Week 1 Post: Wired Articles

There is also an assignment to find 3 articles or advertisements about some items of interest.

The first one I found was http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/twitter-ads-coming-to-official-iphone-and-android-apps/.  This article, in short, says that twitter is bringing adds to their official iphone and android apps in the same way they are in the desktop version.  When viewing the apps, your twitter feed will have ads scrolling through them over the course of the day, but they will remain easy to dismiss and should quickly drift off your top tweets.  This isn't too new or different.  It's just broadening what is already present.  This won't really play into the GSP field as much except that updates can be more easily shared.  

This next article is even more interesting though.  http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/jpmc-gopago-mobile-shopping/ is about new technology that will allow money to be transferred with a brief wave of two devices near each other.  The creators are also taking it a step further by becoming middle men.  They want to become a type of credit card company by putting merchants directly in connection with a bank so that you in essence can use your debit card for everything by swiping your iPhone.  Now this I think is a good thing to some extent.  I'm more concerned about the potential ease of access that either your phone could be destroyed or the data corrupted leaving you without a money source.  If this is done correctly, it could be the new credit cards and could heavily press credit card companies.  

The final article is on the new Samsung Galaxy Note http://www.wired.com/reviews/2012/02/samsung-galaxy-note/.  They acknowledge that the system is powerful.  It can do what most other touch screens can but it has a drawback, its large screen.  The Note is roughly 1/2 the size of an iphone added on to all sides while keeping the same thickness.  This means that in small hands, it is quite a handful and it can be hard pressed to fit in some pockets.  The stylus also has issues, in that while it works with most of the icons, anything android specific won't interact with the stylus reducing you to using your finger like everyone else.  This has been an interesting mix and has a potential to be a new version of a tablet/phone.  I think this will end up being more of a prototype though.  The overall design is still a little big and as technology advances, devices could keep the idea but do it better.  

Week 1: 1/2

This is the first week of a new class and for this one, I am studying the human interaction in an online environment such as an MMORPG.  The game in question is going to be Guild Wars, a fantasy game in a fictional world.  The intial idea had been to do Second Life, but after spending around 30 minutes in game, the UI, minimal tutorial and confusing controls proved too much and I moved on to a different game.

Within Guild Wars, I spent this first day mostly checking around different social hubs, both major cities and some of the outposts that are lesser visited.  Within these areas, the concentration of people was heavy, but the in game chat wasn't very active.  The majority of chatter was for trade purposes within these major cities.  The higher level areas had a lot of chatter, but this was almost all focused on getting a group, usually for specific events and usually searching for specific members.  The lower level outposts didn't even have this minimal searching and there was only a single party search every 5 minutes or so.

Where I did see a lot of chatter for a purely social gain was in the guild and alliance chat.  In these windows, people that were fairly familiar with each other talked back and forth and did everything from trade, social chatter, group seeking, etc.

All told, today proved to get a good grasp of where people tend to talk in game.  Until my next post, my goal is to try and get into groups and do some joined events that require teamwork to accomplish.