Sign into Web 2.0 (or 2.x?)

(tags web, networking)

My old college buddies ditched the old-school college mailing list and went 2.0 with Facebook. Actually in the interim we had other Web 1.x social networking but I never got into it (in fact I forgot even the names). Now I have a Facebook account but it doesn't have my real name on it. Robert Scoble noted that it was a closed garden like America Online, so I tried out Friends Feed. It's a ghost town for me. I might even try Twitter, har har.

I even tried out OpenID, or well I had to because I was posting at a programmer oriented site, Stack Overflow. The latter is pretty and web 2.0-ish, with up to the minute comments and corrections. I've learned a lot from the people posting over there, because correct answers with useful examples bubble up. Regarding OpenID, I like the idea but the implementation still is one click too many. I log in with "http://yahoo.com", which is pretty sweet. Still I want to put my own domain name as my login.

But yeah, I recently dug up my installation folder for the Doom series, using the open-source OpenGL-based PrBoom. It looks decent on my Asus EeePC "Project Tama". I have all the IWADs (Doom commercial assets) collected from my old purchases. I was nostalgic so I looked up Doom and Quake on Wikipedia. One thing led to another and now I'm joining Dennis "Thresh" Fong's new idea, a gamer-oriented Web 2.0 social networking site called Raptr.

This Raptr is PC visible, but collects information about your PC and console gaming. It automatically checks your games and status on Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. For example, by telling it my Xbox Live account info (no password), it showed that I have 40 games on the Xbox 360 (do I get Achievement Points that?!) and that I last played Gears of War 67 minutes ago. Now all I have to do is tell it my Steam account for PC games, etc. Of course World of Warcraft is linked in too. There's even a PC client that promises to update my PC games automatically (opt-in, of course), but I don't need that yet. I want to get one friend onto this network, so lets see how that goes.