I attended the first BayPay meeting at Stanford yesterday. The meeting room was full and presentations were, surprisingly, not boring. There were enough people from all sides although I think more merchants needs to join so we can hear their perspectives.

Anyhoo, I can't talk about what I heard at the meeting but I came away with the feeling that I could hang with this group for a while.

I don't know about the size of his head but John Cowan is great with tagsoup. Howdy John!

It's nice to see another XML-DEVers blogging. It's also sad to see XML-DEV traffic dwindle and its whispers becoming increasingly arcane or irrelevant as time goes by.

Kids shouldn't be playing in the streets yet they do despite what we tell them. When a car runs over a kid playing in the street, what should the parents do? Spank the kid and let the driver go because kids shouldn't be playing in the street? IMHO, this is what happened with Google Web Accelerator (GWA) and Signal37's web applications.

So what should we do? Throw the driver in the slammer, warn the kids again, put up roadsigns and speedbumps. Alternatives are break every kids' legs so they can't play in the streets or turn roads into playgrounds.

Update:

See RFC 2616, Section 9.1.1.

I've been thinking more about ways to fix BzzAgent. Well, it's not really fixing because I have not taken into consideration how much I could bend it without breaking it. I've just taken the core idea and tried applying it different ways. For now, I am going to talk about just one of the ways.

BzzContest

The idea here is to turn BzzCampaign into BzzContest among BzzGamers who compete for BzzPrizes. Control elements are divided into game rules and hints. BzzGamers win by gathering enough BzzPoints to be the top N players. Pro-bono campaigns are launched by having individuals and corporations donate prizes.

As to the exact form of the contests, it's could be a signup contest, variations of scavenger hunt, funniest video contest of people singing product jingles, or some new wild games like flashmob (i.e. get people to show up at Best Buy at a specific time). Just add a suggestion box and I doubt there will be a shortage of contest ideas that just happens to promote whatever.

As long as the contests are fun, rewarding, and not creepy, it will create buzz and attract marketers.

I've heard about the idea behind BzzAgent a while back and thought their idea was a pretty interesting one. But it wasn't until the recent controversy over BzzAgent helping Creative Commons that I've looked closer. Just visiting their website was enough.

I don't know what they were thinking but their website seems to me as if they intentionally designed it to creep out visitors who are not marketers or mindless freebie seekers. Simply unbelievable. The only possible explanation is that they let their Bzz get to their head which made them blind to their mistakes.

Unless they review and overhaul their overall strategy, I am afraid whatever gain they make will be at the expense of their reputation and the status of BzzAgents not much higher than door-to-door salesmen.

What are you, a BzzAgent? BzzOff!

Wow. Gamespot reviewed Guild Wars, a new MMORPG from ArenaNet, and gave it a 9.2 out of 10 points. World of Warcraft got 9.5 but WoW charges monthly network fee ($14 if I remember correctly) where Guild Wars don't. And it looks great. I am gonna have to avoid driving near Fry's for a while because I just don't have the time to swing virtual swords regardless of how shapely the lass ahead of me looks.

BTW, ArenaNet is a division of NCsoft, a Korean game company, where Richard Garriot the Lord British also works. NCsoft is obviously not just playing around.

I've been missing the World of Warcraft, so I took a trial dip into EverQuest II. EQII is a stinker when compared to WoW. I didn't particularly mind the long time it took to update the trial client but the first real gripe was that the view into the 'world' was not full screen like WoW was (visual suffocation). And the overall graphics as well as the UI sucked. Was it my imagination or did EQ2 felt more like a 3D version of Sierra Online's King's Quest games? Phew! With EQ2, Sony flushed their previous dominance in the MMORPG business down the toilet. They just don't get it and I doubt they ever will.

On the other hand, Blizzard needs to work hard to keep the players they have. For people like me, they should allow players to deep freeze characters, meaning I should be able to suspend my account for months without abandoning characters. While playing WoW, I raised enough characters to be tired of doing it again. I tried most of the quests appropriate for level 50 or less players and tried no less than ten race/class combos so I am not going to feel good returning to WoW if I had to start all over again. Besides, how much storage would it take to deep freeze a character?

Blizzard seems to be responding to user feedback though because I've heard that they are now allowing players to move characters between servers. I would have been happy if they allowed that only for level 60 characters. They should also introduce 'rides', meaning events characters can pay money to participate in. They should be highly controlled (dungeon masters!) and as fun as rollercoasters yet each one as unique and unpredictable as life on the edge can be. I think they don't even need to pay those dungeon masters. Let the dungeon masters pay to grind strangers into the ground. But then I don't think they are that smart. They are smart enough to beat the pants off Sony but not enough to make players scream with joy while spilling gold, minute by minute.

Tired of mobile developer blues?

Try building your app for your ideal mobile device and then bundle it with the device and necessary connectivity. Then release a new version every 1-2 years to leverage latest advances in hardware.

Don't sell it to teenagers. Sell it to small business owners who need weapons to compete against the online onslaught. Read my handblogging post if you are short of ideas. Think barcodes, RFID tags, customization, availability, and relationships. Aggregate metadata collected by a national network of application-specific mobile devices.

If this trail of thought doesn't make you shiver, try farming.

Happy Birthday, Big Dave!