360voice Dev Blog

Day Two of new servers

It looks like all the game stats have replicated. Now we have to let all the table changes catch up to allow us to query the stats correctly. As always we are doing our best to get things back as fast as possible. Steve and I are a little burned out on this end... it has been a battle. So if we seem a bit snappy in the blog comments or support emails, sorry!

Update 12:19pm CT

True to form we are still having problems. Something is degrading performance on the front-end. Things are going to be up and down while we try to troubleshoot the problem.

Update 2:28pm CT

Alright! Performance issue turned out to be Microsoft... the presence feed was adding 20 seconds to every page load. I have a 10 second timeout in there but for some reason it wasn't obeying it. But by commenting it out, things have sped up. I am now running blogs for 9/28... so look for those!

Also, due to the craziness I think we are going to play it safe and give everyone a free pass on streaks up through 9/30... just because we don't need the support emails right now. ;)

Update 8:16pm CT

Alright, it looks like all blogs are there through today (9/30). So that is the data we have and they are posted! The fact that we can run 3 days of blogs in under five hours shows your how damn fast these servers are. It use to take 3 hours to do one day!! Finally... something is awesome for a change... I am a happy guy. We still have leaderboards, game stats/days played, and badges to get back to normal... but if we have blogs... I am happy. :)

Day One of new servers

There are parts of the sites running really fast, and other parts running really slow. This is because we moved some of our database to a new storage engine to allow us to update things during the day and not impact the performance of the site... however an unanticipated consequence of this is that many of our queries are no longer optimized for this new storage engine... so we are monitoring the site... looking at the slow points, and then figuring out how to re-write it for performance and scalability.

If you happen to notice something that is consistently slow for you, feel free to send us an email about it at mail@360voice.com and we can dig a little deeper.

Blogs are running for 9.27.2007 right now and the games stats tables are almost done... I have to imagine we should get the entries for 9.28 and 9.29 as well as leaderboards and badges updated today.

(Click the title of this post and leave a comment if you have any questions!)

Update 10:58am CT

Alright... we are getting to the bottom of almost everything... game stats are almost done... but still have to replicate (about a million rows behind) but we are getting close. Once that is done we will run blogs for 9/28 and 9/29 and then run all the individual game stat updates (so the charts are up to date), leaderboards, badges, etc.

If you are leaving comments and wondering why you aren't seeing them, that is because of the backed up replication. So they will get there.

We also found some database issues that were hurting performance... so once those replicate things should pick up a little more. Thanks again everyone for your patience!

Update 9:56pm CT

Well, remember that replication we talked about? It is still running... taking about 2 hours per month. It is up through June 2007 at this point. So it will be sometime tomorrow when all the blogs appear. Stay tuned. Right now it is just a lot of waiting.

We are back... sorta! Kinda! Maybe!

Forms are back!

Registration is back!

Comments are back!

Blogs are being generated starting with the missing entry from 9/26... I will be doing each as they complete...

Your GAMES LIST is NOT back! I repeat... your games list is NOT complete... but we are generating it from scratch, so it will take a few days... but we don't want to hold back the whole site for that. So games stats, leader boards, and badges will recover over the weekend.

If you see something strange, feel free to email us at mail@360voice.com. We appreciate the help!

NOTE: It will take a bit for your DNS to refresh and point at the new server. If you want to know if you are on the new server, scroll to the bottom of the page and look for (rack1) instead of (www1). www1 is the old server, rack1 is the new one.

If you impatient, you can hit it here: rack1.360voice.com

Update 11:49pm CT

It looks like we grabbed an older version of our membership table. We are getting that fixed up shortly. Thank you to everyone that emailed in to let us know.

Update 1:30am CT 9/29/2007

So, the out of date membership table caused some other issues... so we have to put the blogs on hold until we can get that sorted out tomorrow morning. So while people can register, and the forums are open, it will be a little more work to get everything correct. Thank you all again for your patience and the kind words of encouragement. I hope we never have to move servers again... or if we do... not attempt a ton of data model changes at the same time! Lesson learned!

More downtime... last day... hopefully...

Well we thought we had it tonight. Our master database is all synced and ready to rock... It is running fast and mean and it has us really excited... however our slave database, the one that everyone uses to actually LOOK at the site is totally hosed beyond belief. The extent of the damage is to a point where it is beyond Steve and I's ability to bring it back from the dead... so we have to wait for the DBA tomorrow morning.

