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Between the 27th and the 29th, Microsoft celebrate their Xtival online festival by offering a weekend of free Xbox Live Gold membership to all. Alongside the option to experience Live play in all compatible multiplayer games, the real draw surely comes from the ability to become a socially networked powerhouse for three days, able to navigate the clunky Xbox 360 Facebook client for 72 glorious hours.
Excusing the fact that while functional, Twitter and Last.fm are both feature-crippled shadows of their browser counterparts, Facebook’s Live integration takes the proverbial biscuit. Silver members can expect the joys of hopelessly navigating a live feed which is happy to spew unnecessary updates on quizzes and applications (content inaccessible through the dashboard); stripped features running at an absolute crawl; and the indescribable pleasure of joining your friend’s conversations equipped with a disgustingly wonky system of textual input. Read more →
Speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference, Chris Abad, CEO of Irata Labs (who brought you the incredibly annoying “Spymaster”) told developers that they should “incentivise the users to [market] for them”. If you’ve not heard of it, Spymaster was a pretty boring web based MMO which was linked to your Twitter account. Every time you did certain things in the game, it would tweet the action from your account. This gave the player more in game money, and made everyone unfollow you, because it was frankly really annoying.
This is of course a tactic that has been used before. Referral links are used by those sites offer you a free iPod if you to get 10 of your friends to sign up for a free trial of Netflix. They are also known for being a little more than dodgy and extremely irritating, a trend which continues here.
This is very worn territory so I apologise if this piece is even more boring and irrelevant than usual. Recently, I have been checking out some of the news and social networking sites like Reddit, N4G, and others. Generally I’m pretty impressed with the simplicity as well as the infrastructure of these sites and now I check them daily. They often have stories and news items that do not always make it to the traditional press outlets and there are communities that follow these sites faithfully.
Recently I got flamed around a piece I’d written that I had posted to one of the sites. I responded in what I felt was a reasonably mature way that expressed that I thought that the slur against me was a bit of an over reaction and fairly uncalled for. What followed was a pretty strong stream of anger and resentment. Something I had tried to hold this person to some level of accountability for. Read more →
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