Geek Gestalt

'Battle' is a 2D, real-time, combat-oriented, multi-player, Flash game that will be the showpiece for a series of innovations for Multiverse Network, among which will be to give people the ability to interact between 2D and 3D versions of the same game.

(Credit: Multiverse Network)

Developers of 3D virtual worlds and multiplayer games may soon have access to tools that would allow them to build connected, promotional 2D, Flash versions of the same games.

These new tools are at the heart of Battle, a simple Flash game being released Thursday by the Multiverse Network, a virtual worlds middleware company.

A simple Flash game that runs on Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and Kongregate, Battle is really the showpiece behind new Multiverse technology that could, for the first time, make it possible for developers using its platform to build full-scale downloadable, virtual worlds or online games to create scaled-down, 2D, browser-based versions of the same titles and let players compete between them.

At the same time, Battle is also an example of what Multiverse co-founder Corey Bridges said was one of the first-ever multiplayer, real-time, action- or combat-based Flash games. To date, nearly all Flash multiplayer games have been turn-based, meaning only one person plays at a time, or have very basic game mechanics.

And while, as a platform company, Multiverse isn't in business to create games itself, Bridges said Battle shows that a wide selection of games that previously had to be played using a downloadable client could now be played in the browser.

"Now, you can have proven genres of video games, really popular games, like shooters, real-time strategy, sports and things that exist on consoles or specially installed games," Bridges said, and "those types of games can live in your Web browser without a download."

The immediate appeal to game developers of this innovation is being able to use the Multiverse tools to bring a wide variety of existing types of games to Flash, games that in the past required downloadable clients. And that could mean opening up such titles to far larger audiences, since many people don't want to have to install special software in order to play casual games.

As a tools company, Multiverse is not in the business of building games. But Bridges said the point of its building Battle itself was both to show off the latest set of features the platform offers, and to go through the process of using its own tools, so those inside the company know what its clients' experiences are like.

Multiverse offers its development platform free of charge to anyone who wants it, and hopes to make money by levying a commission on any game made with its tools that charges a fee to play. To date, there are no publicly-launched games built with the Mutiverse tools, though Bridges said several are in beta and are close to being launched.

To some observers, the best thing about the technology underpinning Battle is the marketing opportunities game like it can offer larger, more complete 3D, downloadable multiplayer games and virtual worlds.

"The real benefit of this is that nobody's ever created one tool that lets you have two views," both 2D, in Flash, and 3D, into the same game, said David Fox, vice president of technology at casual games developer, iWin. "This lets (game designers) have a free trial version on the Web and a download for the 3D experience without having to create everything again."

Fox did add that he was "dubious" that Multiverse could deliver on that promise but, not knowing very much about the initiative, said, "the proof is in the pudding."

But Bridges indicated that proof is just around the corner.

"We've got a very small handful of our existing developers taking their (in-development) 3D worlds," Bridges said, "and these developers are making a window into those worlds that can be done in Flash, and that's a pretty interesting new way of thinking about a virtual world experience."

Indeed, he added that he sees the 2D to 3D cross-over element of the tools being a good way to get players hooked on a game concept before convincing them to upgrade to a full 3D version. Yet, they would be able to play against people running the full 3D game in order to get a sense of what the entire experience might be like.

"This demonstrates that Flash is well on its way to becoming the default real-time interaction platform for the Web," said Raph Koster, founder of Areae, which is making Metaplace, a platform that lets anyone design their own Flash-based virtual world, "and it enables more kinds of games than people generally think possible."

As of today, Metaplace is in closed beta, but hopes to be opening up to the general public before too long.

Koster said that it's clear that Multiverse is making important strides in developing new kinds of real-time, multiplayer Flash games, but said that others, including Metaplace itself, have created games enabling such types of play.

Still, Bridges said he differentiated Multiverse's tools by their ability to create real combat action in a game like Battle.

Peter Haik, a co-founder of the virtual worlds development company, Metaversatility, which is using Multiverse's tools in some of its projects, agreed with Bridges' assessment of the Flash games market.