So hopefully tomorrow we can get the slave to match the master, the stars will align, the sun will come out and a new day will shine upon us... and the blog swill run (for all the missing days) and everything will be right with the world.

We have been running the imports... so we have been grabbing your data... so you will get blogs for all days that have been missed... so don't worry... you will see all those Halo 3 achievements and points shortly!

(click the title of this post to leave a comment about how much down time sucks!)

Update 7:24pm CT

Still cranking. We are one table and some encoded game names away from flipping the switch. Stay tuned.

Downtime.

Moving stuff over is going slow, we are going to have to keep everything down for most of the day Thursday while we switch over.  That means no forums, no new blog entries, no new members, or any changes.   You will get a blog entry for 9/27, just not until the new server is fully up and running.

Sorry for the downtime, but we tried everything we could and just hit a point where there wasn't enough time to get it up.

We will update you on progress after we get some rest and let the servers do their thing.

Server move, slow support

We are getting very close to moving to our new home. In preparation, we have copied over all of the data and only have some final things to sync up. Because of this, all gamertag changes, game data fixes, repaired blog entries, streak fixes, etc are on hold until further notice. We need to do this so that we don't change data in tables that we have already moved.

So if you submitted a support request, please be patient. We will get to it as soon as we complete the move. It might take a few days, but we WILL get to it!

We have been working on this server move for almost a month straight now and really are excited to knock it out. If you notice anything funny, just give us some time to correct it before flooding us with requests. We are doing our best to move things without you knowing but somethings are just going to be a little funky for a bit.

(click the title of this post to leave a comment about how awesome new servers are!)

Update 9:23pm CT

Forums are offline. It is the first thing we are moving because it is a nice, stand-alone database. Fingers are crossed.

Xbox.com outage due to Halo 3

It looks like Halo 3 has been a smashing success for Microsoft, so much so that it brought xbox.com to its knees! And when their site is down, it means we can't get data! And if we can't get data, that means your streaks and other stats are in jeopardy and we can't let that happen!

So tomorrow, September 26, 2007, we will be turning off streaks. It looks like Xbox Live is still online and collecting data, so if the xbox.com servers come back, everything should run fine... so we will be generating entries... but for people who do not get a correct entry, don't worry, it won't impact your stats or your streak.

If anything changes, we will let you know.

Update 12:25am CT 9/26/2007

Well, the feeds are still down. We will continue to watch them. We may have to pause the blogs entirely today. So sad! All those great Halo 3 achievements will be delayed! Oh well... stay tuned.

Update 6:05pm CT 9/26/2007

Midnight came and went and xbox.com was still offline. So we were unable to pull your recentgames data. We will be syncing up your gamer info data so your scores are , but no blog entries today.

(click the title of this post to ask questions or leave any concerns)

Halo 3 launch chat night

Jump in the chat room and join the Halo 3 discussion while we watch the coverage on launch night.

Update 1:51pm CT 9/25/2007

Thank you everyone who joined yesterday! I will be adding badges for all attendees some time tonight, so look for them!

ChangeAgent's 10K Celebration - Week 2

What time is it? Time to start the week, but also time to give away more points! Week #2 of the gamerscore celebration is in the books... 370 people left blog comments this week... and from those the winner is:

ML7

That means 1600 MS points and the coveted Contest Winner badge!

There are still five (5) chances left to win! So find someone's blog with comments enabled and leave them a comment today!

Sept 17, 2007
Sept 24, 2007
Oct 1, 2007 (next drawing)
Oct 8, 2007
Oct 15, 2007
Oct 22, 2007
Oct 29, 2007

Is this the first time you are hearing about ChangeAgent's 10K Gamerscore Celebration? Read the rules!

(click the title of this post to leave a comment and let us know what you think of the contest!)

Not standing in line for Halo 3? Sit in our chat room!

If you are not going to be out at a fabulous Halo 3 launch event, or standing in line until midnight, why not hang with us in our chat room? I will be camping out... watching the coverage on G4TV and Spike TV as well as watching news roll in off the wire from other community sites.

As an added bonus, if you come hang out, I will be giving away the Plays well with others badge to everyone who attends (if you don't have it)... ok... I know... shameless bribery. :)

I will be entering the chat on Monday, Sept 24, 2007, around 9pm CT and running it until sometime after midnight. Hopefully I will see you there!

