In the past few days we’ve been experiencing some technical problems when trying to retrieve PlayStation Network Trophy data to update member’s profiles. These problems are due to changes from Sony, and we are unable to fix the issue until Sony makes a change on their end.

We are reaching out to Sony in hopes of fixing this issue, so that we can turn on the PSN Trophy tracking that many in our community enjoy. Until then, our Trophy Tracking will not work.

Sorry for the inconvenience, we’re hoping to fix this issue ASAP!

Thanks,
Sam “QforQ” Houston
GamerDNA Community Manager

We’re giving away a $25 Amazon Gift Card to the winner of contest we’re running right now on GamerDNA.com.

All you have to do to enter is make a game post or activity that lists the Top 5 games that were most influential to your gamerDNA. Make this post and link it to us on the designated game post (linked below), or send it to us on Twitter, and do all this by 5pm EST Friday October 9th – and you could win!

For the complete rules and information, please check out our contest page on GamerDNA!

On October 6th we will be making some changes to how Nudges work on gamerDNA.  Please continue to read on, as we describe what Nudges are, what changes were made and why we did them.

Nudges…what are nudges?

A Nudge is a way of letting your gamerDNA followers know about cool stuff on gamerDNA. This “stuff” could be any sort of content on gamerDNA, whether it be a Game Post, Game Activity, or Screenshot that you added to gamerDNA (or someone else added), or even a Status Update or Video on gamerDNA. You can Nudge someone by clicking the “Nudge” button on the page for that piece of content, or you can Nudge other members when you’re adding content to your gamerDNA. Every time a Nudge is sent, a member receives an email from gamerDNA

Here is an old screenshot of how you would Nudge other members when adding a Game Post or Game Activity to gamerDNA.

Nudges were built into gamerDNA when we originally had a Friending Model, meaning that you requested a member’s friendship on GamerDNA and they had to approve this connection. Due to the nature of Friending, the connection between the two members is much more personal, and therefore gives you some more permission to do things like contact one another when you do cool stuff on the website.

Now that gamerDNA has a Following Model, meaning I can follow you without you approving that follow or even following me back, we need to change how Nudging works. We also have new systems that suggest Followers to new members, along with features like your Member Homepage and the Spotlight section, both of which help your content be discovered by the gamerDNA community. Due to all of this, the purpose of a Nudge has changed and we need to change how the feature works to reflect all the recent changes to gamerDNA.

So..what is changing?

Until the upcoming patch (coming this evening, October 5th 2009), a member could Nudge everyone that is following them on gamerDNA.  This could range from one person, all the way up to 500+ people all receiving Nudge notifications in their Alert Box on their Member Home, and all of those 500 people receiving emails about this Nudged content.  Many new members of gamerDNA don’t know why they’re receiving all these emails, and the problem can become much bigger when a member is receiving multiple emails a day from the people they are following.  This is obviously a problem.

With the newest patch to gamerDNA, we now have made a limit on the total number of Nudges that you can send out at one time.  Now, instead of being able to Nudge an unlimited number of people, you can only Nudge up to 50 gamerDNA members at one time.  The “select all” button has now been changed to “Select first 50″, meaning that it will select the first 50 people in your following list.  This list is ordered by the number of Nudges each person has received from you, so that when you select the first 50, it will select the 50 people that you have Nudged the most.

This is a screenshot of the new nudging interface:

Why did you do this?

We have several reasons:

Nudging needs to be a bit more personal in nature, instead of an easy way to mass email all of your followers on gamerDNA.  Our goal for this feature is that a member would use it to notify their followers of something truly special, something that doesn’t happen all the time, or something that is so awesome that it has to be seen.  To date, Nudging has turned into more of a mass spam button, which doesn’t make a Nudge as significant or special, and diminishes the value of the feature for both members involved.

When we launched all the new features on gamerDNA on September 2nd, most of the features were focused on making content discovery and having conversations, as easy as possible.  Your Member Homepage has the gamerCURRENT, which streams in everything that your followers are doing on gamerDNA, and the Spotlight feature will surface interesting content from the gamerDNA community every day.  Both of these features help your followers keep up with what you’re doing and talking about, and both of them work without a single Nudge being sent out.

This isn’t the last and final “fix” for Nudging, or the intended purpose of Nudging.  It’s also not a fix or replacement for how the gamerDNA Community has been using the Nudge system to date, and the conversations that we’ve had internally at the gamerDNA Office have brought up various ideas for better solutions for keeping your followers up to date with things that you think they should check out.

If you have any feedback on this change, we ask that you let us know by using our Feedback Page or by posting below in the comments.  We know that not everyone will be happy with this change, but we ask that you be patient with us as we figure out the best solution, and please give us your feedback so that we can know what your concerns are with regards to Nudging and content discovery.

From the entire GamerDNA Team – We thank you!

