Jared Kim’s Weblog

More videos from the WeGame team:

• The Force Unleashed Preview
• Ninja Gaiden 2 Preview
• Metal Gear Solid 4 Preview
• Gears of War 2 Preview

Really looking forward to these games. Now if I could only find some time to play…

Hey all,

The Associated Press wrote an article about Stalkerati and social networks earlier this week and it had a lot of quotes from me. It got syndicated to places like NY Times, USA Today, BusinessWeek, and many many others. I’ve been getting a ton of e-mail regarding Stalkerati, so I just want to write a blog post that answers a few common questions.

• Stalkerati was a fun project that I made last year in May 2006. I pretty much stopped working on it by the end of June 2006 because I could not do searches on MySpace or Facebook after they implemented certain changes to their respective sites. However, even though I stopped working on Stalkerati in May 2006, I would still get sporadic interview requests from reporters every 1-2 months.

• Yes, I could have written a web crawler/spider to make it work on MySpace and Facebook, but I felt like it wasn’t really worth it. I don’t believe you can build a company that piggyback’s on another company’s data unless their is a formal way of doing it via an API or something. However, I consider Widgets & slideshow services a total different thing due to the fact they are not relying on user data that belongs to other companies. Therefore, they still have a stable market (unless MySpace wants to block them).
• I am no longer actively working on Stalkerati as of June 2006 (wow its been a year:). In January of 2007 I launched Yaqqer.com while in my freshmen year of college at UC Berkeley. In March 2007, I left UC Berkeley to start my 3rd company. I can’t say too much about what my newest company is going to do, but I can tell you that if you play video games on your PC, you’re going to (hopefully) like it a lot I have some awesome and experienced people working with me on this one, so I’m pretty excited.
• Yea, I know Stalkerati doesn’t work on Safari. If I remember correctly, it’s because Stalkerati uses the onLoad event on its iframes, and Safari does not support that event.

Hopefully that answers some questions. If you still have questions or just want to say hi, you can use the contact form on my About page.

I think every household should have a Nintendo Wii. I just got mine today and it’s been fun, even though I’m just playing alone. I played it once before with a couple of people and that was REALLY fun! It’s a great console for families and group events. People who don’t even play games will enjoy games like Wii Sports.

Sorry for the Sepia on the last two. It’s for Sepia Fight Club

Hmm, so China’s largest MMOG gaming company Shanda plans to launch a Second Life clone. They definitely know the market and demographic, which most foreign companies lack. With this knowledge + distribution network + their huge user base == i think will be successful chinese Second Life clone.

I was on Facebook today and saw this ad on the sidebar. It’s an ad for www.todayseducation.com. It was amusing enough to make me click

Just had my interview with TheCulturalConnect go live yesterday. Check it out!

Now that E3 is an elitist, invite-only industry event where game company execs get to schmooze with big media reporters in 5-star hotel suites, there isn’t a premier gaming event for the masses. I know, E3 wasn’t supposed to be for the masses, but that’s what it evolved into and everyone just has to accept that.

What do I propose? I propose someone starts E4: the Electronic Entertainment Expo for Everyone. Let everyone and anyone who is interested in gaming come! Bring back our E3! The main purpose for developers/publishers would be to showcase their newest stuff and get the crowd going “Ooooh, aahhh!” Also, this lets some of the smaller gaming publications and bloggers who don’t get invited to E3 a chance to play around with the upcoming stuff. A little extra press never hurt a game

I’ve been playing a bit of World of Warcraft ever since my classes ended. Lvl 52 Alliance Rogue on Spirestone if anyone plays

Currently, Blizzard (as far as I know)  has three streams of revenue from gamers:

• $15/month subscription to play
• $40-50 to buy the game (however, now you can just download the free 15 trial and pay $15 to upgrade without buying the game)
•  $25 for character transfer between servers

I think both Blizzard and players would benefit by introducing some more paid features:

• $25 - Alliance/Horde faction swap
• $25 - Character race change
• $15 - Character name change
• $15 - Character sex change

This is just coming from a player’s perspective. Obviously offering something like faction swap might create some balance issues in the game, but that could be fixed by instituting some limits.