Haik said there are other multi-player Flash games, but they tend to be casual titles aimed at kids.

Multiverse's tools, he suggested, are geared mainly toward producing full-scale virtual worlds or massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), and therefore have much more scope for being used to create crossover between rich 3D games and 2D Flash versions.

"The true innovation" of the Multiverse tools, Haik said, "is that it's sort of an agnostic client, where if someone is in the Flash application, and someone else is in the 3D client, they can interact, and it doesn't matter what the other one is running."

And he said, Multiverse brings serious server technology to the table that runs separate from the various social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, and that is what enables the rich crossover experience.

One other important element of the toolset Multiverse provides, Bridges said, is a rendering engine that allows developers to generate Flash assets using the items from their 3D virtual worlds.

"It's really cool," said Bridges. "We have a Web-based automated system where a development team just uses a Web page, uploads a 3D model, and back comes the generated Flash files. It's a really quick way to convert a 3D game into a Flash game and make it look really, really good."

At the InterPlay social-gaming conference in San Francisco Thursday, representatives from Zynga, Social Gaming Network, Meebo, Kongregate, and InsideFacebook talked about the future of the medium.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--Huge social media services like Facebook and MySpace should allow application developers access to intelligence about their users' behavior.

That was the message from Mark Pincus, CEO of social-gaming network Zynga Thursday as he and others spoke on a panel called "The future of online social gaming" at the InterPlay conference here.

The confab is the first devoted entirely to social gaming, and it has attracted a packed house for a series of discussions on things like advertising and marketing on social games, how to fund such games and how to build these games on social media platforms.

But in the morning's first panel, Pincus and others, including Martin Green, the vice president of business development for Meebo; Shervin Pishevar, the CEO of Social Gaming Network; moderator Justin Smith, who writes the InsideFacebook blog; and Jim Greer the CEO of Kongregate, talked about how social gaming has emerged as a growing and important platform.

One of the most interesting parts of the discussion came when the panelists began talking about how they could share information about the behavior of their users.

Pishevar suggested that it would be a boon to the social gaming industry if networks like his and Zynga could share information with each other about how their users play the games they create and make available on platforms like Facebook and MySpace.

"Data coming in about gaming interactions between friends is very valuable," Pishevar said. It helps social gaming developers build a "whole intelligence about the games people like to play, who they like to play against, and their skill levels. (It would be great) having a universal feed that connects all the networks."

But Pincus said that while he agreed that such a thing would be a big help, he thinks that doing so would violate the terms of service of Facebook and MySpace.

So he exhorted the big social networks to change the way they do things.

"Right now, it violates the terms of service on every one of these networks," Pincus said, adding that both Facebook and MySpace don't "allow for sharing user data. That's something we as developer community should make a case for them to change, that it's in the users' interest, in their interest, and in our interest."

Whether Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network would see the value Pincus suggested is an entirely different question.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

If you're like many people deeply wired into a Web 2.0 lifestyle, your inbox is a never-ending flow of invites to new social-networking services.

Day in and day out, it seems, there's a new one. Today it's Notch Up, yesterday it's Naymz. Last week it was Dopplr.

And that's not even counting the steady flow of requests to be someone's friend on LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo or Facebook.

For me, it's a constant annoyance. I know I probably should jump on the LinkedIn bandwagon, for example, yet I never have, and frankly, don't expect I ever will. I suppose it's possible that one day, long ago, I created an account. All I know is that every few days, someone I know--often a distant acquaintance--will ask me to be their friend on LinkedIn.

And of course, what follows some set number of days later is a stern automated message warning me that my offer to be that person's friend is going to expire. Darn!

For some people, though, the issue with the constant stream of invites is becoming more than just annoying.

"I'm suffering from sheer invite toxicity," wrote Heather Kelley, the Kraus visiting professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, to an e-mail list I'm on. "Regardless of source, exclusivity or debatable utility of the service, my immediate response to seeing one in my inbox is 'NOT ANOTHER ONE,' combined with annoyance at the friend who sent it--'What? You expect me to join ANOTHER time-wasting thingy just because you did?'"

