6 hours ago:
Announcement! Double Fine and 2 Player Productions will use Kickstarter to fund an Adventure Game + documentary! Whoa. doublefine.com/news/comments/…
— Tim Schafer (@TimOfLegend) February 9, 2012
15 Minutes ago:
$407,470. I love you, world. Double Fine fans are the greatest fans in the whole world. Your gonna make me cry. :) :) :)
— Tim Schafer (@TimOfLegend) February 9, 2012
I’m always amazed of how fast these things can spread and reach the right audience. And there are a few things that make me really happy about seeing things like this:
1) It’s an amazing time for Indie Games. You can do great things – even in a niche like Adventure Games – when you talk directly to your fans and supporters. This changes a whole industry. I think we’ll see more and more success stories like Minecraft and this Kickstarter project soon.
2) It’s a real boost for the community. There are so many people who love innovative and unconventional games. Most of these titles wouldn’t be touched by a single publisher since they won’t reach the critical mass of titles like Battlefield of CoD. But with tools like Kickstarter and all the usual Social Networks fans can help the game designers to bring their projects alive – and even more important: Connect with their peers.
3) It’s easier than ever to get started with things like that by your self. All the tools are just a click away, technology can be picked up faster and simpler by the minute and costs are at an all time low. So it basically boils down to the most important thing to have: A good idea.
To make a long story short: We live in amazing times.
(Oh, and I backed this project of course – you should, too.)
A nice video by Ericsson. I always think that it is pretty obvious that we are indeed “On the Brink of a Networked Society” – so no news here. But I really enjoyed the video for all the different comments and insights from people like David Rowan (Wired UK), Caterina Fake (Founder of Flickr) and Eric Wahlforss (SoundCloud). Now throw some game stuff in as well (“Eve Online” in this case) and you got me hooked.
Twitter is trying to mitigate these problems by only taking down access to content for people coming from IP addresses the country seeking to censor that content. That’s good. For now, the overall effect is less censorship rather than more censorship, since they used to take things down for all users. But people have voiced concerns that “if you build it, they will come,”—if you build a tool for state-by-state censorship, states will start to use it. We should remain vigilant against this outcome.
(…)
So what should Twitter users do? Keep Twitter honest. First, pay attention to the notices that Twitter sends and to the archive being created on Chilling Effects. If Twitter starts honoring court orders from India to take down tweets that are offensive to the Hindu gods, or tweets that criticize the king in Thailand, we want to know immediately. Furthermore, transparency projects such as Chilling Effects allow activists to track censorship all over the world, which is the first step to putting pressure on countries to stand up for freedom of expression and put a stop to government censorship.
Interesting read and advice from the EFF about Twitter’s new method of “hiding tweets” (or, you know, censoring them). Over all it is not as panicked as my first reaction and even acknowledges some positive things in Twitter’s move.
I think what made me so upset the other morning, is the fact that from all the social networks I use, Twitter is the one that holds the most value for me. It’s a great tool and service and I don’t want to see it going the wrong way (and not allowing free speech – even based on a country by country basis – isn’t the right direction).
“No, it’s exactly like Pinterest.”
As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.
Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.
Really, Twitter? “Different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”? Call it censorship, because that’s what it is.
I understand that Twitter, being a comercial company, wants to grow and expand its service even in markets where free speech doesn’t exists or is very limited (think China for example) - but it is really sad to see that there is only one year between Twitter’s glowing “Fredom of Expression” blogpost and the one I quoted above.
Quo vadis, Twitter?
The new Vimeo looks gorgeous!
More recently Nokia has put out some quite noteworthy products. They are few and far between, but things are getting interesting once more. The top end of the Lumia series (particularly the Lumia 900 phone) is a package of both gorgeous hardware and a pretty cool interface. Nokia’s new route planner incorporates public transport data in ways far superior to Google’s attempts so far. The WebGL-based Google Earth-style Nokia Global Maps 3D is – despite limited geographies – fantastic, particularly for something that runs in your browser. (…)
It’s hard to tell if these positive hits recently have been more or less lucky or if they are the first manifestations of a larger change inside the company. And if it is a larger change, is it too little too late? We’ll have to wait and see. I just know that there’s something going on there that brought Nokia back on the radar – in all the good ways.
Oh, how I remember the headline: “Nokia Microsoft is like Yahoo Bing – Nokia’s days as innovator are over”. The day Nokia started using Windows’ Mobile OS as it’s main smartphone OS, everyone agreed that their days as a leading market force were over. They stopped fighting and let Symbian die – and with it all innovation.
Interestingly, as Peter notes, quite the opposite is true. It seems Nokia is re-focusing. And that is a very good thing.
