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Insomniac Is Making A Facebook Game Called Outernauts

Rowan Belden-Clifford, Insomniac Games talking to The Verge:

“I consider myself the core audience of previous Insomniac games AND of Outernauts,” he says. “I’m 23 years old, and I play both console games and Facebook games, as does my roommate and many of my other peers. We as a company are as excited about reaching a huge new audience on Facebook as we are about satisfying our hardcore fans.”

Contrary to stereotypical gaming enthusiast beliefs, I think it’s a good thing that Insomniac is setting out to make a Facebook game. I’d love to see someone make a “legitimate” game on Facebook if nothing else but to prove that it can even be done. If there’s anyone that can pull that off, it may as well be one of the best console development studios in gaming today. Playdom’s “Avengers Alliance” came close to creating a Facebook game that isn’t a glorified progress quest, but missed the mark with its terrible shoehorning of “social” mechanics to bottleneck progress.

Knowing how that turned out, I’ve got some heavy reservations based on Insomniac’s partnership with EA (whom we all know love to microtransaction/DLC their games to comical levels), and the fact that the description of “Outernauts” in the piece make me visualize “Pokemon” and “Farmville” having inappropriate relations.

Still, count me in for at least seeing what they come up with.

via Insomniac Games explains why Facebook is the place for its new ‘hardcore’ RPG Outernauts | The Verge.

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ExtensionFM Becomes exfm: An Extension That Makes The Web Your Social Jukebox

I’ve had this installed on my browser for the longest time, but haven’t had time to really discover music with it yet. Part of the problem is that a lot of music isn’t in mp3 form anymore – it’s embedded in some flash media player for streaming purposes. If they could somehow make this work for ANY music on the web, I think we would have the new world order.

MG Siegler:

The Twitter integration is really killer because if you have the extension installed, you can listen to music shared via exfm inline on the new twitter.com.

Read: ExtensionFM Becomes exfm: An Extension That Makes The Web Your Social Jukebox.

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Ten Reasons Why Ping Is Currently Useless To Music Fans

It just goes to show how accomplished a salesman Steve Jobs is with his introduction of Apple’s iTunes-based social music network, Ping, this past Wednesday. From the way Jobs presented the service, many people felt Ping was the future of music consumption and interaction, calling it a “Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, <insert internet juggernaut here> Killer.” In fact, I believe my initial reaction during the presentation could be paraphrased as “gave me an erection.”

It turns out that all anyone got out of Ping so far was a severe case of blue balls.

If you’re a music fan and you’re wondering if Ping is worth your time, it’s not. You’re much better off with Pandora or last.fm right now. They offer music discovery options that make Ping look like BP of music sites. Don’t bother signing up if you don’t have an iTunes account. If you are already signed up, I guess it couldn’t hurt to opt in to reserve a name/profile just in case Apple improves the service, but no one would blame you if you didn’t care.

In it’s current incarnation, Ping is utterly useless for music consumers and here are ten reasons why:

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