Last year I restructured Fluidiom for the Nth time with the goal of making it really easy to login, create a folder, and get down to building and evolving creatures. I also made it easy to snatch a body that somebody else has built and evolve it further, storing it in your own folder for later reference. Everybody also has the option to create a list of their favorites, regardless of which folder they live in.

My hope was that the new version would be picked up by a good number of people and lots would happen, but as it turns out, lots of people drop by and log in, but very few go further to do anything with it.

I expect that the main reason is the challenge that a new user encounters right away: building a body. It is of course possible to browse a bunch of running bodies, and it's easy to grab one and evolve it further, but still... surprisingly few people do that.

So I decide to move onward. There must be a way to involve people on the web in a way that isn't so difficult that they get turned away. I'm deep in the process of building that new version.

While I'm working on the new version, the existing version has been put up under the web application "buildevo" (build-evolve) which reflects the process. First you build, then you evolve.

My new version is going to be easier in some really fundamental ways. It will invove "aesthetic selection" where you the user become part of the fitness function. Sounds dramatic, but it amounts to having people click on the one of four that they like. Four running bodies will be visible on screen at one time. Now this is a kind of interaction that shouldn't be too intimidating.