360voice Dev Blog

Tuesday night goodies

You may have noticed that if Steve and I roll out anything new, it is typically on Tuesday nights. That is the day that we have set aside to work on the site. When you have a wife and kids, sometimes fitting in fun coding projects is a bit tough.

Tonight we didn't really accomplish anything major. We continued to refine a few coming features as well as tweak some of the offerings in the API section. If you were using the 360voice.games.showtiles output, please go and check out how it has changed. And I added the 360voice.games.showtiles.html variant.

I also went through a backlog of around thirty email questions and data fixes. So anyone that has written should have received a response! My Gmail inbox is now empty of 360voice mail so that feels pretty good! You will also noticed I updated the dev blog with some press mentions and the announcement of the podcast interview. Leave us some questions!

More good things are coming... it has just been a busy week with the holiday and all. We are trying to make sure we juggle the administrative stuff with the coding stuff. When Steve and I email websites we appreciate timely responses and we know you all do too.

I am going camping in Wisconsin this weekend so I won't be working on the site (or checking email for that matter), but Steve has promised to work on getting some more badges rolled out... haven't you Steve? ;)

"It's nothing short of awesome"

Who are we to argue with Chris Scantleberry at GotNext?

If you’re gaming, it will make an entry and if you’re on some sort of hiatus — believe it or not, entries will be made about your absence too. It’s nothing short of awesome and if you’re an actual 360 user, then you really should try it out.

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Thanks Chris!

"The growing Xbox community breeds services"

Check out this great post by Rijit:

The Xbox 360 has become more widely available and the Xbox community grows with each new Xbox Live sign-up. As more people get involved in gaming and more ideas proliferate on what the community wants and needs, new services are born. Particularly since the Xbox 360 sends data to Xbox Live for your gamertag these new services are being created offering custom content centered around this data. Like a blog for your 360, custom gamertags for forums, friend matching services, and gamerscore tracking and comparison. Let's look at each of these services briefly.

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360voice.com is mentioned as well as some other great services built by members of the Xbox community. He even mentions XBL Friends Finder which (if you think about it) is actually a 360voice.com community site because it is powered primarily by our APIs  just as ours it powered by Microsoft's! GamerScoreChart is also partially powered by us if you do not have data with them, they will check our system to back-fill.

There are so many people out there doing great stuff. Good job to you all. Community development rules.

June 17th interview at James Woodcock's blog

Have you always wanted to ask us questions? Well here is your opportunity. Steve and I will be appearing on James Woodcock's blogcast June 17th. If you have any questions you would like to ask, please call his voicemail number and leave a message or send him the question via skype. His contact information is:

UK voicemail: 0207 193 3092
Worldwide: +44 207 193 3092
Skype ID: glidem

Simply say the question if for 360voice.com and he will ask us the question during the podcast recording session. I can't guarantee all questions will be asked since it isn't my show, but I hope we can get to a bunch. It would be great to hear how all of you think we are doing.

I will post the link to the podcast as soon as it is available, or go ahead and add the James Woodcock podcast to your feed reader.

Morning Outage

Sorry for anyone trying to hit the site. It has been going up and down all morning... I opened the neccessary support case at the hosting company. We shall see what they say.

Update 5/30/2006 12:45pm EST

According to the hosting company, it was not our site causing the problem. It was someone else on the server. They have moved us to a new application pool again to hopefully prevent issues. So is the life of a shared setup!

Community Game Night (Beta)

Something new we are looking at doing is having a game night with the community.  It would give us, and any special guests a chance to play with all you folks.  Anyone who plays (nice) would get a badge, and possibly some other things in the future such as a special blog entry or other goodies.

If you want to join our first stab at it, we are calling it a Beta,  we will be playing Perfect Dark Zero on
Tuesday June 6th at 7:00PM EST.

You will need to preregister by sending a message to my Live account (Fatty Chubs).  Please mention somewhere in that message you would like to participate in the game night.  Please only register if you know you can make it, have PDZ and be there at 7:00PM EST sharp.

REGISTER HERE

Mentioned on Video Game Outsiders podcast

A reader of the dev blog, Live3D, posted in the comments about our site getting a mention on the Video Game Outsiders podcast. You can download the podcast here:

Episode 35
Now with swivel-arm battle grip, it's episdoe 35 0f Video Game Outsiders!

