South China Morning Post yesterday broke news about how Facebook repeatedly deleted groups of political opposition in Hong Kong:

“A Facebook group with 84,298 members formed to oppose the pro-establishment DAB was deleted
Kelvin Sit Tak-O, who runs a discussion group that opposes the pro-establishment party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), said his group’s Facebook page was shut down without notice on Thursday. The group had 84,298 members and was aiming for 100,000… The closures could have been triggered by opponents flagging the group as “abusive” with Facebook administrators, Mr. Sit speculated. A spokesperson for Facebook was not immediately available for comment.”

As blogger Joanne Ooi cites:

“‘Apart from my own group, I’ve heard that other groups with an anti-DAB message have also been closed. We’ve written complaint letters, but we’ve only received standard replies about how [Facebook] is working on this case,’ Sit said. …
Kelvin told me that although the original page is still down, he relaunched a new page, which has already hit 50,000 members since it launched 3 days ago.”

Hong Kong’s DAB is a pro-Beijing political party. Party leader Ma Lik denies the Tiananmen massacre, as Wikipedia has it.

Hong Kongers have always seen themselves as China’s last bastion of free speech — it’s sad to see how this is jeopardized by Facebook’s supposed anticipatory obedience.

We have updated the gallery of the development blog of our upcoming MMO Coobico with a bunch of new screenshots of our current alpha version — take a look after the jump.

The year is nearly over and it’s time to show our gratitude to everybody following our work on our upcoming MMO Coobico so faithfully; thanks, especially for all the encouraging comments and emails. As this years small Christmas-goodie we’ve been hurrying up to finish one of the mini-games to be included in Coobico: Metes & Bounds is a clever little tile-laying game, where players expand the borders of their territories turn by turn to claim the largest lands for their fiefdom. Its still got a few loose ends which are going to be added soon, but we challenge you to find your personal highscore in solitaire-mode or by playing against the computer. If you like the game, please make sure to bookmark it and help us to spread the word. Metes & Bounds will also make its appearance on Facebook, we will keep you posted.

A new ruling on software-patents by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) was sending shockwaves through the internet during the past few days. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick describes: “court has said that there’s a two-pronged test to determine whether a software of business method process patent is valid: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable… Well, it may take some time to digest, but it’s likely this will be appealed to the Supreme Court, so that process may take a while.”

It’s an interesting and lively discussion which left me with the impression that it might be too soon to be too happy about the ruling–after all, the according laws are not changed but interpreted differently. If the ruling will really and finally be reaffirmed by the Supreme Court, the industry of virtual worlds and social networks would also be affected–as Mashable’s Adam Ostrow rightfully points out: “In essence, the ruling means that business ideas in and of themselves aren’t patentable. In addition to Amazon’s “one-click” patent, which is the concept of purchasing something via credit card by just clicking a single website link, Friendster’s patents on social networking also come to mind as being unpatentable based on this judgement.”
The Jaipuria-patent (currently held by LinkedIn, as far as I know) and the Friendster-patent belong to the most powerful patents in terms of social networks. They protect features like automatically setting up somebody you’ve invited as your buddy, or graphically displaying the degree of separation between two members.

In the case of Coobico, we tried to discover and circumvent relevant networking-patents like the Friendster-patent. E.g. our invitation-procedure is currently designed like this: you invite somebody, who subsequently sets up his/her new Coobico-account. Both of you then receive a message asking you to accept each other as buddies. It’s just one example which shows that it’s possible to come up with reasonable (and reasonably different) user interfaces when facing software-patents.

Recently I sat down with Worlds in Motion to talk about Coobico’s latest technical milestone, the nuts and bolts of the game and casual gaming in general. Read the interview after the jump.

With our first screenshot-gallery out of the door, some may have already recognized something from the shots: Coobico is going 3D.

When development of Coobico started more than 15 months ago, the social game was envisioned as a pure 2.5D tile-based game, in the ballpark of Habbo, Dofus and the like. The power of Flash CS3 was quite unforseeable at that moment, let alone the development of 3D powered by Flash. Fast forward to summer 2008, a lot of really incredible 3D-frameworks have sprung up in the meantime: open-source solutions like Papervision, Away3D, and Sandy3D, as well as commercial products like the really outstanding Alternativa Platform (kudos!).