-Sam “QforQ” Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

Last week we asked for your questions for the 2nd Edition of the GamerDNA Townhall, and you guys came through big time!  We took all of your questions and answered them in the Townhall that we filmed on Tuesday.  We broke up the Townhall into 10 minute sections, with each video having a theme of questions.

Below are all the videos/segments:

Segment #1 – All about the new content/comment systems

Segment #2 – Questions related to the new gamerDNA Profiles

Segment #3 – Questions about features that we have mentioned/discussed in the past

Segment #4 – Questions and Requests for new Features

Segment #5 – Townhall Wrap Up, with questions about new features, community, and gamerDNA as a business

We appreciate and are thankful for all the questions submitted by the community. We look forward to doing more of these in the future, and we encourage you to stay tuned to our blog for more updates from gamerDNA!

Thanks,

Sam “QforQ” Houston

gamerDNA Community Manager

Hi Everyone!

Now that we have the big launch under our belts, we will be back to more rapid and periodic updates to the product. Here is a full list of the changes this week:

• Added individual trophy detection and display for PS3 users. Now when you play PS3 games and you get a trophy, it will actually display the name of the trophy and a description of it. You still have to make sure your trophies are synced up to your account by going to the trophy section on your Ps3 dashboard.

  

• Added a new profile background called Shooter #1
• Added sub navigation to the profile button in the upper-right navigation.
• Increased the loading performance of the member home page by putting the expansion of all gamerCURRENT items behind a loading process. We had issues where really large discussions (300+ comments) were slowing down the intial loading of a member’s home page as well as the NOW page.
• Cleaned up the game data on a variety of titles.
• Fixed an issue in the quiz counts that was reading the incorrect number.
• Made additional performance enhancements to the games gadget on member home.
• Fixed a bug that was preventing you from unsubscribing to various conversations, so that members would still receive alerts.
• Fixed a bug in the content display that was causing long text strings to not break correctly.
• Fixed a bug where If you exclude a specific type of alert (say, nudges) from a specific user you would miss alerts from other people.
• Worked on some issues with trophy counting for PSN.
• Users can now delete their status. There is a delete link on the display page.

  

• Add some buttons to make posts/gameplay/media when you view your own personal game page.
• Fixed some out-of-date links on the game pages.
• Fixed the layout of all the static pages on the site to use thenew templates.
• Xternal Vids and Xternal Images are now visible in the game activity RSS feeds.
• Added paging to the follower and following modal popups.

Thanks for your support through this site transition. We are excited by all the great usage and participation and are looking forward to our next few releases.

We will be broadcasting live the 2nd edition of GamerDNA Townhall tomorrow, Tuesday Sept 15th at 3pm EST.  Last week we asked for your questions, and in this Townhall we plan to address as many as we can for the video.

We will also be recording the video, so if you can’t watch it live – Don’t worry!  We will have video up later in the week for everyone to watch, so if you miss the live broadcast just make sure you stay tuned to our blog for updates on when the video is up for viewing.

To watch the live stream, please click “Continue Reading” below, or go to our uStream page. See you tomorrow at 3pm EST!  (To see what time it is at the GamerDNA offices right now, please check out the Boston page at TimeAndDate.com)

Cautionary Disclaimer: We plan to stream the show live in its entirety, but if for some reason our internet drops and the video broadcast stops – there isn’t much we can do.  We *will* have a recording up to watch afterward, though.

Join us in the chatroom below!

League of Legends is a Free to Play game on the PC that is getting a lot of buzz, and we would like to give you the chance to win a beta key for the game!

All you have to do is check out this screenshot of the game, and join the conversation. We want to know what you think about the game.  Have you played it?  What do you know about the game?  Are you excited about the game?  Let us know what your thoughts are!

Join the conversation by leaving a comment on the image post, by Sept 11th, 2009 at 4pm EST, and you could win One of 25 Beta keys for the game that we’re giving away!

So make sure you check out the screenshot and leave a comment right away! (Click Here to go to the screenshot)

Good luck!

Sam “QforQ” Houston

gamerDNA Community Manager

Disclaimer:  Leaving comments on THIS blog post does NOT enter you in the contest.  The comment needs to happen on the image page on gamerDNA.com!

This past week we officially announced the launch of the new gamerDNA.com and subsequently we received some press about all the new features.   We had some great articles, and we’d like to highlight them here so that you can check them out!

Kotaku – “Gaming Social Network Launches Revamped Site”

Mashable – “GamerDNA is like FriendFeed Meets Pandora for Gamers”

Big Download – “GamerDNA relaunches with new features”

VentureBeat – “GamerDNA launches major upgrade for gamers social network”

Fast Company – “Five Incredibly Entertaining Niche Social Networks”

GamerTag Radio Podcast – “GamerDNA Interview & NHL2k10 Q&A” (skip to the ~25 minute 20 second mark to hear the interview)

SideQuesting – “GamerDNA launches updated website”

We thank everyone for the great write ups and interviews.  We’re very excited about this new launch and the gamerDNA community has taken to it well.  We can’t wait to launch more features to make things even better!

