Climaxes: My True Jamaican Sex Story Online

We thought that would get your attention; but this isn’t a story about sex at all. This is about Richie Drenz and what he’s doing on the Internet.

Usually a mark of successful Internet entrepreneurship is numbers; but I find what Drenz is doing so interesting that the numbers don’t matter. He is a Fashion Designer with a background in marketing, he’s juggling a number of projects and they all jump off from his Facebook page. Aside from his clothing line, Drenz is also writing a “True Jamaican Sex Story”, which appears on his FB page as teasers, one for each chapter. The teasers link to his blog which aside from the story features Music, Entertainment commentary according to Drenz, and a profile of Drenz.

My guess from viewing his Facebook page is that he funnels a lot of traffic from Facebook to his site using the story, which is so rique he “can’t post all of it in his notes”. I’m always impressed to see anyone using Facebook as a tool to build and direct traffic, but the problem I have here is the site is it’s not very well organized. Why have all those tabs if all the tabs lead to to same repeated jumble? The only well organized page is the one for the Sex Story. But that’s just me peeving, because this post is actually not about his website or his sex story. As much as I appreciate people who are comfortable walking the path less beaten, and like a sprinkling of perversion in my everyday life, what’s really interesting to me is the fact that he’s hosting online parties on his Facebook page.

Drenz has created a page called LTMB (Laugh Til Me Bawl), this page is dedicated to hosting LTMB parties online. People show up to the party which takes place entirely online. If you’re familiar with Second Life, and other games that allow you to live through avatars in an online world then this is nothing new to you. Online parties are also nothing new, but these are usually hosted with the intention of selling products. What’s interesting is that Drenz has created an extremely low tech version of this alternate online universe with his LTMB parties, and he’s doing it purely for fun.

Here’s how it works:

The party start time is when he posts a photo on his profile of the “gate”, the end time varies – the last party ended at “1001” comments. He uses a distinctive neon pink or green for all LTMB activities so frequenters of his profile know that when that colour appears there’s a party in progress.

The Venue of the party is a photo, therefore the “party” takes place in the comments underneath that photo. The elements of the party are completely made up by the attendees and everybody plays along. There are “hash tags” to identify your location in the party, so you can interact with people who have tagged themselves as being in the same area as you. Aside from locations which are identified and tagged by Drenz and the start and end time, all the elements of the party are controlled by the imagination of the attendees. So attendees can have and spend as much money imagine they brought to the party, and drink whatever they want and carry out any activity they please. Actually, they can also be wherever in the venue they feel like, but without a tag according to Drenz “you’re not at the venue, you’re talking from the sky”. As for the music, Drenz business partner Alan Wilds created an app, a radio station which provides the sound track which helps to keep the experience cohesive for all participants.

LTMB is meant to be a completely silly tongue in cheek experience and it seems successful bases on the shenanigans carried on there, it’s also very sexual, as should be expected of a party hosted by the author of a sex story. While the overt expressions of sexuality make it outside of my taste, I like the fact that people are having fun, being creative and having a jolly time just sitting around at home at their computer.

What I especially like about what Drenz is doing is the fact that he’s taking limited resources and doing it simply and successfully. In an age where so much is about flash and pomp and doing it bigger and better, sometimes we allow our inability to accomplish fancy to prevent us accomplishing anything at all. I love that Drenz is doing this simply, and it’s working. He had more than 150 attendees at his last party, and hit his end time of 1001 comments without an ounce of promotion. Now think about this, for a few hours he had 150 people sitting at their computers watching and or participating in the activity on his profile. Not only is he creating traffic that he can exploit, but because of the nature of his activities he’s creating a persona that will stick in people’s mind – traffic and branding. These are two things that can only benefit his endeavours.