Red's Ramblings v.2

Many of you know that I’ve been involved with ugvx.com for many years. You’ll be excused for thinking from the title of this post that its been a millstone around my neck. Far from it and I’d describe it as more of a labour of love. There is no denying though that it was in terminal decline but since I was happy to pay the hosting, I was happy for it to just ‘exist’ and be there.

I often considered what to do with the domain/site but always more pressing matters came up and again I left it to ‘exist’ but on one such occasion over a particularly large mug of coffee I pondered on why people had stopped using it and at which points along the timeline. Undoubtedly there were events such as the loss of XSN, the advent of the 360 and with it the integration of other services that tracked gamercards, achievements, Facebook, good old Usenet (particularly ugvm) and Twitter. So on comparing elements to the site to other communication mediums I was striking out elements of the site as unnecessary or done better elsewhere. It then occurred to me that the only remaining popular part of the site was the shoutbox. Being a big Twitter user I saw an opening. What is Twitter but a shoutbox on a big scale. But while there were obviously a lot of Xbox users with Twitter accounts (proven by the popularity of XboxTweet, etc) I wanted a way that I could see if anyone on my Friends List had an account. So this is where the idea of a searchable directory came from. But I still needed a way of grouping Tweets. The answer was to have a hashtag but for it to be effective I had to make it popular. That’s when I finally decided to call on @SDChown and pitch the idea. Maybe it was a bit selfish to wipe the site and create what could be considered a sandbox project but it was worth a risk. A few days of coding later and ugvx.com was launched.

Its still finding its feet. We’ve had unforeseen things such as flooding the stream with ‘AutoTweets’ of achievements and since its prompted a number of gamers to turn to Twitter they are still getting to grips with it so we are writing the rule book as we go. I quite like it like that.

Truth be known. I don’t visit the site much. I don’t need to as its doing its job. I have my Twitter clients tracking the #ugvx hashtag that the site has popularised. Either way, its nice to see something fresh rather than an old PHP Nuke site in its death throws.