Nintendo Wii Opens Up

From the BBC:

“The hi-tech firm has released a game making tool called WiiWare that gives budding game makers the data they need to use the console and its innovative controller.”

Read the whole article here.

I guess this can be considered as Game Consoles 2.0. Brilliant if you ask me. For years console makers have protected their consoles and games. Now by opening up the Wii, they are in a sense making their console VERY attractive. Users can now create their own games, thus producing a wild amount of software titles available to Wii players. Nintendo just has to sit back and watch as their console dominates the market without much effort.

I foresee Nintendo focusing on “open” gaming consoles. Considering the gigantic industry that gaming is - I see this move as a winner. The Wii also has online capabilities - I also foresee a new social network, and Wii game sites forming from this.

Class differences between social network sites?

A very interesting article from the Globe and Mail:

“The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.”

“MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.”

Read the whole article here and Mail.

I’m not really surprised that the two networks attract different types of people. It’s like saying that people in hot countries like cold drinks, and people in cold countries like hot drinks. Facebook started out with University students, and MySpace started out with hosted music. Of course their users will be different - if they weren’t different, why have 2 identical sites?

I think it’s more a statement that social networking can be examined in more detail in terms of demographics, geographic location, etc. This would be very interesting information to have for advertisers and the like - but it’s always difficult to gather such information without overstepping privacy boundaries.

But in closing, as interesting the trends may be, one should be careful about classifying all users of a site as one type of person - because there are many users out there that are on both Facebook and MySpace… now which class would they be in then?

Safari comes to the PC

From ZDNet:

“Apple plans to ship a version of its Safari Web browser for Windows, and third-party developers will be able to get a piece of the iPhone, the company announced Monday.”

Read the whole article here.

Download the demo here.

Now that Macs and PCs share Intel processors, the lines are now blurred in terms of applications and where they can run. It will be interesting to see whether Safari makes any headway on the PC platform to give IE and Firefox some competition. Probably they are hoping that the new iPhone will also help drive up interest in the browser - or vice versa.

One of the interesting things - is that it claims to be faster than any other browser on any other platform. I haven’t given it a test run yet - but I’m very curious to see how it supports standards, etc… All I know for sure is that Safari finally has tabbed browsing and has a new feature: “Resizable text-fields”. This latter feature will definitely prove interesting for HTML development.

Can we expect IE8 on the Mac in the future? I doubt it.

Update - June 14, 2007

I’ve tried out Safari 3 for a day now - it’s OK. Nothing really wows me about it. It’s the same speed as Firefox (about), or at least I can’t tell the difference. The one thing I truly DO like, is the search feature where it greys out the page except for what you’re looking for. Also, the resizable text box thing is growing on me - especially since I work with Movable Type so much. Other than that - it’s still got a few bugs. I wouldn’t drop my Firefox for it, but however, I would drop IE7 (that sluggish elaphant of a browser) for Safari 3. Firstly, you don’t need an official version of XP to get it (not that anyone would pirate an OS), secondly, it seems to be as standards compliant as Firefox (so far). Just my 2 cents.

I’ll be looking forward to the release version.

Photosynth - revisited

A co-worker of mine just sent me this. They’ve taken the technology that I blogged about last year, to a brand new level. Ground breaking stuff. Will this technology make its way to the web? If so, it would revolutionize the way things are linked, tracked, and used. Pure genius in my opinion. Microsoft acquired this technology - good thinking on their part. Forget Google Maps…

What the video here.