Since Coobico should be poised to push the envelop of flash-gaming, we finally made the (not entirely easy) decision to scrap our codebase and project-plan and port everything to Flash-3D. Some visitors at our blog already seriously asked when Coobico is going public, since the original beta-release date was set to April. The answer is, that the past 3 months kept us busy switching to 3D, rewriting most of the codebase, editing artwork, creating new maps and textures, just to name a few things, and the work is not finished yet. A new release-date will be issued as soon as we have adapted our project-plan.

What does all this mean to the game itself? Everything will stay pretty much the same: Coobico will still be playable in Flash without any additional client-downloads. It will still be completely free to play. But its new 3D-capabilities now allow for zooming in and out of a scene, as well as turning around a building freely before placing it. We feel that this is a great improvement to the gameplay and makes exploration of the island much more exciting.

Now this really too cool — today Google finally offers an API to its language-tools – it was about time. A certain kind of translation to Coobico’s chat-interface was planned all along, and after pondering for quite a while on the actual realization, we decided to use some kind of automated approach, translating chat-bubbles among players with different language-settings on the fly. There were quite a few free, open-source, unofficial solutions available during the past years which could be queried against Google’s translation page or Yahoo’s Babelfish (and of course the occasional premium services). Now, such hackerish approaches tend to break too easy, so it’s a relief to see Google’s translation APIs finally going live, featuring all languages of Coobico’s prime markets: English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese. While it is not sure yet if such auto-translations will already be a part of the closed beta, they will definitely be added further down the road.
Enough development-chitchat, back to work!

Today, Mashable, probably teh world’s largest blog on social networks, features Coobico’s development:

“Although every MMO is, in fact, some sort of social network, many companies are trying to find that special niche where gaming and social networking meet. Coobico is, as the founders say, a mix of casual MMO (casual, in the realm of MMOs, usually means that you don’t have to leave your family, quit your job and spend the rest of your wretched life living in a tiny apartment, permanently hooked to the screen, to be successful in the game) and a social network. It’s Flash based, it’s free, it’s part strategy, part RPG, and it’s coming out in the first quarter of 2008.”

Read the full article after the jump.

Newly released MMO-Blog Worlds in Motion, part of CMP Media, recently wrote an article about Coobico: Getting Casual with Coobico. This week we sat down with editor Leigh Alexander to talk about the peculiarities of creating a casual MMO for a non-teen audience:

“‘More’ is the typical game-industry’s approach to everything: more levels, more graphic power, more customization and even moreso, intertwining features. Here is a lesson that the game-industry can learn from the Web 2.0-world — less is more, really,” Winter opined. “Less is what a casual audience of above-30-year-olds are looking for. They don’t want to waste their time and money on upgrading graphic-hardware just to play Crysis in all its beauty. They are looking for some thirty minutes of ease and challenge besides their working-life, their family and hobbies, instead of spending endless hours of grinding in an online-game.”

Communities are the key to online worlds, Winter says — and the current community within MMOs currently reflects, he notes, the industry’s “max-out principle,” where the learning curve to fully engage in the virtual society is steep. “This doesn’t mix well socially with the casual market,” Winter says. “Such social discrepancies — almost like culture shock — are among the biggest shortcomings of recent multiplayer-products.”

Read more at Worlds in Motion: Linking People’s Lutz Winter Talks Casual Adult MMO

Spieletipps, a large german gaming-portal covers Coobico and its development (in german only):

“Knuddels, Habbo Hotel oder ChatCity - die Auswahl an Chats und virtuellen Welten ist in den vergangenen Jahren enorm gewachsen. Allerdings richten sich die meisten an Jugendliche und junge Erwachsene. Genau diese Marktlücke will das Unternehmen Linking People Ltd. nun schließen. Mit Coobico erscheint Anfang 2008 ein kostenloses Flash-basiertes Multiplayer-Strategiespiel, das besonders Gelegenheitsspieler im Alter von 30 bis 44 ansprechen soll.”

The full article is here.