(You going to be there? Click the title of this post to leave a comment and let me know!)

360voice T-shirt @ Zazzle

Steve and I have been messing around with the Zazzle API and came up with a T-shirt idea that you can customize with your own gamertag. You can find this link on any blog page under the Links & Community gadget. It looks like this:

Buy a custom shirt! (ChangeAgent)

If you have never used Zazzle before, you can customize the product. So if you want a Women's version of the shirt, or a different color or shirt style, you can play around with it before ordering.

We get a small cut of each sale (10%), but don't worry about doing it for us. Steve and I made these for ourselves, so feel free to join us if you like! If anyone wants any other products, email in and I will see what I can whip up.

This is just an experiment, and if you order something and don't like it, you have to take it up with Zazzle. Steve and I enjoy the products we have purchased so far, otherwise we wouldn't be posting this to the site... but if you don't like the shirt when it arrives, you can always use it as a super awesome dish rag... or maybe a dust rag for your precious 360!

Code Night and the Adventures of CA and FC

ChangeAgent has been plugging away a lot this week, working on new secret features, but also doing a TON of support.  Tonight he spent the majority of his time doing even more support... finances... business stuff... etc.  Yeah not very exciting to you, but the guy deserves a medal for everything he has been doing lately. 

Me (Fatty Chubs) on the other hand... I've been skirting my duties, away at my sister's wedding in a far off place without reliable Internet connections.  Tonight I continued moving a years worth of data to the new servers, trying to come up with more workarounds for slower feeds, and genre badge updates.  Here is the genre rundown;

1. Sports - Added Tiger Woods
2. Racing  - Added Moto GP 07
3. FPS - Added Medal Of Honor Airborne Assault
4. Oddball - Added WAR TECH:SenkoNoRonde

And a new Genre Badge, SHMUP! (or Shoot-em-up).

We have been asking for feedback on our current genre system, which we are still working on.  For now though it's going to be business as usually, as we add to the lists and possibly some new genres in the next few weeks.  But if you have feedback let us know!

(click the title of this post to leave a comment!)

ChangeAgent's 10K Celebration - Week 1

So here it is... the moment you have all bee waiting for! Week #1 of the gamerscore celebration has come to a close. There were 400 people who left blog comments this week... but there can be only one winner and that is:

CaptainMayhem88

He wins 1600 MS points and the coveted Contest Winner badge!

There are still six (6) chances left to win! So find someone's blog with comments enabled and leave them a comment today!

Sept 17, 2007
Sept 24, 2007 (next drawing)
Oct 1, 2007
Oct 8, 2007
Oct 15, 2007
Oct 22, 2007
Oct 29, 2007

Is this the first time you are hearing about ChangeAgent's 10K Gamerscore Celebration? Read the rules!

(click the title of this post to leave a comment!)

ChangeAgent's 10k gamerscore celebration!

If you haven't seen my blog yet, last night I cracked the 10K mark in gamerscore. Now yes... for many of you that happened over a decade ago... but I think this is a pretty big deal. Everyone says your first 10K is your hardest... and I can attest to that!

So to celebrate I am holding a little giveaway:

The Giveaway

Every Monday morning for the next seven (7) weeks, I will be holding a random drawing for 1,600 MS points. In total, this means we will be giving away 11,200 Microsoft points. I would be giving away exactly 10,000, but MS makes that impossible in how they break down the prepaid cards.

The Rules

1. All you have to do to be eligible is post a comment to ANY xbox blog on this site. It doesn't have to be mine. To leave a comment, find any xbox blog with comments enabled and use the comment form under any blog entry. You can always find some blogs with comments by looking in the Top 20 Most Popular List on the 360voice homepage. Anyone with a star (*) next to their name has comments on.

2. When posting a comment on an xbox blog, you have to use your GAMERTAG in the name field... otherwise, I won't know how to track you down. If you use someone elses gamertag, they will win! So don't do that unless you want them to. :)

3. You DO NOT need to be a member of 360voice to leave a comment. Anyone can leave a comment on an Xbox blog so anyone is eligible.

4. I will private msg you via Xbox live to let you know you won and you can provide your mailing info for the pre-paid 1600 card shipped from Amazon.com. If you have a 360voice account, you will also get the Contest Winner badge!!