If you want to jump right to the 360voice.com part, it starts at 4:22.

It brings a smile to my face when I hear people talking about how the blog is making them feel guilty about neglecting their Xboxes. Mission accomplished!

Interview at K1lla's Xbox Domain

Head over to K1lla's Xbox Domain and check out the interview:

In my second xbox community spotlight I wanted to shine some light on another xbox site which has been talked about by people all over the message boards and blogs and they were also "Nelson'd". Here is my interview with Trapper Markelz from 360voice.com

1-Can you tell us about your site 360voice.com?

Trapper– 360voice.com is a site where gamers can read or subscribe via RSS to a blog about what their friends are doing every day on Xbox live. It takes the information in the gamercard that only gives you a current snapshot and allows you to see a players gaming over time. This allows for conversations around specific daily achievements and events like gamer score increases and most played games. What we are doing right now scratches the surface of what is possible once you start caching all this gaming data.

2–Who runs 360voice.com?

Trapper–Trapper Markelz (ChangeAgent) and Stephen Sopp (aka Fatty Chubs). We have personal websites at www.trappermarkelz.com and www.istephen.com . We both have day jobs in the IT industry. Steve is also an Xbox MVP and a member of the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP). We have worked together on numerous internet projects since college. We were the first people [I think] to record super bowl commercials and put them online for voting (1998). We were involved with teamdvd.com, one of the first review sites for DVD movies when the media was brand new. We also were involved with filmtease.com, the first movie review sites to utilize IM-style conversational reviews. 360voice.com is our latest collaboration.

3-How did you come up with the idea for your site?

Trapper–As a member of the XCDP, Steve had access to the live gamer feeds and was playing around with the data. I attended the O'Reily Emerging Technologies conference where I heard Bruce Sterling give a keynote about blogjects… futuristic objects that write "blogs" about their interactions with the world and other devices just like humans write about their interactions with the world and other people. In discussing this keynote with Steve, it didn't take long for us to get a quick prototype of the idea up and running. The response from the prototype was so huge that we immediately developed it into a full blown product which became 360voice.com.

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...now that I think about it, I think Steve and I did the Super bowl commercial site in 1997... For the longest time if you searched for Super Bowl commercial on Yahoo (back when it was purely a directory) we were at the top of the list! I remember the NFL wrote us and told us to take their logo off the site...

We are glad people dig it!

It is really fun tracking the "buzz" surrounding our site. Every once in awhile you come across blog entries and such that just make you smile. Like this one:

I've been playing videogames since I knew how to turn on a tv.  With all the progressions of technology over the years something recently has taken me by surprise.  My Xbox 360 began a blog about me a month ago.  Every morning my Xbox 360 writes a blog about what I did the day before.  It's very strange yet all very real.

If we can take people by surprise, that is great. If we can make it seem "real" that is excellent.

360voice.com badges

Steve and I figured that everyone was getting in on all the fun with achievements... so we decided to create our own 360voice.com achievements... complete with our own badges.

The first question you are probably asking is: "What do I have to do to get achievements?"

We haven't decided if we will publish a full list. Let's just say you have to do some pretty spectacular things... To see an example of someone with badges, take a look here.

We will be continually adding badges as we think of cool new things to recognize people for. There are three types at the moment:

1. Length of play
   These are awarded to people who have certain games appear in their blog 50, 100 or 200 days. These are backwards compatible meaning that as we add new ones, you will automatically receive them if you cross the threshold.
2. Game completion
   These are awarded to people who get 100% of the gamerscore points in certain game. These are also backwards compatible.
3. Daily achievements
   These are awarded to people who do crazy things like get an absurd amount of gamerscore in one day... or an inhuman number of achievements. These are not backwards compatible. They are awarded each day... so if you did things in the past, as we add more daily achievements, you will not receive them unless you complete the challenge again.

So yeah... Steve and I were just sitting around talking and decided this would be a fun addition. We haven't finished all the logic for all the badges, but we just wanted to warn you that if you see a gadget in your blog with a little 32x32 pixel square in it, you know what it is about.