We are definitely open to your ideas and will take your feedback into consideration when designing this feature. Please post your comments and ideas below as we are anxiously waiting to hear your thoughts.

Q. The quality of the items has been decreasing. What are you going to do about it?
A. We realize the main concerns are four rotations and non-transparent items. Previously, you would lose money when you bought a poor item, but we changed this so that you have two hours to sell items back for the full price. Regarding the rotation and transparency issues, we are experimenting with tools that will automatically detect these problems and warn the buyer before they purchase them. This same warning could also be used when creating items so the creator knows that there could potentially be issues before he/she finishes.

If a given item has been voted below 0, the creator will see the most common reason why it has been voted down. We will be adjusting the threshold at which the creator sees this message. We’ve listened to you in regards to being able to explore all of someone’s created items. We’ve done this with the profile module on all item creators’ profiles. Since you are the item creators, we would like to hear your input on this. If you think more needs to be done, please let us know your thoughts.

Q. I am having a hard time with the item creator. Do you have any resources for me?
A. Unfortunately, there are no plans to improve the item creator in the near future. Performance issues, among other things, are currently seen at a much higher priority. If you are having difficulty creating items, please watch our introduction video here: Youtube Item Creation. You should also read our help documentation on creating items here: Item Creation Help. If you are having trouble getting started, reach out to the community as they are more than willing to help.

Q. Will we be able to gift money and MiniHomes?
A. In a short answer: currently no. That is not to say that this feature is completely out of the question. We understand and hear you, but are really trying to think this feature out first. It appears that most of you would like to send a monetary gift to a new user to help jump-start their building. Our main issue is fraud and if you have a good solution to help us prevent this, please let us know if the comments below.

Q. Can I make more profit from creating items?
A. We will investigate this further and come up with a profit-scheme that is fair to everyone.

Q. Can we have forums?
A. Previously we had forums; however, they were rarely used. Now that there is a clamoring for them again, we will add them, but only after we solve the performance-related problems.

Q. Are there any plans for improving the MiniMes?
A. Unfortunately, there are no plans to improve the MiniMe in the near future. Our priorities are focusing on performance within the MiniHome as well as improving the MiniHome in general.

Q. Where does the MML team live?
A. This is on our about page. We are located in sunny Palo Alto, CA.

Q. How do the views work with the new economy system?
A. The views are always being counted, whether you’re online or offline. If you have money that is pending and should be paid out, when you login, you will receive that money. We reset the views (for the day every 24 hours). If someone views your MiniHome and it triggers a reset, it will pay out any remaining money (whether you are online or not) and then reset the count with 1 view. You would be able to notice this in your transaction history.

Q. Are you going to drop the price of the medium and large plots of land?
A. As of now, we have no plans on dropping the prices. We will not announce a price drop before it actually happens. If we decide to drop the price, it will be effective immediately.

As always, please leave your feedback below!

– Zao, Joel, Luke, & Amitt

Tags: fireside chat, Q&A

Hey all,

We’ve recently upgraded MyMiniLife! New to this change:

MiniHome interactions

There’s now a dock of ‘actions’ you can perform while viewing someones home. This includes ringing a doorbell, leaving a lawn flamingo, or even cleaning the house for someone. Similar to sticky notes, these actions leave an effect on your home. The last 10 actions received will be visible in your home.

We realize that some users do not want people doing anything in their homes, so we have added a new “Settings” tab underneath the MiniHome editor on the home’s page. This will let you control what people can and can’t do to your home. You can also delete all of the sticky notes or interactions in your home from here as well.

Profile improvements

MiniHomes on your profile have now been consolidated into one box. You can choose up to 3 MiniHomes to display in your profile on your MiniHome page. (The rest of your MiniHomes will be viewable through a “See all” link that’s in the box). To change the order of them, go to the edit MiniHome page.

Items a person has created are also now shown in their profile. Furthermore, you can now see all of the items made by a specific creator.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback at feedback@myminilife.com. Thanks for using the site!

-Amitt

Update

We’ve made it easier to apply the interaction settings to all of your MiniHomes:

Go to any MiniHome, click on the “Settings” tab at the bottom. Update your interaction settings, check the “Apply to all of my homes” box, and click “Save Changes”. This will apply your settings to ALL of your current homes. When you buy a new MiniHome, we will pull forward the settings from your last updated MiniHome. This means that if you turn everything off once, you’ll never have to turn it off again.

