Napster Founder Builds WOW Social Networking Program
Back in the early days of the internet there was a little program called Napster, which caused quite a stir. At the time Napster seemed like the wild west of piracy. It was the last hurrah before everyone realized that there are consequences for pirating any kind of file through the intertubes. Shawn Fanning was the mastermind behind Napster, and launched the peer-to-peer file-sharing phenomenon.
Now he’s back and developing a social networking program for World of Warcraft. BusinessWeek Online is reporting that Fanning is working on Rupture, “a virtual community for online gamers.” He came up with the idea from his own problems communicating with other WoW players.
Fanning plans on using data pulled from WoW, to post stats and info on your own personalized Rupture page. Players can track the progress of their guild members easily. Also, there will be instant messaging available, so players within guilds can communicate easily.
The project will be funded by ad revenue, so it will be free of charge to everyone. Fanning plans on opening Rupture to other MMOs in the future.
If everything goes as planned, this should be pretty huge. Napster was a phenomenon, because of Fanning’s ingenuity and ability to organize a slick and easy-to-understand interface. I imagine Rupture will do pretty well. There needed to be some kind of MySpace for WoW, and other MMOs. I can also see this becoming a super nerd dating service. Hey, nerds need love too, you know.
Check back in with Rupture.com within the next month or so, after the site officially launches. The site is in a closed beta right now, but it should launch soon.
Napster founder targets WOW for next project [Gamespot]
Toots
Posted to Video Games on 4 December 2006
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: mmo, mmorpg, myspace, rupture, shawn fanning, social networking, wow
I think I’ll start my own social networking community for Second Lifers, called “Hemorrhage.”
I’m trademarking Aneurysm™.
P.S. Who cares if Shawn Fanning is involved? That’s, like.. The opposite of hype.
Please, that boy built peer to peer networks. Without him, where you get all of your software, from the store? I hope you enjoy your copy of Adobe Photoshop, must have cost you a dime or two.
He also gets his PR department to roll out a press release every time he takes a shit. Good on him to be the first to finish the idea; it’s not like HOW TO SEND FILES OVER THE INTERNET was a real puzzler.
Sidenote: I seem to recall OTH.net and scour.net indexing ftp’s long before. There was also the big bang of AOL massmailing/serving and private warez/mp3 rooms. If, you know, you were around for that. :)
I don’t use Photoshop, either, bruh.