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Wordpress Acquires Polldaddy
October 16, 2008 · Comments
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, bought the Irish startup Polldaddy (which is my poll service of choice and used in this blog). This is to further push and make WordPress better more than other things, similar to the recent acquisition of IntenseDebate. However, the acquisition, just like IntenseDebate and Gravatar, will not lead to exclusivity of the service to WordPress users.
Polldaddy’s stiff competitor in the Poll service space is Vizu, which provide features that daddy’s poll doesn’t provide. However, the same can be said for Vizu, and thus I created a test post displaying the two top poll services side-by-side: POLL: Where are you from?
Congratulations and good luck to Polldaddy and Automattic!
Originally Posted at: Technology Playground™.
Filed under Blogging, Internet, Software · Tags: Automattic, gameshogun, Gravatar, IntenseDebate, PollDaddy, wordpressMSN Groups Migrating to Multiply
October 16, 2008 · Comments
MSN Groups, one of the last remnants of the MSN Brand, is going to shutdown its services on February 21, 2009. All groups in the service will be given a chance to move their group, discussions, files, and histories over to Multiply – the 8th largest Social Network today.
The optional migration will hopefully start next week, as MSN and Multiply do the final testing on the scripts. After this, Microsoft will be able to concentrate and pool all their resources to the upcoming Windows Live Groups.
Below is the letter posted by Charlotte Jones, Group Product Manager of Microsoft, in the CommunityFeedback of MSN Groups.
You may have heard rumors that MSN Groups will in closing, I’d like to respond to those here so that our most active users have the information you need to manage your groups effectively. It is true that we are planning to close the MSN Groups service on February 21, 2009 and will offer you the opportunity to move your group to our new partner service, Multiply. We understand the importance of keeping your group together, so we partnered with Multiply to create a migration process that moves your group to their service to preserve your online community and its history.
The migration method that Multiply has built for you is still in the beta stage, we plan to open it next week. Once the service is ready we’ll be sending all of our users an email and will post notices within the MSN Groups site with more information, including instructions for beginning the migration process. In the meantime I encourage you to visit http://Multiply.com to get to know the service and see some of the thousands of groups they host already.
The natural question to ask in this situation is why we are closing MSN Groups. It is our goal to provide our customers with the most current and user friendly technology available today. We made the difficult decision to close the MSN Groups service as part of an overall investment in updating and re-aligning our online services with Windows Live. In the long term we believe that closing the service is the best way to continue to offer innovative, best of breed services that help you stay in touch with the people you care about. It’s very important to us that you keep the data you created using MSN Groups and that is why we have partnered with Multiply, so you can keep your group going into the future despite the closure of MSN Groups.
Between today and February 21, 2009 the MSN Groups service will remain the same as it is now. We will remove the option to add more storage to your group but other features will remain until the service is shut down and you can use it the same way you do today until the date of closure. Watch the site and your email inbox over the next week as we will post updated information there, including a more detailed outline of your options and next steps.
Regards,
Charlotte Jones, Group Product Manager, Microsoft
Originally Posted at: Technology Playground™. Filed under Internet · Tags: gameshogun, Groups, Live, microsoft, MSN, Multiply, windows
Android and iPhone gets 1st MMO
October 16, 2008 · Comments
MMOs for Mobile Phones
It’s been years since the first announcement about an MMO for Mobile Phones – Nokia’s HinterWars: The Aterian Invasion. It’s defined as:
the revolutinoary dual-platform Symbian Mobile Massively Multiplayer Online Game (3MOG) that allows gamers to play simultaneously with tens of thousands of others using either their Nokia Series 60 and Nokia N-Series gamedeck or their PC.
(as copied from the official site)
Well, MMOs for Mobile Phones are getting closer and closer to reality.
But first, we have to check out how the journey continued after Nokia’s HinterWars. The next step (or maybe backstep) was the availability of Mobile Applications that allows a player to check his character and his friend’s statistics.
For example, the EVE Tracker by Saggy Software, that keeps you updated on your pilots.
The features available are:
- Pilot pager – track your pilots; includes attributes, race, gender, bloodline, and more
- Currently training skill
- Pilot skills
- Skills database – search the skills database and plan the future of your pilot
There is also Rudip’s Warcraft Characters, that tracks your World of Warcraft characters anywhere and everywhere.
It features:
- Checking all your characters
- A summary of your character, similar to what’s seen on WoWArmory
- Ability to see all the items you are wearing
- See the ‘tooltip’ of the items
- Track your reputation stats
- Worldwide support for WoW-US, WoW-EU, WoW-KR, WoW-CN, and WoW-TW
These two applications are available for Apple’s iPhone only, but we can see how the MMO world slowly invades our mobile phones. A short stage but with a wide effect and opened plenty of possibilities for the players and the companies alike. Today, welcome the new kid on the block, a Mobile MMO by PerBlue entitled Parallel Kingdom: Age of Exploration.
As the name suggests, this Mobile MMO is set on a parallel world much like Earth. In fact, this world is on top of our world! Or if you’ve seen the movie – “The Spiderwick Chronicles” (or read the book), there is another world right here on our own planet that we can only see by some ‘means’.
This is what Parallel Kingdom is, and that ‘means’ is the iPhone and Android-based phones. By using GPS (Global Positioning System) combining it with the virtual world, a player will be able to explore this parallel world as s/he travels around the real-world (products that use GPS are called geo-aware).
Get to fight monsters in this virtual world, collect gold in this world, and even have a duel with another player (you two must be near each other in-real-world). The virtual world itself shows a Google Map of where you are in the real-world, imagine your phone as the window to another world giving you a visual of what our naked eyes can not see.
Parallel Kingdom is set to launch on October 31, and will use the same game network regardless if you are an Android user and your friend is an iPhone user. The game will be free initially, and we can hope that they release a 3D graphics version that will make use of iPhone’s and Android’s GFX capabilities.
And that is only just the beginning. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft team have been conducting polls for the past few months about Mobile Phones and Mobile Games, which led fans to believe that the company is considering developing a mobile version of WoW. Philippine online gaming companies are into Mobile Games development already, some are already providing Mobile services link to a player’s account. The possibilities are endless and the future of gaming and mobile phones are merging.
I can’t wait as our lives gets more mobile than ever, bringing online and social entertainment together and wherever we go. I just hope that they do not separate the game worlds between mobile, console, and PC (it’s possible). For now, I’ll wait for Motorola’s first Android Phone, then I’ll join the world of Parallel Kingdom.
Originally posted at: Technology Playground™.
Filed under Cellphones, Gadgets, Gaming, Mobile, Software · Tags: Android, EVE, gameshogun, iPhone, Kingdom, mmorpg, Mobile, nokia, Parallel, warcraft