If you wish to make it so that you don’t see interactions on any one else’s MiniHomes:

Go to your account info page. Change the “Number of interactions to show” to 0.

Tags: Improvements, Interactions, Profile

Hey everyone! I hope that everything is well with you all and your homes. So one thing I have been doing is reading your comments and feedback over the past few weeks on the blog. It seems to me that one common theme is you all have questions. They range from wanting to know more about how to use a feature, to when an update will come out or what the MML team ate for lunch that day. So, with that being said we are asking you, the MML users to post your questions in the comment field below. I’ll pick a few of them out, go to the MML team and get you the answers that you demand! Now, I won’t be able to get them all answered that’s for sure! So, we may do this a few times a year if it goes well. So, get those questions ready and post them below.

Makenna

After listening to your feedback from yesterday, we’ve updated our formulas for making money. You should notice a much higher bonus from MiniHome and profile views now. We’ve also increased some of the Instant Economy values. Those that have been updated specifically are:

• Visiting the website (daily)
• Updating your status (daily)
• Voting on MiniHomes, MiniMes, Items, Tiles, Wallpaper
• Adding photos to your MiniHome (daily)

With the Karma History, you would still have to login and you would receive an arbitrary amount of money based on your past actions. As a new user, it was very difficult to get started buying items and plots and creating new MiniHomes. The karma history is gone, but this new system is designed for someone to come in completely new and still be able to make a lot of money. That was the original intent. We’ve tweaked the formulas since to benefit everyone equally.

Let me give you an example of how the new changes (including the updates tonight) will benefit you. Say I wake up this morning and log in to MyMiniLife. It is my first time logging in today, so I made 2,500 MiniBucks. I’m really tired, so I decided to update my status and let everyone know. Another 500 MiniBucks. I sent my MiniHome to three of my friends the other day and they checked it out. Another 2,470 MiniBucks. Two of them were interested enough to check out my profile to see what other MiniHomes I built. That’s another 2,306 MiniBucks. Right now I’ve made 7,776 MiniBucks today so far. But, let’s say I’m so close to buying the large plot, that I need just a little bit more money. So, I turn to voting. I go to the explore page and vote on some MiniHomes, MiniMes, tiles, wallpaper, and items. Since this is my first time doing this today, I made 250 MiniBucks each time. That’s 1,250 MiniBucks! Now I’ve made 9,026 MiniBucks today and can buy that large plot of land that I’ve been saving up to buy.

If you read my story (those are real amounts by the way), you will see that I could easily earn over 9,000 MiniBucks by just doing a few small things. We hope these changes help improve the economy and in the end, benefit everyone.

We’ve also given everyone the karma history that they had earned for the two days that it was down. Those funds should appear immediately in your account (and will not appear in your transaction history if you have it).

As always, we’re open to feedback. Please try out the new system for a few days and see how it affects you.

Cheers,

– Joel

As you may have noticed, a few days ago the Karma History function of MyMiniLife was suspended. We have been working on improving this system and now are ready to release the changes.

In place of the Karma History is a new system for making money. Your profile views and MiniHome views now directly affect how much money you receive. Before, you would receive a “daily allowance” every day and these came at inconsistent times. Now, you will receive money every time you login if someone has viewed your profile or MiniHome since you’ve been gone.

The amount of money that you make is similar, but in some cases can be much higher if you get a lot of your friends to check out all of your creations. Basically, the more you share your creations, the more money you get.

The formula that we’re using for this is not terribly complicated, and will most likely be adjusted in the future. Essentially, every day your view counts are added up and you receive money based on how many people viewed your home that day. After 24 hours, the view counts are cleared out and you can begin all over again. So, there may be times in which you will get a lot of money and times in which you’ll get a little bit of money but the basic guideline to follow is that the more people that view your homes and profile the more money you make.

This new latent way of making money is tied into the instant economy system that we launched a few months ago and is also tied into the transaction history system that several of you are beta testing for us right now. We will hopefully be opening up the transaction history to more people soon but these changes should apply to everyone immediately.

