Patent ID: 8843585

Claim:
A computer-implemented method, the method comprising, generating, in response to an indication of a request from a creation-requesting party, a unique encoding specification for a unique virtual item, wherein one or more components of the unique encoding specification influence appearance properties of the unique virtual item, said generating comprises algorithmically deriving from a user profile describing the user a first set of the one or more components from a plurality of items of personalization information, the plurality of items of the personalization information describe a rule set selection, and the plurality of items of the personalization information comprise items describing at least one or more transaction parties identified in a request for the unique virtual item or one or more configurable feature specifications indicating requested properties of the unique virtual item; creating from the unique encoding specification one or more item characteristics for the unique virtual item, wherein the creating from the unique encoding specification the one or more item characteristics for the unique virtual item further comprises selecting based on the one or more components the one or more item characteristics set from a set of options provided by a rule set, the one or more item characteristics describe a unique feature set for the unique virtual item in terms customized for a type of a rendering client selected from a plurality of rendering client types to render the unique virtual item, the one or more item characteristics describe a unique feature set associated by the encoding specification to the unique virtual item such that no other virtual item exhibits the same feature set unless generated from the same encoding specification; and sending the one or more item characteristics to the rendering client for rendering of the unique virtual item; subsequent to said sending, displaying a prompt to send an image of the unique virtual item to an intended recipient of the unique virtual item; and based on receiving an indication to send the image, denying access to the unique virtual item by the creation-requesting party, wherein access is denied to the creation-requesting party until the image has been displayed for the recipient, wherein the deriving comprises: deterministically encoding the plurality of items of the personalization information as the one or more components of the encoding specification; comparing the one or more components of the encoding specification to a set of encoding specifications registered as also using the rule set; and responsive to discovering a non-uniqueness of the encoding specification, altering a uniqueness component of the encoding specification.