And lest you think that Kelley is complaining too much, and why can't she just ignore the invites and move on, remember that for many people, staying connected to their friends, and current or potential professional colleagues is a little like breathing.

Whether that's a good thing is a conversation for another day, but you know these people are hardly rare--you may even be one of them.

And for people like that, there is an intense social and professional pressure to join whatever new social network is on offer, especially if the invite comes from a friend.

"That is pretty much exactly how I feel about it," said Mark De Loura, a San Francisco-based video game technology consultant. "There's enough of a net gain out of joining that I always (feel I have to) do it."

One of the major problems behind the flood of invites is that many of the services seem to mine users' contacts lists for names to send invites, either for joining a new service or for, say, using a Facebook application. Similarly, some systems force users to opt-out of adding their contacts to new invite lists rather than opt-in.

To some, that is a real problem that the companies behind the social networks need to solve.

"That behavior," said Kim Pallister, a technology blogger who works for Intel, "the opt-out spam list is going to piss off the user base...You need to have that be opt-in, not opt-out."

That's particularly true because, practically speaking, since many users quickly click through such opt-outs without noticing what they mean, they may not even see what they're agreeing to.

"The interesting thing about those invites," said Judith Meskill, a longtime social networks observer and blogger, and currently COO of a startup called CrowdFusion, "is that they are being spawned often without the knowledge of the spammer. This practice really must stop."

Meskill suggested that the only way it might stop is if the companies behind some of the services band together to create a set of behavioral regulations.

"It's their industry," Meskill said. "They should be protecting its rep. It really makes the whole industry look bad."

Still, if such standards were to be implemented, it's certainly not going to happen any time soon. And in the interim, the problem of people being endlessly frustrated by more and more invites continues.

One rather well-known tech executive, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently decided to quit Facebook because he was getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day.

That, of course, is an extreme example, but to people like Kelley, the never-ending invites often feel like a plague, and one that simply won't go away.

"I first noticed it like one notices a new allergic reaction," Kelley, who said she is or has been a member of at least 14 social networks, told me by IM. "Over time, I started noticing a more and more negative reaction to each new one that surfaced. It was similar to the feeling of hearing about a new startup during the height of the (dot-com) bubble. It just defied all logic and kind of offended me as a thinking human."

Not everyone, of course, feels that the number of new social networks is a problem. For some, it creates ever-changing ways to connect to important people in their lives, and more focused ways to filter lists of friends and acquaintances.

"I receive invitations for new social networking sites almost every time a new one hits beta," said Souris Hong-Porretta, vice president of interactive media at Entertainment Media Ventures. "I'm not so tired of receiving invites. It's part of my culture and part of my job to know what's out there."

Hong-Porretta said that she's even moderating a panel at the upcoming South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, about such applications.

But even she wishes the services weren't such time-sucks.

"I do sometimes wish that there was a magic button I could push that would fill in all my relevant information for me though."

Hong-Porretta, though, can see why for people less interested in staying abreast of every new service, the invite stream is a problem.

"I'm not surprised people are experiencing social networking site invite fatigue," she said. "The sites are time capital intensive in the beginning...I think people are going to be much more particular about the sites they sign up for now. I think a defining factor will be, 'Is this site useful or helpful to me?'"

One thing some would like to see would be an actual consolidation of the many services, precisely so there isn't social networking site overload.

"What I'd ideally like would be to have a couple different networks, personal and professional (that I could) keep separate," said De Loura. There might be "somebody I might want to connect to for personal reasons, but not for business reasons. (And) there are people I want to protect. I don't want everybody to be linked to execs at Microsoft who have been gracious enough to link to me."

Meskill thinks that De Loura is on the right track. She said she foresees a new set of social network sites that are "strong vertical offerings," sites like Flickr that give users a specific and focused set of things to do.

"I think a new generation of strong, user-focused offerings would be very well received," Meskill said, "in verticals like photos, music, food, tech, etc. Those plays have not arrived yet, however."

