Showing up on Evil Avatar

There is a forum thread going over at Evil Avatar about the site... some people were doing a bit of bashing so I had to chime in with my two-cents. I am reposting my response here for archiving:

Hey, I was just reading through some of the comments and I just thought I would pop in to clarify what we are doing with www.360voice.com... you can also follow the dev blog over on our site if you are interested... we have only had the site up for a week... it is a big experiment in a few things...

First, the whole point is to provide a way to follow the change on a daily basis of your friends. Gamercards are great, but if your friends are playing games and gaining points, it is difficult to tell day-to-day what they are playing and how their scores go up. With 360voice, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of your friends and then you know exactly what happens. At launch, we were only offering RSS feeds, because that is how we primarily envision the consumption... but people asked for an HTML render to link to so there ya go. It is pretty cool to open up your RSS reader in the morning and see what games your friends played and how much their gamerscore increased by the number of achievments they received.

Second, yes the voicing is limited. It is generating from a random set of 10 or 11 phrases per parsing section. Is it annoying? Maybe... is it childish? Probably... but it is goofy for sure and that is really the point. What type of personality would a next-gen egomaniacal gaming console built by Microsoft actually have? Who the hell knows... in the future we are looking at allowing for customizable or at least selectable voicing. We just rolled out female voicing for the ladies in the place (80 registered at the moment). Right now we are dealing with scalability issues of importing all the XML for thousands of gamer tags to do the delta... once we get past some of those issues we can dive in to designing multiple voicing.

Third, the idea comes from the concept of Blogjects. I created a wikipedia entry for the word and then set out to find something that I could create a blogject for. The amount of public information coming from the Xbox seemed perfect for parsing, storing and then manipulating to anthropomorphize the device. The whole site is really an experiment for trends towards more aware devices driven by sensors and logging that can interact with us just like we interact with each other. The Aibo robot dog also has its own blog... it even takes pictures and allows their owners to comment on the posts and picture taking... which is a bit strange and creepy... so in the end 360voice attempts to explore the same interactions.

Finally, the site is free... it is a personal experiment that has a public face because it uses public data. I hope even those of you that think the site is stupid can understand the joy in thinking up academic questions and using software to help probe for some of the answers while at the same time providing a unique service for free.

My partner Steve and I are thinking about a premium service that gives you access to a toolkit of advanced reports and statistical information about the daily data that we collect. We have some pretty good ideas for that and people might find it interesting/valuable to trend their gamerscore over time... or the games the play by calendar day, etc.

Like I said... its just a little side hobby... if you think it is cool, great!

Read the thread

Comments

[epthegeek]

Bah, don't pay attention to the haters. I think your little web gadget is pretty fun, and enjoy seeing the activity of the day. More detail would be cool. More options for phrasing would be cool. But even as is, it's pretty sweet.

Thanks!

[Jane McG]

This is such an amazing project. You're absolutely right-- I love the idea of getting an RSS feed of my friends' gameplay. Keep up the great work. You guys rule!

[GrandHolyKing]

I think this idea is fantastic as its just another way of personalising the xbox live experience along with achievements, the phrases are OK but a few more would be better..perhaps the ability to post your own phrases to be added to it? Obviously these would have to be moderated but im sure some people would come up with some interesting ones..lol
Im glad you have created the project and im sure that things can only get better, its a shame though that it uses the xbox live clock though as a regionalised version would be better for us UK folks...Keep up the good work!!

[Trapper Markelz]

GrandHolyKing - We are giving internationalization a lot of thought. It isn't as easy as you might think. It is a very high priority for us... unfortunately it is a very big change to make it happen.

[GrandHolyKing]

Im not saying it would be easy, in fact I have no idea what is involved in doing it. Im still amazed at the system you have implemented and its new updates. There are however some problems appearing. On my blog it shows listings twice within a post sometimes. E.g. gaining kameo (3 achievements) and then further down saying it again. I can only assume this is because I got the achievements around 4pm uk time (12am PST) and its crossing 2 days into one.
Still loving it though, Fantastic!