Thanks,

Sam “QforQ” Houston

gamerDNA Community Manager

Today gamerDNA has officially announced the launch of the new gamerDNA.com. We’re very excited about this launch, and it has been great to see everyone’s response. We’ve got plans for more features to come this fall, so stay tuned to the blog and we’ll keep you up to date!

Here is our YouTube video, demoing the new gamerDNA.com:

Click Read More or Scroll down to read the Press Release for this launch:

GAMERDNA LAUNCHES NEW SYSTEM TO SIMPLIFY YOUR GAMING UNIVERSE

Harnessing massive amounts of real-time game-play allows gamerDNA to create a highly personalized experience around a member’s unique gaming tastes

CAMBRIDGE, MA – September 2^nd, 2009 – GamerDNA today launched a new system that enables the site to react to a person’s distinct gaming preferences. Game-play activity is one of the many data points that construct a powerful preference engine, or “gamerDNA,” for every member. The engine works to deliver a real-time stream of gaming content, conversations, and games that are tied to a member’s interests.

“Millions of gamers go online every day to find new games to play or read up on games they’re excited about. Gamers are faced with an overwhelming amount of information and content, making it extremely difficult to find out about all the potential games they would enjoy,” said Jon Radoff, CEO of GamerDNA. “GamerDNA’s new system takes information from conversations and actual game-play trends to help gamers find the information they really care about.”

New members are now presented with a wizard-like process that quickly gets them up and running. Connecting their account to popular gaming networks supported by gamerDNA– including Xbox LIVE, PlayStation Network, Steam, Xfire, and Web-based gaming networks– makes the continued work of refining their gamerDNA effortless. When a member plays a game that’s reported by those networks, their gamerDNA account records that activity.  A member can choose to have their game-play activity distributed to their followers on gamerDNA, as well as the popular social networks Twitter, FriendFeed, Tumblr, and Facebook.

GamerDNA members can now follow games and players to create a real-time stream of gaming content and conversation. This keeps a member informed of what their friends are playing and discussing and what’s happening in the games they’re most interested in. Every piece of content, including reviews, videos, images, trailers, and all sorts of community-generated content, is a pivot for conversation and is enabled with sharing capabilities that allow any visitor to distribute the content to their social networks. This new approach acts as a means to help members discover new games and content in an authentic, meaningful, and relevant manner.

About GamerDNA, Inc.

Without a software download or installation, gamerDNA connects to a member’s favorite gaming networks and automatically creates a personalized experience that delivers gaming content that gamers care about most, every time.  For more information, or to sign up for a free account, visit www.GamerDNA.com.

GamerDNA is led by online media and interactive entertainment veterans in Cambridge, MA. Additional company information is available at: http://blog.gamerDNA.com/about/

The biggest consumer game show in North America known as Penny Arcade Expo is this weekend, and we’re very excited about it! Seattle PAX this year looks like it will be a lot of fun, and we’ll be there at the show!

GamerDNA’s Community Manager, Sam Houston (that’s me!) will be at PAX all weekend and he will even have some gamerDNA swag to give away.  Sam will be at the show wearing a gamerDNA shirt, so he should be fairly easy to spot.  Here’s a picture to help you out:

Sam is on a panel on Saturday at 1:30pm at the Unicorn Theatre, and we would love to see you there.  A special bonus for attending will be receiving a gamerDNA Sticker, which Sam is handing out after the panel.  Here is the description of the panel:

Saturday, 1:30pm – 2:30pm, Unicorn Theatre

Twitter and Beyond – New Game Communities Online

Online game communities are changing rapidly as social media is being used more and more by gamers. No longer are people primarily congregating on official game forums. They’re talking with each other on Twitter, Facebook, and in other types of online communities about games. For this reason, Community Managers are actively leveraging social media tools to keep online communities informed and engaged with their games. This panel will discuss the exciting transition of game companies using social media to build, communicate with, and engage with players as well as highlight the macro-trends that impact all online communities. Panelists include executives from both the game development and social media side of the fence.

Panelists Include: Michelle Broderick [Moderator] – (Marketing Director and Community Manager, Yelp.com), Morgan Romine (Fragdoll Team Captain, Ubisoft), Jaap Tuinman (Director of Social, Community, & Online Marketing, EA), Sam Houston (Online Marketing Manager, GamerDNA), Meghan Rodberg (Senior Manager of Online Community Relations, Turbine)

If you see Sam outside of the panel make sure you “hey” when you see him.  He will be giving out gamerDNA stickers all weekend to community members, and it would be great to meet members of the community!  Here are the new gamerDNA stickers:

I hope to see you at the show, it should be a lot of fun!

-Sam “QforQ”  Houston

gamerDNA Community Manager