The thing is, though, that even if social-networking services do evolve as Meskill suggests, users will still find themselves accosted with nearly daily invites. And that's not necessarily a good thing. Especially when the invites come from friends.

In fact, there's even a term for the invites that come from friends: "bacn."

"It's spam from people you know," said Pallister. "It's worse than spam because you're not sure you should ignore it. 'Did they mean to send this to me? Should I delete it?'"

Meskill said she's aware that bacn has become a big problem on Facebook.

"Friends are dropping friends as friends," Meskill said, "because they are being hammered by a ton of this stuff."

So what's the solution?

It's hard to say. But to people like Meskill, it's become clear that the social network services are going to have to take action soon, or else they're going to risk turning off their users. And these days, it's more important to those companies than ever that that doesn't happen.

"Since we have advanced beyond the first adopters," she said, "and the next wave and are now into the broader wave of medium-to-late adopters, this is more imperative than ever."

Digsby is a new service that aims to give people a way to link their contacts from leading IM clients with e-mail and social networks like Facebook and MySpace.com

(Credit: Jeff Hester, BigBlueBall.com)

If you're the type of person who communicates with friends, co-workers, relatives, and such via several different IM services, e-mail, and Facebook--and you know you are--software could soon offer you one of the cleanest ways ever to link them all together.

The software, called Digsby, went into private beta Tuesday, and its goal is to give people a way to organize their contacts from Yahoo Messenger, AOL IM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Windows Live Messenger, as well as e-mail, Facebook, and MySpace.com into a single client.

Digsby went into private beta on Tuesday. It is the brainchild of Steve Shapiro, an MBA student at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

(Credit: Jeff Hester, BigBlueBall.com)

According to Jeff Hester, who runs instant message community site BigBlueBall.com and who wrote about Digsby late Wednesday night, the service is the smoothest integration of all the various communications tools that it links together.

Digsby offers the ability to have a single buddy list for all your (major) IM clients and to carry on several IM conversations via tabbed windows. Furthermore, you can create new aliases for each contact for convenience.

It also allows you to work with Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and other major Web-based e-mail services and to "stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook or MySpace accounts," including friend requests, messages, group invites, and other communications.

Currently, Digsby only works with Facebook and MySpace, but it hints at other social network support in the near future.

Hester said he thinks it works better with Facebook.

"The integration with Facebook is best," Hester wrote on BigBlueBall.com, "and (there) is even a Digsby widget for your Facebook profile. With Myspace, you get the status and updates, but to take an action, Digsby launches a browser and takes you to the full Myspace Web site. It might be nice if they used a mini-browser and the mobile version of the site, but only as an option."

Hester told me late Wednesday night by instant message that the integration with Facebook is cleaner because of the API.

For now, Digsby is closed to general public sign-ups, but a visit to BigBlueBall might net you an invite.

I have to admit, I'm not sure whether there are other services that can do all of this, but even if there are, this may be the best yet.

Got a great idea for a TV show but don't want to deal with going through the traditional Hollywood studio system vetting and production process?

Or maybe you don't even want your show on TV at all, what with the Internet offering so many different distribution opportunities?

Then a Los Angeles start-up called 60Frames Entertainment may well be your ticket to the director's chair.

The company, founded with $3.5 million from investors United Talent Agency (UTA) and Spot Runner, is geared toward providing a wide variety of content creators with the financing and resources they need to produce and distribute original programming across the sites of Internet partners like YouTube, MySpace.com, Bebo, and soon, Joost.

To begin with, 60Frames is supporting two projects, Cockpit, a comedy which "explores what really happens inside the cockpit of a commercial airline." The series is by Big Fantastic, the team of Douglas Cheney, Chris Hampel, Chris McCaleb, and Ryan Wise, which produced Prom Queen for Michael Eisner's start-up, Vuguru.

The new series Cockpit, by the producers of the online show Prom Queen, is one of the first series that 60Frames will distribute to partners like YouTube, Bebo, and others.

