Summary

And here we are, at the last post of the project. Before I get into the summary, here are the three comments I made on classmates blogs:

Harmony Dashut's NoteBase

http://notebase.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/week-1-social-networking/#comment-7

Sarah Schuster's Charities Connect

http://imanentrepenuar.blogspot.com/2011/09/blog-post-1.html

Amilcar Hoefdraad's Musician Networking

http://musiciannetworking.blogspot.com/2011/09/introducing-my-idea.html

Okay! With that said and done, lets move onto my final thoughts on OmniEXP.

I suppose its a bit my fault that the project idea hasn't evolved a whole lot throughout the course of the semester. When I start thinking about concepts, I get obsessive about fleshing them out as much as I possibly can before I present them, so by the time I had made my initial post I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted OmniEXP to be and the general direction I was going in. Its also my fault that, being a rote niche social media site, there wasn't a whole lot of room for peripheral content, as in content that applies to the variety of lectures delivered throughout the course.

To be fair, there were some pretty intriguing lectures that got me thinking about implementation issues that I hadn't previously considered. The web protocol lecture got me concerned about SSL encryption, the input/output lecture informed me of the wonders of RFID, and the operating systems lecture reaffirmed my faith in Linux. So its not like there was absolutely no progress.

Overall, I like to think my experience with this project has been a good one. I'm my idea's biggest fan, and would love to see someone a lot smarter and more business-minded than myself implement it. It got me thinking about technology in a more proactive way, not just as something to utilize but as a tool for precognition. The next idea is out there, and any one of us could be the next Jobs or Zuckerberg or Google Hive Mind.

This was a triumph.

Web Protocols

At last we come to a lecture of the week that is relevant to OmniEXP. As a singularly web-based endeavor, web protocols play a huge role in how OmniEXP conducts its business. I think that specifically I'm going to want to talk about SSL, and then maybe briefly get into domain names and the role ICANN plays.

So first off, lets discuss SSL. OmniEXP's website would definitely employee several instances of SSL overlapping the HTTP protocol. First off, OmniEXP is a website that allows for the creation of distinct and, more importantly, secure personal accounts. So right off the bat, you want the account registration and account log-in process to be SSL encrypted. Otherwise, it would be pretty easy for ne'er-do-wells to monitor the unsecured traffic and pick out people's account information, which could lead to instances of griefing and even identity theft.

Another key point of SSL encryption would be in the event that inputting your gaming data from other sources requires some sort of account authentication process. I'm not precisely certain how it would work, but lets say someone wanted to attach their Steamworks Achievements to their account. Obviously we wouldn't want them manually inputting their scores, both for the sake of convenience to the end user and also fairness to everyone, in the event that certain parties might fudge the truth on their actual statistics. So we would want to interface with the Steam client to access their information, which might require the use of SSL encryption in the event that the user has to provide any account specific information to our end in order for us to facilitate that data transfer. We don't just want to protect our users' privacy as it pertains to our site, but their privacy as it pertains to the web.

Finally, I suppose we can talk a bit out domain names. We would definitely want to snag a '.com' domain, as nothing screams successful venture quite so much as that suffix. Hopefully www.omniexp.com would be up for grabs. If not, then we'd have to figure out some way to buy that domain or file some sort of complaint if that didn't work out. Worst case scenario, we'd either go with a different web suffix or a different venture name. OmniEXP was just sort of the first thing that popped into my head, I'm not beholden to it.

I don't think we would be interested in ICANN's new suffix initiative. As cool as .game might be, I think it would only serve to cause unwarranted confusion among our customers. Maybe if the program was more widely adopted in the future, we'd consider throwing down the capital needed for it, but at the moment I don't really see the point to it. Its an utterly useless initiative up until the precise point that competition demands it not to be.

Operating Systems

Unfortunately we've come upon another week of lectures that don't conveniently apply to the OmniEXP project, but we're going to have to make do anyway. So this week I'm going to discuss about operating systems as they apply to the project. The way I see it, there's really only two major ways that I can think of that OSes really fit into the OmniEXP concept, those being a) what OS our web servers will use and b) OSes as they apply to mobile devices. I'll take about both of those, and then briefly discuss open source software and how it can apply to OmniEXP.

So, first off we have our web servers. The three major players in that field would be Windows 2008, Apple OS X Lion Server, or some form of Linux. As far as cost effectiveness goes, Windows 2008 is by far the most expensive, costing several hundred dollars. After looking it up, I found that Apple's Lion Server was surprisingly cheap at only 50 dollars. I didn't do enough research to know if this was just a bare bones basic version or not, but if its comparable to Windows 2008 then thats an amazing price difference. Finally, Linux is open source so that would obviously be the most cost effective, although I didn't research whether or not there are professional versions of Linux server OSes that are distributed at cost, so that price comparison could be slightly false. As far as utility and effectiveness goes, from what I can tell it seems as if Windows 2008 or some form of Linux (likely Red Hat or SUSE) are the two major players in the server game. I'm honestly not sure about Apple, mainly because I've never really heard of a server running OS X. I would assume that's because of performance inferiority, but I am unsure.