5. It DOES NOT matter how many comments you leave. Each tag is counted only once... so don't spam the comments.

6. The drawing will be conducted on Monday morning. Everyone who left a comment from the previous Monday through Sunday will be eligible to win. The dates will be:

Sept 17, 2007
Sept 24, 2007
Oct 1, 2007
Oct 8, 2007
Oct 15, 2007
Oct 22, 2007
Oct 29, 2007

7. If you win, you are NOT eligible to win any other for the rest of the giveaway.

8. We are not responsible for ANY situation that prevents you from commenting and therefore being unable to enter. You can let us know and we will make every reasonable attempt to accommodate you all, but this is just for fun... and you have 7 days each week to enter.. so if a technical snafu takes the site down on one of the days that week, just comment on another day.

9. FYI, we reserve the right to change the rules at anytime... just in case I made a mistake or something. Don't worry though, if the rules change I will tell you all!

That is it! If you have any questions, email me at mail@360voice.com. Good luck! Oh and if you leave a comment for someone, try and make it interesting. Don't just put "HI" as that isn't much fun for anyone. Ok? :)

(click the title of this post to leave a comment!)
 

The COD4 Beta, and other demos/betas/halo 2

I have been receiving tons of email from people losing their streaks while playing the COD4 Beta. Let me explain what is going on.

One feed we use to track what you play is your gamercard. If the game appears on your gamercard and is in your most recent played list at xbox.com, that is one way we see what you play. This is the "primary" way that we see it. It allows us to ask Microsoft "What did <gamertag> play yesterday" and we get back a list of games.

The second feed that we use for FULL members, is the presence feed. this is the feed that tells people what you are online playing at all times. The only way for us to monitor this feed is to take a snap-shot every 20 minutes of what that feed says and store it. At midnight when we get all of your games off your gamercard, we merge it with the games we "watched" you playing during the day.

Now the reality is, lately Microsoft has seen some serious degrading service with presence. All of the community sites that use this feed are starting to see really poor performance. What this means is that we ask the feed what you are playing and it sends back NOTHING. It times out. It gives no answer. So it shows you as playing no Demos, or Betas... or Back compatible titles like Halo 2.

For those of you playing ONLY the COD 4 beta, this means that you have nothing on your gamercard (cause betas don't show up there) and you have nothing tracked by presence... which means that you lose your streaks and the Xbox says you didn't play anything.

So here is a friendly warning: Always, always, always play an arcade game or something before doing anything. If you play one thing that appears on your gamercard, and THEN play the COD 4 beta, even if the beta isn't tracked through the presence feed, you will have something to keep your streak going. Please please try and do this... because the presence feed just isn't working well enough to trust.

If things keep performing poorly with the presence feed, we may need to pull it from the site and stop tracking demos/betas... it isn't fair to you that you expect it to track what you play and it isn't fair to us to have to keep manually going into everyones accounts and repairing the missing data.

Sorry for this long explanation... we are doing the best we can with these feeds, but as more people register and all the xbox community sites using this data continue to grow, certain parts of the data were never meant to support some of the things we are doing. The presence feed for tracking non-retail and non-arcade titles is one of those growing casualties.

Thanks for your patience! Keep those streaks alive! Play a live arcade title before your major gaming sessions! I recommend Track & Field! ;)

Remember that thing that happened on monday?

Remember that thing that happened on Monday where everyone lost there streak? Well it happened again. For some reason our Load job ran TWICE in a row... again. And we put code in to catch the problem... but it didn't work because of some random situation that we didn't account for (the fact that people register and new games get inserted, which means that our check for new games doesn't work in some cases)...

So thank you AGAIN for your patience... stay tuned for updates...

Update 8:05am CT

Well the plus side is that I am getting good at cleaning up the messes... so blogs are now running

Update 2:52pm CT

Blogs are done. Game stats are done... if you are still missing things, email us at mail@360voice.com. I am NOT going to process the leaderboards today... instead I will run the badges because those are a few days behind. If badges finish tonight and everything runs smooth tomorrow morning, we should be back on track.

A big list of linkers

It has been a little while since I put up a list of the latest people linking to us. Here it is for your scanning pleasure!

mfischer.com
"The 360's online / Internet functionality is light-years ahead of the Playstation 3 and Wii -- even though those consoles came out a full year after the 360."

