Starting the GuildCafe Blog

First, let me answer the biggest question: why start a blog for GuildCafe?

First, it’s for our customers. One of the principles I want to imbue into GuildCafe is transparency. I think the best companies are those that align the interests of every type of customer, employee and investor. We’ll talk about new features here as well as our thoughts for the future—and share with you some of the thinking behind our business decisions. The voices you’ll hear on this blog will include not only me, but the people who are “in the trenches,” whether they’re writing code or designing pages or building our business strategy.

Second, I think the world of online gaming and the world of social media is a fascinating—and huge—intersection. The online gaming ecosystem includes technologies as diverse as the World of Warcraft Armory, Gamespy, OpenSocial, the Facebook F8 platform, Xbox Live, Vivox, and the numerous walled-garden social networks being created at number of videogame companies. As we continue to develop GuildCafe.com, we hope to offer some helpful insights and commentary on what these technologies mean to the game business.

Finally, it’s clear from my interactions with other entrepreneurs, Web geeks and potential investors that we have some interesting tidbits to share. As a serial entrepreneur and multiple-VC-raising-offender, I’d like to offer this as a lens into the growth and development of a new company. I believe the person who first asked me, “do you have a blog?” was Bijan Sabet, at an OpenCoffee several months back. As time has passed, others in the local Web community like Matt Douglas and David Laubner have encouraged me to get this started. There’s something stirring in the Boston consumer-Internet scene: one need only visit the local Web Innovators Group to get a sense of the growing excitement here. I hope to use this blog to document the life of a new company in our ecosystem.

Some of you probably have one other question about this: why not use GuildCafe’s built-in blogs?

It’s true. GuildCafe has its own blogging system. However, one thing we’ve learned that we’re not—and should never be in—the blogging business. We recently added a feature to GuildCafe that allows you to auto-import the headlines and content of outside blogs into profile pages, which was our tacit acceptance of the fact that many (or most?) blogs of interest to our community will come from outside the site. Over the coming months, we’re going to change the blogging system that’s built-in to GuildCafe to be simpler; more of a journal-system for keeping track of the fun things you’re doing within games, without all the clutter and complexity of the current system—we envision something somewhere between twitter and a real blog in terms of simplicity.

A lot of what our customer’s have used the GuildCafe blogging system for is to document the stories and experiences of games; take jonjonz’s blog as an example of someone who is using us to record the tales of their characters—or Shadow, who has shared lots of game reviews. We’d like to streamline the system to encourage our members to share these sort of stories and information, but do so in a way that’s easier, more structured, and more harmonious with the rest of the site. (And if you are keeping a blog on GuildCafe already—don’t sorry—your existing content will automatically become a part of whatever simpler system we end up with.)

NOTE: Because we used to store our press releases here using static HTML, we’ve backdated some blog entries for a few of the more recent releases.

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