Second comes mobile operating systems. As far as this relates to OmniEXP, I'm mainly thinking about app development. It pretty much goes without saying that the two big dogs are Android and iOS, so both should be prioritized as far as development goes. With the smartphone industry as cutting edge as it is, and with the emergence of the tablet market, there is a high level of potential for OmniEXP's growth in these areas, and should not be overlooked. I am hesitant about the concept of pricing structures for an app of this nature, it seems to fly in the face of what social media is about, but if the project were to theoretically blow up, one might consider exploring something like a premium option.

Finally, lets talk a little bit about open source. I don't believe it would be in OmniEXP's best interest to go open source. Like all social media endeavors, the project would be successful only if it provides a unique and entertaining user experience that can't be found elsewhere, and handing out our source code to anyone who asks only invites potentially fatal competition. My major concern here is compatibility with open source applications, namely open source browsers. Nothing annoys the techie quite as much as something being incompatible with their browser of choice, and considering the debatable fact that open source browsers are so far beyond proprietary browsers, we should make every possible compatibility accommodation that we can to these services without compromising our product.

Blog Review: @Rotolo Blog

Choosing the subject of my blog review was kind of a no brainer for me. The blogger had to be a well known professional in either the IT or entrepreneurial industry that correlated to my social media concept, so who better than Syracuse University's own Anthony Rotolo? In the past two years, Professor Rotolo has accomplished so much in both the realms of social media technology and entrepreneurship that one could equate the quickness of his rise to the explosion of the Web 2.0 movement.

I met Professor Rotolo for the first time about two years ago, back when he was the Instructional Technology Manager at the iSchool, a position James Powell currently occupies. I had been peripherally aware that he also "taught a course or two" and that they were "pretty interesting", but at the time I had been going to a different college for a different major, and it wasn't until I transferred into the iSchool this semester that I fully grasped his meteoric rise to academic stardom.

Professor Rotolo is an Assistant Professor of Practice at the iSchool, teaching Social Media on the Enterprise and Star Trek in the Information Age. In 2009, he was appointed Syracuse Univesity's Social Media Strategist, a position that previously did not exist, and within two years had brought Syracuse University to the forefront of collegiate influence upon social media, placing number two in the country according to Klout. Rotolo is also a co-founder of enormo.us, a company that specializes in social media consulting, interactive design, digital video and animation.

His blog, @Rotolo, mainly follows his experience teaching his courses at Syracuse University, and is used along with a multitude of other social media tools to aid in teaching the course. But there are also a variety of posts made about the social media industry in general, and Professor Rotolo seems to have a unique grasp on both the industry and really the culture of the social media landscape that allows him a measure of authoritativeness over the field.

Were I to implement my entrepreneurial project, I believe that @Rotolo Blog would be an absolutely vital resource to determine the do's and dont's for social media, coming from a reliable source that really understands the industry. The URL for the blog is: rotolo.syr.edu

Input/Output

This week I decided to speak about input and output and the ways that it might be incorporated into OmniEXP. I think that RFID chips are a promising field of technology that could find their way into improving the overall experience of the social media project.

Unfortunately RFID readers are still in a state of being fairly expensive for purchase, but once that price drops I can easily imagine RFID readers being installed in local video game stores in order to track OmniEXP users and perhaps even provide them with reminders and updates as to what is going on in their local gaming store. Sort of like foursquare for gamers.

I know foursquare has gotten along just find without RFID tracking, but considering how seriously certain individuals take online competition, having something as stable as RFID tracking really ensures a high quality experience for each and every OmniEXP. In other words, it cuts down on the hacks.

Hardware

I'm not really quite sure what to talk about this week, so I hope you'll excuse me if this post ends up being a little brief. Neither lecture can really directly apply to my project, so I chose to speak a little bit about hardware, because it at least peripherally applies. As far as machine requirements go for OmniEXP, the most intensive aspect would definitely have to be the servers. The project is entirely dependent upon a high degree of web traffic in order to be successful, so we need to ensure that our servers are up to the task.

Now I don't know a lot about servers (yet), and the lecture for week three didn't really go into this area of computer hardware, so I won't pretend to have any idea what I'm talking about in this regard. I do know that, to progress this idea, I would have to learn quite a bit about servers or at the very least hire some people who do. We can work on design aesthetics, we can work on functionality, but if the site is never up, we're not going to last.

