I have a theory why the websites which have successfully utilized user generated content in form of photos or video generally don’t look anything at all, or are butt-ugly. Here it is:

If your website is so ugly or blank that a user customizing a page on your site can only improve the page, 100% of your users have a chance of feeling gratification for having authored content, no matter what their level of skill is.

Conversely, if your site has strong visual identity, Joe Average will feel pressure to match the level of design he sees on your page. If the only thing Joe has is a badly lit photo of himself with a massive pimple in the middle of the forehead, it’s harder to upload that to a site that looks like it could be presenting Gucci models than to a site that looks it’s done by the geek down the road.

It’s so simple it has to be true. :)

I made a behavioral observation when stepping out of the bus this morning that I though was somewhat interesting. As the bus stopped and I was standing up to the aisle, a girl was stepping to the aisle on the other side. We were both listening to music on iPods (the white earbuds are just so discernible!) and hence had to negotiate who goes first by using hand signs and by pretending to speak to each other. We both mouthed something around “you go first” and hand-signed the globally recognizable “you go first” hand-sign of passing the hand to the direction of expected movement.

I realized this happens all the time now – people are aurally in a virtual music world (listening to music on an MP3 player) and have to communicate without sound. Looking at people obviously listening to music, there’s a pretty broad range of behavior that emerges from this, from totally ignoring others leading to bumps to being extra careful and polite while not actually uttering a word in real world. Obviously all this did happen before but at least in Finland, only the MP3 player phenomena has resulted in massive adaption of having the earbuds on all the time.

Given that deaf people have had to live in this land for long, it made me think if this has any implications for understanding people who have to live without the real world sounds. Or if we should be looking at how the deaf deal with signage in situations like above.

Makes me wonder how long it’ll take for us to realistically model all this in a way that’s intuitive to use. I know there’s a lot of research being put to this but so far the results seem to mostly be in the deep recesses of the uncanny valley.

Whew. First talk at Worlds in Motion in GDC is over. Went pretty well, got the whole audience laughing a couple times. ;)

The second talk is on Friday, interesting to see how many people turn up.

Whew, we finally put Release 18 out in UK Habbo. This is a pretty massive release, the website is fully redesigned and there’s a new system for the avatars. Users seem to like it which is excellent news. It’ll go out in other countries as it stabilizes.

In other news, the Netherlands Habbo got the local police to round up a few guys who’d been distributing keyloggers with the sole purpose of stealing items in Habbo. Made the news in Reuters so might be you’ve seen this. I’m happy that police is finally understanding that stealing furniture might be a crime. As the news says, the one dude got around 4000 EUR worth of stuff.

Update: BBC picked the story.

Looks like Brandon’s put the fullinterview up on Gamasutra. I wrote a piece earlier about my opinions on virtual worlds on consoles since the shorter writeup of the interview caused such a stir. Aside from that I guess I’m pretty happy about what I said.

Hope I’ll start less replies with Yeah! in the future, though. :)

For one reason or the other, Jaiku and Twitter have been compared a lot, probably due to people not having tried Jaiku’s mobile application. I think the winner of the battle for microblogging dominance was announced yesterday, as Google acquired Jaiku for non-disclosed amount.

I’m certain Google the due diligence on both companies and figured where the beef was. Having used both services, I think the reason Twitter’s been more popular is the free text messages. Incidentally I’ve had access to free texting also on Jaiku (knowing a founder helps) and when that’s turned on, Twitter just seems like a sorely lacking version of all the niceties Jaiku’s had.

Reading the congratulatory thread on Jyri’s announcement Jaiku is reveals half of the reason I think the deal happened. It’s the people who’ve jumped aboard and are using the service. Jaiku’s community features people like Randal L. Schwartz and Tim O’Reilly and at least to me, that’s a pretty powerful statement about the service.

Incidentally someone on the thread is wondering why the company wasn’t sold to Nokia. If I had to guess, I think Nokia wasn’t interested in purchasing Jaiku, or if they were, offered much less than Google. Looking at Google’s acquisition history, they know how to value communities. Looking at what Nokia is doing, they’re still in the level of thinking they can just clone up technology and the community will happen, similar to the recent comments from Steve Ballmer. Of course, I hope I’m wrong and that there was a bloody battle which lead to Jyri getting a bigger wad of dough. :)

Heh, just heard an odd conversation at the office. People have been rushing to get Halo 3’s and were happily expecting to go play at home last night. So what happens? One guy had his Xbox overheat and disasterously fail two minutes into the game. Other one had his Xbox drive break an hour into the game. I guess I’ll have to go ask the other Haloers how they’re faring.

It gets funnier though, the Microsoft Xbox hotline had already re-recorded their voicemail message. “As you might understand, please expect extended delays on service due to Halo 3 coming out.”

Virtual World News posted a bit with title Habbo’s Sulka Haro Says Virtual Worlds Won’t Work for Consoles.

I didn’t quite expect that title based on the article but yeah, I’m pretty skeptical of how the PS3 Home end up being adopted by PS3 owners. However I didn’t quite mean to specifically target Home as such. Looking at MMOs in general, I think player to player communication is key to creating a successful world. On consoles, most people won’t bother to hook up an extender cable to a USB keyboard so any game trying to motivate people do that is going to have adoption issues.

I also don’t believe voice will cut it either. Sure, we’re starting to have somewhat realistic filtering that’ll change what you sound like but that doesn’t mean a fifteen year old would still sound like a 40 year old paladin. So, if you’re working on a world where people actually have characters with roles, voice communication probably won’t be applicable to your game. Voice just might work for Home though, if the main point to go there is to meet your real-file friends. Just don’t expect to make too many new friends.

So, I believe consoles are inherently at disadvantage when it comes to MMOs. Someone please prove me wrong! :)

The submission deadline for GDC 2008 is coming up in a matter of days. I’ve been wondering what to submit… If you have any ideas what you’d like me to cover, please leave a note here or send email and chances are I’ll submit that! :D

Haha, blogging about Facebook again… Anyway, it seems the Finnish Facebook usage has totally exploded during the last couple weeks. I’m getting a massive amount of invites from people who’ve just signed up. Interesting to see where it goes.

On another note, I’ve noticed the Apps in FB are starting to have serious scaling issues. Most of the apps in my profile have ceased to update themselves or update with extreme delays and a couple have completely broken due to the load. I’ve been playing Warbook (which is really plagued by cheating multis) but it seems the game’s now just gone. The site was spewing out Internal Server errors a few days ago and this morning the server was first down and now it’s just showing a blank page.

To me this indicates that Facebook actually needs to start hosting the apps to provide high quality experiences. And they seem to be considering this, too, as I saw news of an experimental framework for apps storing data on their servers.

Of yet another note, Aaron Miller commented on my previous post on the terms of use on Facebook. They basically claim ownership to everything you put there – what does this mean in case of you putting a Metaplace world up on your profile? I think there’ll be quite a clash of usage terms, especially if you start billing players within your world (as Raph’s indicated you can).