CO-OPERATIVE: The PS3, 360, PC and Mac versions of Create allow level sharing via the Internet.
EA's UK outpost have revealed their pet project, Create, promising to provide a digital playpen in which families can club together to beat each challenge.
With a strong DIY aesthetic, players pick from a toolbox of props and objects, altering levels in order to clear a path for buggys, barrels, bikes and dodgem cars.
In some challenges, the chosen vehicle must make its way towards an obstructed destination - like the ooze in Pipe Mania or the cliff-loving mammals of Lemmings - and players work out how to avoid or use the items in its way.
In others, objects must be ferried safely to their destination by tweaking a makeshift transport.
Though popular web browser titles such as Wake The Royalty, Cargo Bridge and Transformice have already shown that games can integrate physics and engineering without losing a sense of fun, Create balances its challenge mode with a level creation suite that allows the construction and decoration of more domestic scenes.
A passing resemblance to two other well recent console titles that came with integrated level-editors, LittleBigPlanet and Joe Danger, may not be entirely co-incidental as EA Bright Light are located in the same city as LittleBigPlanet studio Media Molecule and Joe Danger makers Hello Games.
One key difference is that unlike those two PlayStation3 exclusives, Create is multi-platform, coming out on Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 as well as PC and Mac.
The PlayStation3 version also has Move functionality so that those with the console's new motion controllers can point and click just as on the Wii. Like LittleBigPlanet 2, it's targeting a mid-November release. - Relaxnews
Rumors that Google is building a new social network have persisted since late June, when Kevin Rose, CEO of Digg.com, posted on Twitter that the Web giant was working on a challenger to Facebook. The company's recent actions--its reported investment in Zynga, a social gaming company, and its acquisition of Slide, a company that makes various applications for social networks--have fanned the flames.
Credit: Technology Review
Google already owns several products that encourage online social interaction--including YouTube, Google Talk, Google Reader, and Blogger. But it has struggled to deliver a successful dedicated social networking service. Its existing social network, Orkut, has far fewer users than Facebook (around 100 million, compared to 500 million), and is mainly popular in Brazil and India. And the launch of Buzz, a social network built into Gmail, was botched after users complained that their privacy had been invaded. Google has acquired several promising social services, including the microblogging site Jaiku and the location service Dodgeball, only to hold back on investing in them.
Some argue that Google has failed to deliver the kind of overall experience people expect from a social network. "Google has never come out with any [social networking product] where the experience drove it," says Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, a consulting firm based in North Andover, MA. "It was always the technology and the engineering that drove it--the experience was sort-of layered on afterward."
Spool notes that other failed social offerings from Google, such as Lively, its foray into virtual worlds, and Wave, an experiment in online communication and collaboration, originated as side projects for the company's engineers. Spool says that it is hard for side projects to be expansive enough to become a fully featured social network.
Nick O'Neill, a social-networking industry expert who runs the blogs The Social Times and All Facebook, says Google is desperate to get more involved in social networking because Facebook is collecting commercially valuable information that Google can't access.
O'Neill says that sharing content with friends provides important data on users' interests and behavior--useful both for providing better search results and delivering more effectively targeted advertising. To maintain its dominance in both fields, O'Neill says, Google needs to hone its search results by considering a user's social connections and the information shared with friends. Google may believe it needs its own social network to get the best social information, he says.
Google's existing social offerings are scattered, and it will take a focused effort to pull them all together, Spool says. He thinks users will expect nothing less than a spectacular new product from the company. "Google has way too much baggage," Spool says. While users might forgive a startup social network for lacking features, they'll want any offering from Google to have full integration with Gmail, Docs, and its other products.
Google already has popular communication tools, and plenty of content being shared on sites like YouTube, Picasa, and Google Reader. It is also involved with OpenSocial, a system for adding third-party applications to social networks, and has FriendConnect, a service that lets websites add social features that allow users to interact with each other and pull in content from social networks.
But Google will have to tread carefully as it tries to gain traction against Facebook. "A social network only works with a social graph in place," says Spool, referring to the connections between users on a social network site. With Buzz, Google tried to populate its social graph automatically, using links between Gmail users. But the resulting backlash--as users felt their privacy had been violated--shows that Google cannot easily exploit the user data it already holds.
Spool compares Google's Facebook problem to trying to compete with a popular frat house party. Another group can try to get a better keg and a better band, he says, but if most people are still at the frat house, there's not much that can be done. Users need a good reason to switch to a new social service. Google may have been hoping that an innovative social service, such as the now-canceled Wave, which offered a completely new approach to online communication and collaboration, could draw users away from Facebook, he notes.