As far as work nodes for the actual project, we're not looking at anything too intensive. Maybe one or two truly high power machines for the sake of the designers. If it takes off, we might look into increasing the amount of aesthetic design that we put into the website. The more we try to evoke this feeling of gaming in the consumer, the more we would need a graphics heavy website. But we want to marry that with raw functionality. We don't want the consumer to need a high end machine just to be able to load the website efficiently.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much all I have to say. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of hardware in developing a successful social media website, but unfortunately I simply don't know enough about the type of hardware most critical in order to provide a more concrete output of thought.

Social Media & Privacy

I realize that last week I chose to write about social media as it pertains to OmniEXP, but I felt as if I would do the project a better service if I chose to write about the follow up lecture on Social Media Privacy rather than the other material, because it really pertains to OmniEXP in such a strong way, the project being a hypothetical social media website, as well as because privacy is such an important subject both in the realm of social media, and in the realm of video games. Just this past year we saw evidence of that with the attacks on the PlayStation Network and the devastating consequences it had not only for Sony but for third party developers developing for the PlayStation 3 and, really, for the industry as a whole.

The internet is a scary place, especially the portions filled with bored nerds with too much free time and eager for quick thrills. Unfortunately, that also happens to be the key target demographic for OmniEXP. So one might be able to understand why taking these bored, vindictive, anonymous nerds and setting them loose in a social media population also filled with innocent regular folks might raise some concerns, to say the least.

To compensate for this, OmniEXP would have to feature very robust privacy settings that allow for a lot of customization. We still might want to allow people the option to allow public access to more personal information such as full names, locations, etc. But we should make it very clear to people from the get-go that putting yourself out there in such a way carries with it very real risks, and maybe even configure the settings so that individual users have the opportunity to opt-in to those settings, instead of opt out.

Personal privacy is a hallmark of the gaming community. If you're not gaming on your own or with your friends, chances are you're gaming with total strangers masked by non-specific handles, with almost no other information about them. The gaming community has been very slowly moving towards a more social atmosphere, with voice communication, user profiles, and friends lists, but OmniEXP wouldn't be a gaming website if we didn't keep that option for near-anonymity available for the end user.

Introduction & Social Media

My entrepreneurial concept is OmniEXP, a website that serves both as an aggregate for several utilities already in place that video game developers and publishers have designed to allow end users to track their scores and progress, as well as a sort of social media hub for avid gamers.

The project would take data from as many reputable sources of gamers' personal progress as it possibly can. These sources include such preexisting entities as Microsoft's XBox Gamerscore, Steam's Steamworks achievements, and the PlayStation Network's Trophy System, as well as other lesser known repositories and any future databases of such information. Once this data has been compiled, OmniEXP would use a homebrew algorithm to generate an aggregated score, presented in the format of an experience bar, and present this detailed data to the end user via their profile on the website.

The second aspect of OmniEXP specifically pertains to the lecture given the week before on social media. The website would serve as a niche platform for interaction and networking between avid gamers that share similar interests. The website would take its compiled data and utilize some sort of mechanism for matching people with those that have similar taste in games, as well as allowing for the option of becoming friends or perhaps teammates with friends that you already know, allowing you to compare your similarity rating.

Although I haven't worked out the specifics as of yet, my hopes would be that a sort of gaming component could be integrated into the experience tracking system, to provide the end user with more of a reason for browsing the site than just when they want to track their progress as gamers. In some format or another, it would ultimately be feasible to compete, against friends or strangers with similar tastes, or even perhaps alongside them in groups against other friends or strangers. I still haven't quite worked out specifically what this competition might entail, or how it could be implemented, or even what level of persistent engagement it would demand from the end user.

Regardless, the website would allow for end users to communicate with one another, either via micro blog format or a comment system, keeping others up to date on the specifics of their progress with whatever game they're playing, as well as to provide ratings of certain games, and even perhaps the level of enjoy-ability pursuing achievements or trophies in specific games and to provide recommendations to their friends.

The revenue stream would likely be advertisement based, likely in the format of small, out of the way advertisements that don't diminish the experience, a la Facebook. At launch it would likely be an entirely free system, but pay options such as a token system or even subscription based would be an option to be considered for the future, depending upon the popularity of the site and whether or not premium content would be feasible and arguably worth the price.

I would like for the design format to be very evocative of a video game itself, perhaps in the form of a heads up display, or some other hallmark visual system of video games. Perhaps collecting played games into a sort of "inventory", or other nuanced touches that make the end user feel as if they are still gaming even on the website.

Thats all I've got for now. More in a week!