Both GigaOM and Sciam have been reporting about the growth of the new Barbiegirls flash MMO game having a reported 3 million members growing at 50,000 new members a day but have they checked their facts? To quote Sciam:

Last night at the Digital Life preview a Mattel rep–who, just to make the conversation extra surreal, actually looked sort of like Barbie–told me that in the first 60 days of its existence, the new online virtual world Barbie Girls has signed up three million members, and they’re adding new ones at the rate of 50,000 a day.

Look at graphs by compete and alexa you can certainly see that there has been a spike in growth, but compare it to Neopets, Disney or even lesser web properties and it is left in the dust and I wonder where the 50,000 new member figures comes from, and how many are actually truly active? Just looking at the graphs demonstrates a pop in traffic since launch, but is nothing close to 3 million members. Or perhaps it has 3 million members but they’ve only signed up once and are gone, how many log in each day?

It’s traffic compares just about with Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post which I am sure does not have a readership equal to half of Hong Kong’s population (it’s english only).

I tried the game, I’m a fan of web games and even non-web games like Maplestory. The game is very underwhelming, and I saw at most a few hundred people online at any given time, I wonder if GigaOM and Sciam have bothered to try the game to see if it’s really that popular?

The game was incredibly underwhelming, and is a mix of habbo hotel, hompy and flash games but the only real community experience is the chat and it is enjoying the same kind of Second Life Hype because it’s supposedly focused to people like myself, young women but outside of the cute and stylish interface it has missed the mark, it’s not really fun, it’s mundane and gets dull easily because I cannot really play but above all it’s massively censored!

For a game that is supposed to be a kind of social chat, I cannot write anything without being censored! I was not writing swear words or anything like that, I would write “hello come visit my blog” and it would censor blog! It even censors common words like “but” (presumably because its close to butt) but I couldn’t even write confused! I tried c o n f u s e d and kon-f-us-ed and it wouldn’t work. Every brand was censored too, be it pepsi, sanrio, hello kitty, disney (kitty was censored too but not hello). In the end, I gave up in frustration as I could no longer bear how Barbieville was trying to reach me how to write. The image below is just an example, I promise I did not type anything rude!

A game that censors this heavily can never be a success in my view, we play to escape, we play to have fun, we play to enjoy a kind of freedom not experienced elsewhere. This game is 100 times more censored than my country (China) and for you western folks, that’s saying a lot.

Barbiegirls is going through a silot of hype and of course it’s still a Beta but if the Beta is considered almost complete I would be surprised that the community will continue to hang around for long, just chatting online in a slow flash interface isn’t going to cut it, we are not simpletons, we need more sophistication than this!

ps: Was this game designed by women for women or from men for women?

pps: There were a lot of people trolling around claiming to be “dudes”.

The New York Times reports on an earthquake in Japan.

TOKYO, July 16 — A pair of powerful earthquakes shook Japan’s northwestern coast about 14 hours apart, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 800.

Hundreds of buildings were flattened or damaged to some degree, including the world’s largest nuclear power plant, which suffered a minor equipment fire and a leak of a small amount of radioactive water into the Sea of Japan. The utility that owns the plant said the leaked water posed no environmental threat.

Thousands of people were left homeless by the damage done by the first earthquake, which struck at 10:13 a.m. on a national holiday in Japan. The quake, its strength estimated at 6.8 on the Richter scale, was centered off the cost of Niigata, a prefecture that was hit by a devastating earthquake in 2004. Skyscrapers in Tokyo, about 130 miles southeast of Niigata, swayed for almost a minute from the tremor.

Japan has always had a lot of earthquake problems, I wish for a speedy recovery to all affected!

Btw, how can radioactive leakage not pose an environmental threat?