What About Mashing Up Communities!!?
Noticed this on TechCrunch, and it immediately got my thinking juices flowing.
Essentially, EA has acquired an online singing community called Singshot!
Now, if you're like me, you look at any acquisition of a social network in a slightly Machiavellian light, and for me, this presents an interesting opportunity for EA... and Microsoft (remember the disclaimer on the left hand side, my opinion not that of my employer!!!!).
So, this is how I would play this out if I was the top chop at EA. I would take the Singshot vehicle, I would rope in a bunch of music publishers, build a game for XBOX Live, called Singshot for XBOX Live, which enabled you to:
1. Buy single songs as soon as they are released
2. Compete with friends on XBOX Live to see who is the best Karaoke singer
3. Compete in online singing contests with other XBOX Live Singshot singers all over the world
Essentially, I would take the existing Singshot community and introduce them with a whole new XBOX Live community, and see what comes of it. You could almost call it a Social Mashup! Yeah!
While I'm on the topic, I've also always wondered why XBOX Live doesn't support the ability to create "Crews". For example, say if I'm a big GOW player, and I have some mates from work who play GOW with me. And say they want to hook in some of their friends who play GOW, into a kind of GOW crew, or support the six degrees of separation practice of socializing contacts with similar interests.
I'm not talking about having my friends provide all their friends details to me, but more, I want to be able to say to XBOX Live, expose my details to my friends friends for GOW only.