by sirQus

Back in fall 2000, as I was the mayor of Horizon City, quite many Active Worlds citizens repeatedly sent telegrams to me asking to have their advertisements placed in Horizon City. As there was not any particular area for those kinds of ads, I started to think about a different kind of solution: What if the town had its own network of advertisements? On the other hand, if the network included other towns as well, the advertising would be more effective.

There already were some working advertising services in AW, such as AWComReg and UTN, and I didn't want to start a similar system. Combining features from the Lensmans Teleport Maze and the ADZ@GZ was a good way to start to develope a new kind of advertising method. The final idea started to shape. The very first prototypes of advertising booths were built in November 2000 in northern part of Horizon City. The first logos for the service were designed at the same time. The name of the service was about to be 'Horizon City Travel Agency' but it was later changed to ActiveWorlds Travel Agency, AWTA.

After weeks of developing the service, the first booths (or offices as they are called) were built in several towns and the first ads were displayed. I had to update every office manually as the new technology and net coding was not in use yet. In December 2000, Mauz gave me a world that she had won from Christmas Present Hunt in Storage. Andras provided hosting for the world. The world was called 'Worlds' and it started to serve as AWTA main world.

After I got my long term AW friend Partymaster to join the AWTA staff, things started to run more easily. Partymaster provided the hosting for AWTA website and the advertisements and I built the offices. We used 'Worlds' as our development world for AWTA. In November 2001, Partymaster coded a new php-based advertising system for AWTA. Our website was located in awta.cjb.net and new advertisers joined our services constantly. New features for AW users were provided: customized offices, stats, randomly displayed advertisements, awcounter...

AWTA.net -domain was purchased by D5K Networks for AWTA use in summer 2002. In fall 2002, the AWTA graphical image and logo were modified slightly. By the end of the year, the new website with a better user interface and an easier sign-up process was published.

sirQus (sirqus@awta.net)

- Founder
- Builder

Partymaster (party@awta.net)

- Technical manager

Founded: Nov 30, 2000
Virtual advertising locations: 61
Virtual advertising boards: over 305
Total community advertisements served: over 144000
Staff members: 2