04.27.07
Posted in games, work at 3:01 pm by Rob Fahey
The biography feature of PlayStation boss Ken Kutaragi I wrote for Eurogamer has just gone live. It’s quite huge, but I think it’s pretty interesting - I found out lots of things I didn’t know about him while researching it, and then I put them all in one article so you don’t have to trawl through a million old interviews and write-ups, or chat with the estranged sons of former senior Sony executives, like I did. Which is good, because you probably wouldn’t do all that anyway, so you’d never find out those things.
Researching and writing this sort of feature is the kind of task that journalists with a real passion for a certain subject or sector dream of. Researching and writing it in about 12 hours flat because the guy has just unexpectedly retired, however, is a waking nightmare which has left me a hollow shell of a man. Hurrah.
First commenter to say “tl;dr” gets a slap, too.
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04.09.07
Posted in web at 9:22 am by Rob Fahey
Regular readers of Eurogamer will probably have noticed the launch of a bunch of new social networking features on the site last week. I’ve been tracking the development of this with interest - evangelising the whole concept and doing some of the groundwork in terms of design and roadmaps was pretty much the last major thing I was involved with at EG before going freelance.
What has actually been launched now only resembles the stuff I worked on in rough outlines, and all the credit for the fact that it’s shaping up really nicely belongs to the supremely talented guys working on it at EG - but all the same, there’s a bit of a proud-dad grin on my face at the overwhelmingly positive reaction it’s had from the site readers thus far. It’s early days yet, and I know there are bags more features in the pipeline, and some of what’s there now won’t make complete sense until it’s augmented with the additional features that are coming down the line - but it’s a great start, and I think people are going to find stuff like game lists and private groups pretty compelling. I know I already do, in fact.
Social networks in general are an area which fascinate me. I’ve gone from being incredibly cynical about the whole LiveJournal/MySpace/etc phenomenon to being quite addicted to it - my Internet use is heavily defined by LiveJournal, Last.fm, flickr, Facebook and now, hopefully, Eurogamers. I think what’s really interesting, and an emerging trend which is going to be very important for success in future, is interoperability. Very few people, as far as I can tell, use one social networking site only; especially with sites like Last.fm (music), YouTube (video) and flickr (pictures), it’s likely that you have an account on each because they cover very different types of content. As such, the ability to link those accounts together is becoming increasingly vital. Even something as simple as being able to hook in feeds from flickr and Last.fm on this blog is quite an exciting use of the technology, and Facebook’s ability to pick up LiveJournal posts and add them automatically to its feeds is a clever bit of functionality.
The logical trend here would be for one “uber-network” to emerge which simply amalgamates the key features of the others; a site where you put in login details for all the sites you use, and it builds a master contact list and a bunch of content and interaction panels, essentially giving you one launchpad for everything you do on the internet. I’m not convinced that that will happen, however, because the other sites would resist it strongly. Such a site would be a “predator” website, sucking content and ad-dollars out of other social networks and giving nothing back.
What’s more interesting, and likely, is that successful social networking sites will learn how to interface with other sites in a meaningful and cross-beneficial way. A site like Facebook could link directly to your flickr galleries and last.fm music, Eurogamers could automatically import blog entries from LJ or WordPress, Bloglines could add feeds for all your friends’ blogs based on existing feeds on other sites. Cross-functionality like this will be crucial for new, upstart networks; by saying to people, “hey, I work seamlessly with your existing sites”, you’re removing the barrier to entry and solving one of the biggest problems with new sign-ups, namely the need to input loads of duplicate data.
Right now, lots of social network sites are islands which are great in their own right, but barely acknowledge the existence of everything else out there in the ocean of the Internet. I firmly believe that success over the next five years will fall largely to the ability of those islands to build strong transport links with each other. People are too diverse for homogenisation of social network sites to occur in any meaningful way - letting people stick with the networks they like, while still giving them the ability to build cross-network connections, is definitely the future of this technology.
(In other news, I estimate that I’ve now spent four full hours staring at my word processor and trying to find something interesting to say about the new Buzz game. On the weekend of Jesus’ famous now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t trick, is a little divine inspiration too much to ask?)
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