Comments on: Bindings and Ties: Community Building Within Home

By: Nos

Nos — Sat, 14 May 2011 16:05:40 +0000

Indeed. Better clubhouse functionality and features need to be created and implemented, no doubt. We have been asking this since the beginning. But it must go beyond that. To the level of community. Home clubhouses and their functionality are less than lacking.
Homelings began in the closed Home beta. It was not long after Home opened to the public that our external pilot community was developed. This was a momentously significant and pivotal point in Homeling history.
The nature of the Collective demanded more from a website than what homelings.com originally had to offer. Ning seemed to be able to provide that “community” feel and some decent functionality, and so we migrated to fluidicspace.ning.com. It was the website, playstationhometoday.com that aided in that decision. At the time Ning sites were free of charge, and remained so for a time. We will soon be going on our 2nd year paying for Ning if we decide to stay there (which we likely will for another year), but Homelings have outgrown Ning, and indeed the restraints of conventional websites. We require more creative freedom.
Hopefully, the next year will see the birth of a unique, fully customizable, and interactive Homeling community. An interweb base with features and functionality that will more than fulfill Homeling requirements, both known and unknown. It will not only be Home-positive and promotional, but Homeling Friend accessible to a great degree. It will also be more “visitor friendly” for the curious.
The next wave of Homeling Collective evolution will be like nothing the Home community at large has witnessed, and nothing Homelings have experienced.
We are the product of imagination and ingenuity, and are therefore, without limitation.

By: Burbie52

Burbie52 — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:22:38 +0000

Excellent read Gideon. I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of the situation we find ourselves in right now. I created my website during this outage for the express reasons you detailed, the ability for my members to stay in contact, even if it is only to leave messages for each other. I love the idea of the bulletin board. I have had to send numerous messages since my club started and it would surely simplify it. I actually did what you spoke of and wrote down each persons name in each clubhouse so I could send those messages out to the right ones. You made several great points in this one, good job.

By: SealWyf

SealWyf — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:50:22 +0000

I hope the Home developers read this one, post it on their bulletin boards and send it around the office as email. There are so many things that could be done to improve social functionality, such as the brilliantly simple idea of sending a club bulletin-board post as a PM to all club members. (Bravo!)

Some changes will require deep mods to the PS3 operating system: real email, for instance, which can be routed to and from the Internet. A much larger Friend List, with the option of assigning friends to groups, and addressing mail to all members of a group. A text-editing system, with the ability to capture the Home chat log to a file, edit the file later, and attach it to a note or copy it to a USB drive.

Other changes will require updates of the Home core: the ability to own more than one clubhouse, and to belong to more than five clubs. (This is a constant headache for club-active Home users.) As you mentioned, there should be a more efficient way to find gaming partners in Home — that’s what the platform was built for, or so they tell us. Visibility and follow-ability should be made more granular. Constant emotional drama is one of Home’s native features, and sometimes you just don’t want someone to be able to come to you, without actually unfriending or blocking them.

It would be interesting if Home could build hooks into external services such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. I’m not sure what this would look like, but it could really add value to the social dimension of Home. There are hints of this in the Twitter feed in Sodium Hub, but a lot more could be done, especially if Sony can solve the legal issues of streaming YouTube videos into private spaces and clubhouses.

Oh, and picture frames in clubhouses, please. I know I sound like a broken record on this one. But it’s one of my crusades: bigger and better art shows!

Thanks for posting this, Gideon. I’ll see you in Home soon, I hope.

By: gamereaper218

gamereaper218 — Fri, 13 May 2011 07:54:15 +0000

great article and very true