Also, we’ve upgraded the “My Stash” page. You can now sell items from this page (as an alternative of having to sell them from your MiniHome stash).

Last but not least, we lowered the price of the Small Plot to 2,000 credits. This should help allow some of the users with not a lot of money to be able to purchase more MiniLands

We would love to hear your feedback regarding these changes. Thanks for using MyMiniLife!

Cheers,

– Joel

This morning we pushed a few small updates. Here is a list of what changed:

• If you buy an item, you now have two hours in which you can sell the item back for its full amount (meaning you will not lose money for trying an item out).
• The marketplace splash page was redesigned to include tiles/wallpaper.
• Can now sort items/gifts by most gifted.
• Can preview items before you buy them (in the item list at the top) by clicking on an item and choosing “View item preview”.
• Small improvements to transaction history (which has been reset to those who are currently using it). Hopefully, these are the last changes that we need in before we open it up to everyone.
• We’re continuing our efforts at improving performance. Hopefully you’ll see some big speedups in the near future.

Cheers,

– Joel

Tags: New Features

I have always heard that change is good. That change brings good things. Well, change is what is about to hit MyMiniLife! As you read this, the crack team at MML has made several changes to the way you do things. So, I thought it would be a good idea to give you all a “Heads Up” to some of the new things.

- We will be slowly rolling out a “transaction history” to users over the next few weeks. This transaction history will track your money as it changes through MML. You can think of it as online banking… except for MyMiniLife

- Do you spend your time rating items in MML? This has been moved entirely to the individual item pages. You can now rotate the items that you see there.

- Now you can see all the information surrounding a MiniHome in one simple information box.

- Like to put YouTube videos in your home but have trouble finding some you like? We now have a YouTube search feature! Along with this, it’s easier to add effects and media to your homes as well as comment on them.

- We now have an application on Hi5! Add MyMiniLife to your profile now by clicking here!

- We have slightly changed the way you buy new MiniHomes. There is now a very basic MiniHome creation wizard that will help make it easier to create your first home as well as setup your 2nd and 3rd homes!

These are just some of the changes coming your way. We hope it makes your MyMiniLife experience better and easier.

Make sure to leave a comment and tell us what you think! The MML team always like feedback!

Mak

We want to thank everyone who has offered to help us test some new features here at MyMiniLife. Your response has been overwhelming. At this time we have all the beta test users we need. I want to thank all of you for offering to help. Once the beta testing is done we will go live and all of the MML community will get to experience exciting and new features!

Thanks

Mak

So we here at MyMiniLife are always working to make your MML experience a better one. You might not know it but we are always working quietly in the background to make your experience better. Well, most of us are quiet, except for Joel who like to bang and hit the computer sometimes. When he is not trying to break his computer he is coming up with creative ideas. Joel has a few new features he wants to try out with some experienced MML users. Do you spend a lot of time on MML? Are you a devoted user? Can you provide constructive feedback? Are you up for helping the MML team try out some new features for the site?

If so please email betatest@myminilife.com with your Userid in the subject line and we will add you to the beta list. If you do not specify your Userid, you will not be added to the list. You can find your Userid on your account settings page.

Please know this is a first come first served situation. Not everyone will be able to be part of the beta test.

Thanks

Mak

So we all know that we can build amazing houses, design cool items, and rate homes. One cool thing I was thinking about was the sticky notes. How one can leave a a note for a friend or acquaintance to find later in the day. That got me thinking, what fun and neat things can we do with sticky notes.. hmmm…. sticky notes… GOT IT!! How about a flash sticky note mob? I’ll pick a user at random and we attach sticky notes to their home! Yep, simple as that. Let’s see how many notes we can get on this one users house. So the first person to be the recipient of the 1st ever MML Flash Mob is:

Congrats to JustJessica for being the first ever receipt of the MML Flash Mob! Here are some simple rules:

1. One note per a user
2. Leave a weird, wacky, different comment. Not “5 Stars”, or ” Good Build’. Leave something crazy, wild, different like “This is the place to be” or ” Anyone for pool?”

So let’s get on it people! Let’s see how many sticky notes we can put on her house.

XoXo
Makenna