Facebook, meanwhile, has its own problems, and some of these could turn out to be opportunities for Google. Ben Gross, an expert in online identity, notes that Facebook and other social networks don't accurately differentiate between people's social connections, making their social graph information less valuable to users and advertisers. For example, social networks tend to put all of a user's connections into a single group of "friends," and expect users to manage complex privacy settings to sort out family, work connections, and bar buddies. "Social network services should not assume that networks are flat, or that people are willing to put in the effort to articulate these networks or that they even want to," he says.
They really need to hire some artsy design weirdos at Google if they want to stand a chance. I like the simplicity of their basic site but everything is fairly ugly from their docs through gmail.
Also, internally, different software groups members follow other members using their "buzz". So, some frickin idiot thinks "let's do that for everyone ... automatically". Let's see: I email students about research problems, my old Grad school buds about that those LSD experiments, my parents about their health, my kids about the homework and various business people about various business projects. Yea sure I want all these people mashed up together following my "feed"! That's the biggest WTF?! I've ever seen.
Given that track record, my bet is on facebook ... it is really stupid about how to categorize "friend" too, but it grew up organically that way and so everyone there puts on an act.
I do have use for something like Wave though ... and now it's "bip" gone. It was not communicated well, and their slow beta invites put me to sleep waiting until I forgot all about it. Hire some real product designers, preferably who can barely program. Steve Jobs is a nut, but where would phones be without him?
The employment situation in the United States is much worse than even the dismal numbers from last week’s jobless report would indicate. The nation is facing a full-blown employment crisis and policy makers are not responding with anything like the sense of urgency that is needed.
The employment data for July, released by the government on Friday, showed that private employers added just 71,000 jobs during the month and that the unemployment rate remained flat at 9.5 percent. But as bad as those numbers were, if you look beyond them you’ll see a horror show.
Government workers were walking the plank from coast to coast. About 143,000 temporary Census workers were let go, and another 48,000 government employees at the budget-strapped state and local levels lost their jobs. But the worst news, with the most ominous long-term implications, was that the reason the unemployment rate was not higher was because 181,000 workers left the labor force.
With many of them beaten down by the worst jobs situation since the Great Depression, they just stopped looking for work. And given the Alice-in-Wonderland way in which we compile our official jobless statistics, they are no longer counted as unemployed.
Charles McMillion, the president and chief economist of MBG Information Services in Washington, is an expert on employment and has been looking closely for years at the issue of labor force participation. “Over the past three months,” he said, “1,155,000 unemployed people dropped out of the active labor force and were not counted as unemployed. Even ignoring population growth, if these unemployed had not dropped out of the labor force, simple arithmetic shows that the official unemployment rate would have risen from 9.9 percent in April to 10.2 percent in July, rather than — as it has — fallen to 9.5 percent.”
Because of normal growth in the working-age population, the labor force increases by roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people per month. If those folks were factored in, said Mr. McMillion, “unemployment now would be even higher than 10.2 percent.”
We are not even beginning to cope with this crisis, which began long before the onset of the so-called Great Recession. The economy is showing absolutely no sign of countering the nation’s staggering jobs deficit.
“We have a large number of people who have just given up hope of finding a job,” said Mr. McMillion. He pointed out that there are record numbers — “I mean lights-out record numbers” — of long-term unemployed people who are still looking for jobs. Of the 14.6 million men and women officially counted as unemployed, nearly 45 percent have been out of work for six months or longer.
The Times’s Michael Luo wrote a moving article last week about the people who have started calling themselves the “99ers,” meaning they have been out of work for more than 99 weeks and thus have exhausted the absolute maximum in unemployment benefits. Nearly a million and a half people have been out of work for at least 99 weeks — and not all of them qualified for jobless benefits.
Said Mr. McMillion: “When you combine the long-term unemployed with those who are dropping out and those who are working part-time because they can’t find anything else, it is just far beyond anything we’ve seen in the job market since the 1930s.”
They may be thinking about this in Washington, but they sure aren’t doing much about it. The politicians’ approach to the jobs crisis has been like passing out umbrellas in a hurricane. Millions are suffering and the entire economy is being undermined, and what are they doing? They’re appropriating more and more money for warfare while schizophrenically babbling about balancing the budget.
At some point we’re going to have to claw our way out of this denial. With 14.6 million people officially jobless, and 5.9 million who have stopped looking but say they want a job, and 8.5 million who are working part time but would like to work full time, you end up with nearly 30 million Americans who cannot find the work they want and desperately need.
We’ve got more and more people in our working-age population and fewer and fewer jobs to go around. Mr. McMillion tells us that there are now 3.4 million fewer private-sector jobs in the U.S. than there were a decade ago. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the worst job creation record since 1928 to 1938.
We’re not heading toward the danger zone. We’re there. The U.S. will not remain a stable society if this great employment crisis is not addressed head-on — and soon. You cannot allow joblessness on this scale to fester. It’s wrong, and the blowback will be as destructive and intolerable as it is inevitable.