(Credit: 60Frames)

"It's an incredible opportunity for creators to get their work out there," McCaleb said of 60Frames. "It's a whole new vision of what an entertainment company can be. It puts the power in the hands of the creators. It's an artist's dream."

That's because, McCaleb said, 60Frames is putting the creative power in the hands of the people creating the content. He said that while his team went through some production meetings with 60Frames, he didn't recall having to submit a budget.

Another early 60Frames project is Erik the Librarian Mysteries, which "follows a reclusive librarian who falls in love with a mysterious stranger." It is from Brent Forrester, a consulting producer for The Office.

Another future effort will be an as-yet unspecified project by well-known filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, otherwise known as the Coen Brothers.

60Frames is not talking much about its business model, though it does depend on advertising relationships with its distribution partners. And the company plans to share revenue from the projects with the artists, once they're profitable.

"The basic spirit of the agreement (with artists) is that we're going to spend money and resources getting (projects) to market," said Brent Weinstein, CEO of 60Frames. "And as soon as we're profitable, we become financial partners with our artists and collaborators."

To one Hollywood observer, however, 60Frames' model is a little suspect.

"The problem is monetizing it," said Mark Litvack, an intellectual-property attorney who has worked for Sony, Time Warner, and Disney. "(That's the) difficulty with any project such as this."

Litvack, who has not been briefed by 60Frames, said that while projects such as LonelyGirl15 have managed to be successful financially online, it is extremely rare. More common, he said, are Internet hits that breed large fan bases, but few dollars.

"One of the classic cases is (Eepy Bird), the Diet Coke and Mentos guys," Litvack said. "Those guys were a huge hit. Many, many people saw (their videos) but the people who made them didn't become rich off it."

However, the 60Frames model does afford artists some significant advantages, Litvack allowed.

"For those that think that the studios control all methods of distribution, they don't," he said. "The Internet provides a very low-cost way of distributing content to literally billions of people."

And McCaleb agreed that for him and the Cockpit team, working with 60Frames and having the opportunity to have their work showcased on sites like YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, and others, is extremely valuable.

"As a creator, having all those different distribution platforms, it's so key," McCaleb said. "Having your content be so ubiquitous, it's just awesome for us."

And that's what 60Frames is hoping to leverage. The company is not yet talking in detail about its financial arrangements with its strategic partners, but it does say that in arranging to have its artists' content distributed on sites like YouTube, 60Frames worked with the advertising divisions of each distributor.

To Weinstein, the opportunity such sites offer is massive and wide-spread distribution for content that could bring in money from a variety of different advertising methods. Among them are product placement, as well as placing ads before or after the content.

For his part, Litvack said he is optimistic about product placement deals, but suspicious of putting ads either before or after content.

"It tends to discourage people from watching," Litvack said. "If you have an option of watching something with an ad in it or not an ad in it," you're likely to choose the latter.

It's sure to be the next Facebook. It'll dwarf MySpace.com.

I bring you: The Ask a Ninja social network.

For anyone who's been using typewriters and watching over-the-air television the last couple of years, Ask a Ninja is the hit video blog in which a ninja answers questions about the lifestyle of sneaking undetected into locked buildings and opening victims up with katanas. And things like that.

The hit video blog is launching its own social-networking service.

(Credit: Ask a Ninja)

Well, the audience has gotten so big that the creators have decided to do something that almost no one else has thought of: launch a site on which the video blog's fans can network with each other, create friends lists, leave testimonials--surely about the best suggestions on how to slice up evildoers and the like--and so forth.

Ah, so I kid just a little bit.

The truth is, I'm just not sure how successful a deeply focused social network like this can be. The Ask a Ninja community may be passionate and strong, but is it big enough to support a whole social-networking service? Especially when it's possible to set up focused groups on other networks?

Well, of course, we won't know the answer for a while. But I'm skeptical.

Particularly, because I wonder how members will be able to tell their friends apart when every single one of them is wearing the exact same ninja outfit.