A soon to be released game for the Nintendo Wii called Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destory is a side scrolling shooter with a great UGC element to it. You will have the ability to create your own character, enemies, shooting patterns, and levels - all of which you can post to the game’s website for download by any Wii owner.
User generated content for games is nothing new, however we are really starting to see a trend where games are becoming specifically designed to allow for all sorts of customisation and online communities to facilitate sharing of the assets they develop.
If you’re sick of having to set up a new profile for yourself every time you join a new social network - you may be in luck. MySpace have launched a “Data Availability” effort with big-name partners Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and fellow News Corp. unit Photobucket. The initiative’s goal is to let MySpace members share their public profile data outside of the walls of the social-networking site.
In a nutshell you create one profile representing your online identity and then you can take this with you wherever you go. Imagine all the time saved!
Facebook have responded with their own data portability initiative called “Facebook Connect” - expect to hear the phrase “opening of the walled garden” to be used a lot in the next few weeks.
Not long ago, Google released the “My Location” functionality in Google Maps Mobile, which allows you to see your location on the map regardless of whether or not your phone has GPS support. At the moment this adds limited benefit due to the accuracy (or lack of), but does raise a LOT of interesting questions, particularly in relation to a social networking/mobile/mapping mashup. Imagine being able to see the location of your facebook friends that are within a 5km radius…
Taking this idea a couple of steps further: imagine being able to find people in your area looking for a game of tennis? Or using a dating service that shows everyone nearby who’s looking for a date?
This all sounds quite cool, but begs the questions: do I really want to know that my partner is looking for a date in the city? Or that my friends have all gathered together without me?
I’m a strong advocate of open information, but this one has me stumped. I’d be interested to hear other opinions on the matter, how your privacy could be protected, or even just some fun/interesting applications of the concept.
So after absorbing the internet goodness for about 11 years I finally decided to give something back. And that just happens to be a website… about universal sameness.
Recently brought to my attention (thanks Michael!) a cool free mobile application Nokia Sports Tracker which integrates your smartphone and your GPS with exercise-related data-logging, stats and exports to Google Earth .
It record your tracks, graphs speed vs time and speed vs distance, captures photos taken during recording are automatically positioned on the track, blog your journey, compare the data with other users from around the world etc..
