About

So What's Up with This Collectivus Thing Anyway?

Who is behind Collectivus?

The people participating in Collectivus are from all manner of locations, backgrounds, and interests. Start mixing and matching their stories and communication and some truly cool things begin to happen. That's social networking.

Collectivus is the latest project by:

Collective Detective, LLC. Mountville, PA, USA

What is Collectivus?

Collectivus is an activity for finding, trading and using Thingies. Thingies are objects used in Collectivus. The journeys of each Thingie are the common element to connect People and the pursuit of Thingies the incentive to interact and discover new People, Places and activities.

Collectivus is a (hopefully) different kind of social networking application.

Collectivus is a combination of location-based activity and online application.

It's a modern web application using location services, available on the desktop and basic and advanced mobile devices, which uses analog objects for that "get out of the house and go somewhere" old school, analog quality.

When is Collectivus?

It's whenever you want to check in on us or whenever you come across a Thingie. This question and answer probably didn't need to be here, but we're keeping with the 5 types of questions theme.

Where is Collectivus?

For the application, well it's on the Web, so practically everywhere. For Thingie distribution, our focus right now is on the US, but we hope Thingies will wind-up all over the world so we're planning on following along.

We're based in Pennsylvania (for now), with offices anywhere we're sitting with a mobile phone and a laptop.

Why is Collectivus?

We're a big fan of social networks and location services -- we're on a lot of them. We didn't want to recreate something that was already out there and wanted to do something outside the traditional friend-of-a-friend social graph many of these services use.

We wanted something that would encourage a wide variety of people to find and engage with each other. There's something very cool about a housewife, a lawyer, and a physicist encountering each other where their online and offline social graphs might not have otherwise crossed.

We also think there's something very exciting about the history of an object — where it's been, what it's seen. Otherwise antiquing wouldn't be the industry it is. The point is, people make connections in the most subtle ways; having a shared Thingie encounter could be one of them.

We also wanted to create a creative and entertaining activity that people can pick-up and put down. Many immersive entertainment, advertainment, viral marketing campaigns, online games, etc. make it hard to jump in mid-stream or force broad group participation. We wanted to create a simple platform for people to be creative in a group, on their own, and at their own pace.

How can I use Collectivus?

Part of how to use Collectivus is up to you to define. We have given the possibilities considerable thought however and here's a few of the things we came up with:

• Create a game like a scavenger hunt
• Use them to mark a geocache
• Creating art by Decorating Thingies or integrating them into other pieces
• Distributing a narrative: Create part of a poem, story and let the next person to encounter that Thingie carry it forward.

At its core, Collectivus is a way to post what's going on when you find, share, or place a Thingie and where. Then, follow the adventures of the Thingies you've encountered and see where they end up next while you search for new Thingies around you.

The story of a Thingie is part of the story of you.