The Married Gamers
"Yes my 360 has gained sentience and is blogging..."

Hawty McBloggy
"If you don’t have your 360 blogging for you yet, you should go sign up for those services."

Gamebar 360
"GamerBar360 has been a few months in the making and I’m very proud to finally open it up to the Xbox and 360Voice community."

Tales from the Road
"They get a little redundant, but it's definitely an original concept!"

McWilliams' World
“Do you have an account at 360Voice.com?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a web site?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you may want what I have.”

Brewtality
"Check out 360 Voice and sign up."

Virtual Vacancy
"I don't really blog anymore, but my Xbox 360 blogs, and it's kind of funny."

Butwheaty's Blog
"My 360voice blog is quite happy about my playing time, and I was happy to oblige it."

Borandi's Xbox 360 Diary
"I like to give a shoutout to a great site called http://360voice.com. I just found out about it recently."

The World is Naive
"Crazy concept huh?"

Thierry's Space
"It's kind of funny."

Ramblings of the Mad Cow
"Not only does everyone and their mother have a blog nowadays, but so do gaming systems."

The Perry Hyatt Show
"I even found that site Joe talked about when he got his 360, where your xbox keeps it's own blog."

Soupdog50's Blog
"Lately my xbox has been blogging more than me."

Azereki
"Anyway, in the past two weeks since my 360 started it's own blog I have managed to raise my Gamerscore up to 3640."

Blisslogs
"It seems to think it’s better than us humans too..."

God Hates Me
"To keep our stupid streak going, we took advantage of a dear friend’s Xbox who is upstairs from us, and then managed to borrow another friend’s machine to make sure nothing went wrong."

Look at that mammoth list! (ok it looks bigger when I just type it up less frequently!) My copy paste fingers are tired! Thanks everyone out there who is keeping the conversation going!

Things are still catching up from yesterday

I would like to say we are 100% back on track this morning, but we have been still fighting with the new server. This fighting contributes to slowness on our primary servers as we are doing massive data exports to try and get everything up and running at the new host. So blogs are a tad behind again today... everything looks on track though... so thank you for your patience while we continue to fight through this hardware migration.

Just an update on the blogs

We are just in the process of cleaning, reloading and recovering.  It's going well though and everything is there, so we should be back on track eventually today (with everyones streak recovered).  We will give another update when the blogs start showing up so you guys know.

Update 11:45am CT

Yay! Blogs are running now... streaks are repaired... look for your entries over the next few hours.

A little snafu this morning

There was a little mess up this morning with our imports. It was not related to the outage. We are deleting out the bad blog entries and starting everything over.... so things will be delayed. We will keep you all in the loop.

If you emailed me about missing game data or losing your streak, that is why. For some reason our data import ran twice so from our system's perspective the lastplayed date for your games were all equal... so it looked like no one in the system played anything... which is obviously not correct. :)

So we are getting it fixed up. Stay tuned!

New chat software by Geesee

I was sick of Gabbly always breaking down, so I am trying some new chat software for the site. It is by Geesee and it seems pretty sweet. The button to join the chat is on the homepage and an embedded version is found in the nav drop down under Forum. Let me know what you think.

If you had a Gabbly account, you will need to register (if you want a custom profile). This software allows moderators, co-moderators, as well as private msging and such... so it is a little more full featured.

(click the title of this post to leave a comment)

Code weekend comes to a close

I would like to celebrate our triumphant completion of some huge milestones, but this weekend has been more about frustration than progress. When you are writing code, you get to see lots of progress because you are singly responsible for any progress you create. When you are doing server builds, there is so much waiting for other things to happen, that it is easy for frustration to mount. We have everything ready to go with the new servers, but our primary import job, the one that grabs data from Xbox Live, takes about six times longer to run on the new server than on the old server. That is prohibitive.

The new server is a HUGE beast of a machine. There is nothing that should prevent it from being anything but faster... but it isn't... and that puzzle continue to baffle both us and the hosting company. So for now, things remain as is.

We did roll out a new badge type, and we did rewrite significant portions of our back end to better handle timeouts that were causing people to have missing blog entries. We also merged our registration process and continue to track down small bugs there. If you go through the registration process and notice anything funny, please tell us!

