Sing it along with me to the Vilage People rythm! “It’s fun to talk at the I-M-V-U! It’s fun to talk at the I-M-V-U!”

As you can see I have added a banner to the website of IMVU, which is somewhat a mix between instant messaging like MSN, AIM and Yahoo and sites like MySpace combined with pretty decent 3D graphics. Nothing high end, but for some reason it’s pretty heavy on your system, but that doesn’t make it less fun.

On IMVU there are several things you can do: create your own 3D avatar, get stuff for you avatar like accessories (jewelry, gloves, hats and other stuff), get pets for your avatar ranging from little baby dragons to penguins and even bodyguards. You can also decorate your own rooms and design your own stuff if you have the expertise to do so and then you can sell the things you make for IMVU credits with which you can get new stuff again of give gifts to other people. And besides all that you can also chat.

Chatting doesn’t occur in just another flat window, but in the 3D scene you, or your chat partner choose. You can also enter public rooms with lots of people and chat away. If you have no friends on IMVU you can simply hit the Chat Now button in the program’s main window and you’ll be connected to someone who has also hit that button and trust me, there’s always someone. The only downside of this Chat Now feature is that most people leave even before the avatar is fully loaded and they don’t say a word, but you shouldn’t give up too quickly as there are interesting people to be found occasionally and you can also look for potentially intersting people on the website instead of using the Chat Now feature.

If you have chat now enabled there will also pop up a balloon on your taskbar every now and then telling you that someone is waiting for a ChatNow session. In this case your room will be used, if you hit Chat Now yourself, the room of the other person will be used and if the other person leaves in that case you will be sent to one of the default rooms with noone else in it and the program will ask if if you’d like to give it another try and you’ll be connected to someone else.

I have found a few nice people through Chat Now, so it’s really worthit to try it once you’re there. Besides Chat Now and a people search there are also groups, so communities within the IMVU community. Just try to find a group, or multiple groups that are to your liking and you might just come across some cool people to chat with or to hang out with in public rooms or even in real life (RL) if they’re close enough.

	I’m Zhooibaal on

When you sign up there will always be a Guest_ prefix before your name though. It doesn’t bother me too much, but some people find it annoyin. But getting rid of it will cost you some $$$. Which brings me to the only real downside of IMVU. It’s more or less free to use, but to get everything out of it means that you’ll need to spend some $$$. I don’t do that, at least, not yet, you never know what might happen in the future.