For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Hello Kitty Online MMO has started an interesting event called "be nice to a newbie".

What was interesting in this event was how new players suddenly got great offers for their gear, and many were saying how this was "much harder", I thought this was really interesting that buying equipment from new players was considered tougher by some than actually questing for some difficult items which can take many hours to complete.

For those who know the game, watch the details in the chat text, 1000 dollars for T-shirts, trading level 9 wands for level 1 wands etc., it’s great to be a newbie in HKO right now, click the image to see it expand (to see the full sized screen if you want!)

The below is the redemption line, it was the end of the line, the entire line I could not capture from my position as they were redeeming their items for quest fulfillment, it was pretty funny and interesting.

So on my first day inside HKO, trying out the game, the first order of silliness was lining up and taking a group photo as below, so we all lined up, and everyone took group pictures.

Some players referred to it as the reason they liked HKO, the little things like this which are so different from other mmo’s in the social aspect of gameplay. What I found interesting is the time (and length) everyone was prepared to invest in a fun group activity that simply had no benefit to gaining levels, money, status or otherwise. It was just for fun and that’s what Hello Kitty Online is about now isn’t it?

This is a phone camera shot of the Autobild 1 Event in Geneva.

Very cute video blog introducing Hello Kitty Online from a user experience point of view and introducing the game element, well made entry.

Here is a screenshot of a bunch of people building a house together in a social setting in Hello Kitty Online, in this case the house is almost finished but it takes many hours to finish it as a group, and days if you do it solo! Here 5 of us are constructing the house together, after having gathered the necessary resources, people would work together to collect materials and then put them to good use in constructing the house, which can then be decorated inside.

That’s right everyone, the 23rd of April is the opening date, so even if you get your package today or a few days ago, you won’t be able to play until the 23rd! Can’t wait to see the results of this!

Judging from the Google News coverage of the Hello Kitty Online Game the web is clearly abuzz about this latest MMO from Sanrio Digital.

The headlines range from “Move over Warcraft, Hello Kitty is here” to “A world full of love and free of hate”, it is quite amazing to see the levels of interpretation Hello Kitty can deliver to people who both know her, love her, and well “dislike” her.

It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out, in the meantime you can enjoy the official website of http://www.hellokittyonline.com

According to Techcrunch Yahoo 360 is being shut down.

Although I don’t quite agree with the statement that "nobody noticed" but certainly very few people in the Blogosphere with influence appeared to care which is probably the more relevant statement, because certainly Yahoo users (of which there are a lot) do care a LOT about their data and have raised concerns/comments etc. on this. We shouldn’t forget afterall that something "small" in Yahoo terms is probably still huge for most other organizations and companies.

The Yahoo blog states:

Many of you have asked if Mash, Yahoo!’s experimental profile service, will replace Yahoo! 360. We know this is an important question for many of you, and even more so given this news. We don’t have all the answers today, but we are testing solutions, including Mash, in order to provide a more integrated universal Yahoo! profile throughout the Yahoo! network.

The only thing I found interesting is that an announcement to "transition" Yahoo 360 doesn’t come with an actual coherent, this is what we will do, approach. Letting customers guess and be concerned about the continuity of the service is never a good thing, even if they assure them that data will be "kept". As of the time of this posting there were 1,554 comments on the Yahoo Blog related to this and a quick glimpse appears to reveal that most of the users are not interested in change and like it the way it is, others just appear to want to have bugs fixed and not anything new. I’m curious to see what they will do with the "new" Yahoo Social Network.

I’m at Heathrow airport checking for books and in the top 20 section, there were 4 books all about child abuse and child betrayal with jarring subject titles such as “please daddy no” and “the ultimate betrayal”, “don’t tell mummy”, I didn’t realize it was such a hot topic here…it’s sort of depressing.

This led me to some other thinking which is, why is bad news so popular? It’s popular everywhere, in the news (bombs, explosion, death and destruction), in gossip magazines (divorces, fits of anger, temper, outbursts), and now even in the bookstores it’s filled with a variety of disturbing topics.

As a parent this is very bothersome for me, because all the books up until a certain age are all about a wonderful wonderful world, colorful and happy and then it all seems bad news after that. I cannot imagine telling my 2 year old about what is in the news but it’s all over the place, on the web, on tv, radio etc., it’s impossible to shelter him and it would probably be wrong to do so anyway.

If an Alien landed on planet earth, and read our news he’d think this was a horrible place….but that’s simpy not true! If you count how many good things happen to you in life, I would wager they out do your “bad” things unless you live in Iraq or one of those war torn places.

We take what we have for granted, what would someone in Somalia give for how someone in a safe place (I don’t even mean rich, just safe) where there was no War and you had food on your table. This is happiness to them, but many take that for granted. A good meal is happiness too but how many people rejoice about the good food they had, or that they even had food? How many people truly cherish their relationships, their families or their friends? Newspapers don’t sell if the headline is “a happy family”, we crave for this bizarre sensationalism of “big news”. Is it because we are not able to enjoy the happiness of others and can only be made to pay attention on the eve of disaster? That would be sad indeed, but the world cannot truly be that pessimistic, because if it was, we would not know how to laugh, smile or enjoy anything. Being sad cannot exist without being happy and we must have many moments in the day that make us happy, we just don’t realize it. It could be a small victory, a success, an achievement, some good news, no matter how small or unimportant, if it pleases you it’s positive, it’s some form of happiness.

We take happiness for granted, we really shouldn’t. If we can learn to appreciate what makes us happy and enjoy it more I’m sure the world will be a better place.

Google finally responds by denying all that what Viacom accused them of which I posted a bit about before.

 A fairly complete report exists here. I don’t think anybody expected Google to just sit back and take it, certainly not when Viacom is looking for a billion dollars in damages.

The outcome of this (which no doubt will take a long time) will be an important case study and it will put into question many issues on the internet once again like the Grokster, Napster and Kazaa cases. The difference here is that it’s one company (albeit a very large one) vs. an entire industry (eg. the MPAA) and Google/Youtube has examples who are partnering and licensing content with other companies such as the BBC.

The bigger question to me however is the point I previously made, and that is that I don’t think this is just about Viacom feeling violated. It’s about defending its original way of making, producing and ultimately controlling content. The good news is that the particular Video in question is finally back up and posted again, but the damage was already done and this particular Video probably benefited from the recent release of Final Fantasy in the US!

A recent study indicates that less than 10% of YouTube’s popular videos are actually due to copyright materials. This is significant and potentially galling for the likes of Viacom because it may prove that this type of content is far more popular than they themselves are willing to accept and could potentially turn their existing industry upside down. Of course the study may have it’s inaccuracies but the point is that unlike the previous P2P cases, YouTube owes much of it’s success from these new creations due to the availability and low cost of making such productions and that is a very powerful and relevant statement.

I hope this case will also make the point that the little guy with the big idea will continue to be protected.