I think one of our other issues was one of fatigue. Normally Steve flies in on Thursday night and we both take off Friday and worth through Friday and Saturday. This time, he arrived Friday and we only had one full day (Saturday) to really get things done, so we cranked it extra hard and I think we just ran out of steam. We aren't as young as we use to be... we need our beauty rest these days. :)

So we will keep everyone in the look on the server migration. Hopefully we can get an answer put together in the next day and be up and running by Tuesday. That is the plan. We can't really move on a bunch of changes until the new boxes are up and running and stable.

Missed Data Fixes

Some of you have been reporting missed blog entries this month.  We have determined the issue, and have a work around in place.  Last night we put it in motion and it did correct the couple dozen or so people we had problems pulling data initially.

So we are putting the workaround in place and I think it should correct the issue from here on out.   So if you do see anything off it's important you let us know right away.

The server preparations continue

It doesn't look like we will be cutting to the new servers this evening. The last time we did this, we only had one dedicated server... this time we have four... so it has been quite the challenge getting everything lined up, and despite our preparation, things just seems to be cropping up from every angle to keep us from our goal... whether it is problems with PHP, email, disk file sizes, import transfer speeds... you name it, we are looking into it.

The day has been long, but it has been fun sitting here geeking out all day. I learned to semi-enjoy Game Fuel, so that has to count for something!

Tomorrow morning the battle continues... You can also watch my Twitter for more details if you are interested in that kind of thing!

Registration Process changes

We are making the move towards consolidating our registration process. Previously the blog and forum accounts were two separate entities. I have spent all morning hacking into the Snitz forum software and merging the two accounts a bit. Now when you go to registration, you can pick BASIC or FULL and you only have to fill out one of the forms... not both.

This will continue to be something that we tweak over time, but in the short term it allows us to position the value of the two different registrations and hopefully cut back on the support emails where people register for the BASIC and thing they get the forum account automatically... or register for a forum account and never register for a blog.

It will also help spam because you can't register for a blog without a valid Xbox Live tag (since that check is now included). So all around, this is a move towards a more traditional and consistent user experience around registration.

I spent pretty much all day on this... and I am really tired of looking at Snitz code. :)

Code Weekend: New BADGES!!!

Code weekend has been going good, some stuff is going a lot quicker then I thought, others not so much.  But we took a little break and added a new badge!

Watch List Badges!  If you are on at least 10 peoples watch lists you earn a badge.  The breakdowns are;

• 10 Watchers
• 25 Watchers
• 50 Watchers
• 100 Watchers

And finally there can be only one... the most watched person.  See if you can guess it before clicking;

• Most Watched

I personally am 3 away from the 50, I guess I need some new friends!   Hope you all enjoy, give us some feedback in the forums.

Code weekend begins

Steve and I are here drinking our Dunkin' Donuts coffee and getting into a groove. He is loading data into the new database and I am working on repointing the DNS so that we will be ready to switch over. You might notice some outages... especially when the DNS makes the switch.

So this is the warning. All weekend, things might be a bit crazy... but that is only because we are working to make it better!

Update: We forgot to mention that badges will be turned off for today and tomorrow (Sat & Sunday). No new badges will appear over the weekend... this is to give us time to really hammer the server without other jobs taking up the processing power.

Coding tuesday

A lot of stuff happening behind the scenes this week as we prepare for our server move this weekend. Here are a few things we finished up today:

1. I got a version of the site running on the new web server
   This involved installing all our code and our add-on software for caching and URL rewriting. Things look pretty good. I also started the process of getting the DNS services cut over to our new provider.
2. Steve installed a database on the new server
   We have a test version of our database up and running. There is no data in there yet... but the database software is installed and working on Linux now.
3. We started adding in all the required firewall rules
   Yes, our new host has a firewall... so hopefully when everything is all said and done there will be no hacking and no IP flooding!
4. Added "360" flair to the most played games list
   Based on feedback from the forums, we had little "50", "100" and "200" flair on the most played games list of your blog pages. With so many people playing so many games for so long these days, it was a good idea to create a "360" flair entry. To see an example of this, check out drukyulgoods with 393 days of Zuma!
5. Added a "date" parameter to the score.getlist API call
   Some people working on various 360voice community tools wanted to be able to query for a gamertag score by date. So here it is.

