I know this is going to get some groans, so sorry, but I was wondering, maybe Twitter shorthand (@name and D name) might be a good shortcut for talking to people in specific windows?
though this overturns the GNE social smorgasbord somewhat, it might be less intense and scale better to structure that panel to work more like twitter - with status updates from friends and status update based conversations. "chat" could then be IM and location based, with enough flexibility to connect multiple people in a conversation without having the entire world talking at once.
Awesomeness of chat and communication tools is going to be critical for our success, so we are listening and thinking and will invest heavily in making the awesomeness.
On this topic, I'm curious if you think actual in-game status updates would be useful? We have already planned for news-feed like stuff on your home page (and eventually available out of game), but that would be based on automated things ("Your friend Tom has made it to level 5.", etc.) but have recently been discussing explicit updates which would not appear as chat, per se, but show on your home and page and as growl-like notifications in the game.
"On this topic, I'm curious if you think actual in-game status updates would be useful?"
do you mean above and beyond the automated stuff you're talking about? if so, i'd say yes.
i'm thinking that the most useful use could be to send out a general invitation to all your friends to join in a certain activity.
"in hetchey building a tree fort - come help!"
"need a cook in ix to work with the sack of potatoes i just harvested."
"found an awesome new mini-game in nirvana."
i think these kinds of intentional communications and explicit invitations might spur more communication and interaction than an automated status stream with a lot more noise in it. plus they would have a bit more character and could evolve to fit unexpected new needs better than an automated system.
not that i'm saying an automated system would be bad or anything.
I definitely like the idea of a manual status update that's seen only by friends.
It would also be interesting if status/activity data was automatically posted to a different feed that anyone could pull (perhaps with some kind of granular privacy options). I could see that sort of thing also being really cool to incorporate into the API.
could be seen by friends only in order to reduce noise, though i wonder what kind of in-game status updates would require privacy. wanting to keep information about some cool new thing you found private to friends only, so random players couldn't exploit the find?
this is an idiotic suggestion, since visual style is clearly the area where glitch needs the fewest suggestions - if any. but i did a little mockup of how status updates could add some visual flair to the game by either using location as a visual background or having a badge representing the location the status update is coming from:
Noise reduction was my first though in specifying manual updates as 'friends only', although a twitter-like model might work best as far as following, tagging and @'s are concerned (so far the glitch social network seems to follow this line already, which is a good thing IMO). Support for @'s and #'s would then allow user specified panes to show specifically tagged updates from the global manual update feed, per the original poster's suggestion. It could conceivably also simplify integration with twitter and facebook.
I don't think that this game will attract many griefers, but privacy settings on the automatic feed could be a good first step in discouraging stalking/etc. (although ideally emergent solutions based on in-game mechanics would....emerge). It would also allow for planning of 'surprises' and other benign uses of sneakiness. I'm not sure how these mechanics would be incorporated into the mythology, or if they even need to be.
With regard to filtering 'finds of cool new things' and other such events from automatic feeds, perhaps the option to manually redact items from one's own autofeed (in conjunction with a short delay where items show up in one's own feed before the global feed) would suffice?
Also, I think that your 'geotagged' updates are a good idea.
"Support for @'s and #'s would then allow user specified panes to show specifically tagged updates from the global manual update feed, per the original poster's suggestion. It could conceivably also simplify integration with twitter and facebook."
i got so sidetracked with my own suggestions that i forgot to agree with the OP on this : [