The hoods design goes back to 1998. Realizing that realtime 3D was to be difficult, we started to seek other ways to spatialize the community. We thought that using a 2D map we could let people claim a portion of 2D space and perhaps even let their online "presence" via the companel have a map location associated with it. If people could own a home located on the map and walk around the map, then we would be starting to integrate space and community. Here are some of the early maps from the AS neighborhoods:

The Vicorum	The Vitiorum	The AedisBacchi

Each neighborhood had a name and a description and a certain number of plots. We never really got this system with all its bells and whistles online though.

I was happy that we were able to get the current hoods feature up last year, although I think it has fallen short in two ways. First, it is a tree structure rather than a 2D geographic mapping of community locations. The Flash map of the Roman Empire on the Rome city page was supposed to be the beginning of this new spatial system. The idea was that when you zoomed into a province, you could see the cities there and then zoom in to choose a plot of land to buy. This is a more complicated data structure and would take longer to engineer. We decided to wait until there was a more comprehensive design of a 3D world where the maps would be an easier way for slower client computers to view that world. Newer computers would be able to view the 3D images of that same world.

The second way that the hoods have fallen short is in the indexing as some of you have noted. It is still hard to find properties and posts. Currently one must drill down into the hoods structure in the hopes of seeing something at that point in the tree. Here I think we can make some improvements soon.

I think the excitement over the hoods in their current incarnation exceeded our expectations. This tells me that the idea of spatializing the community is still a strong one.