We had a few other things planned to announce... like a new way of showcasing community tools... but we didn't expect to do so much work with the new servers tonight... so we will probably wait to launch that this weekend. Stay tuned.... things are busy busy over here in the 360voice world.

In other news, Steve and I's good friend ProPapa Smurf finally got an Xbox 360 this weekend! He has been saving up and the dream is now a reality. He is so new, he doesn't even have a blog registered yet, so I had to link to his xbox.com profile.

Get ready for it! Code weekend!

Fatty Chubs is coming to Chicago this weekend... the plan? Write 360voice code for 48+ hours. Unfortunately, we have no major features planned as our primary mission is the migration to our new-hotness servers. I just want to warn everyone that there will be some outages... not on your game data... but on the appearance of the badges/blogs/leaderboards, etc as we will be making the biggest data and hardware migration that we have ever attempted and we will be trying to get it all done in a single (ok maybe two) days.

We will try and put in a few outstanding features... it all depends on how fast the server move goes and what gotcha's we bump into. Because we are dumping and reloading our database from scratch we will also be taking the opportunity to make some data model changes and recode large portions of the site to benefit from them.

So it is going to be a busy weekend, but it will hopefully prepare us for all of the radical things that are going to happen in the coming months... you just wait and see!  As always, watch the dev blog for details during code weekend. We will keep it updated as to what is going on. Remember, if the site is down, the dev blog runs on another server which you can always access directly at blog.360voice.com. So if the site is down and you want to know why, check that URL.

Blog of the future?

I was reading Robert Scoble's blog, and he had a post titled "Blog of the Future". It made me think about what the blog of the future might really be like, and I think it is probably something similar to what we are doing here at 360voice with Xbox Live data, but extending it to many more general areas of your life.

Sure, there will always be room for writing your commentary on your actions, but as AI systems evolve and sensors/monitoring become more pervasive, our movements and interactions will be increasingly represented by data... this data, can be fed into the same types of systems we are using for 360voice (albeit much more complex) and auto-generate your "life log".

For instance, in the future I won't have to write in my blog that I went to a certain movie this weekend. By GPS and ticket purchase, that information will be captured... so my blog entry will say "Trapper went to see <name> at <theater name> this weekend." and then I can go to that entry and fill in any little details that I want to flesh out about the experience... so the blog of the future becomes much more annotative.

Just some thoughts I had this Tuesday morning. Steve and I created 360voice because we thought it would be a fun experiment to create a "blogject". The project has definitely slanted towards a community portal, which is natural, but it is still fun to think about the whole site in the context of taking actions that were previously locked away in the stats of the gamercard, and making them searchable.... findable... linkable...

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Boo for comment spammers...

In the last few days, I have seen a considerable increase in a person or persons leaving inappropriate comments on blogs while impersonating users of the system (yes, I read every comment!). We have an anonymous comment system because we feel anyone... not just forum members... should be allowed to participate in community and discussion on the Xbox blogs. We have seen very appropriate behavior until just yesterday.

So, this morning I took the time to code IP Address tracking into the comments. I will be using a zero tolerance policy. If I see anyone pretending to be someone else and leaving comments that are inappropriate, your account will be immediately banned from accessing our servers. The only way you can get unbanned is to email me and explain.

If you think you have been a victim of impersonation, email us using the contact form... link us to the blog entry and the comment, and we will investigate the IP Address. Also, if you have comments enabled on your blog, you can delete any comment you want from your blog settings page.

It upsets me that I have to take the time to build out tracking like this... but I guess John Gabriel's theory (minor NSFW) always applies.

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Most popular blogs for Aug 2007

Here is the top 20 list from Aug 2007... these people worked hard to get to the top of the list!

1. jcnet *
2. Mr Achievement *
3. GuvmentCheese *
4. Fshguy *
5. syndelin *
6. ZeroDesolation *
7. Major Nelson
8. Misha LinGhan *
9. the dren *
10. cc99999 *
11. StripClubDj
12. PSonic *
13. IrishPauly *
14. frankie
15. GameSpotting *
16. COBAIN x87x *
17. destruktive87 *
18. cluskevird *
19. andyg8180 *
20. Major Flankage *

Look at all of those people with stars next to their names! That means they have comments turned on! Go leave them one. It is worth noting that Major Nelson took a big dive this week. It looks like we have some popular members these days!