Guildmates.com

Blake from Guildmates.com asked me to have a look at his site. Guildmates is an online community for MMORPG players. You can create a profile, and list all the characters in all the games you ever played. And somebody who used to play with you in another game can then find you and see what you are currently playing, and thus maybe you can reconnect with old friends.

The idea is very good in principle. But it is a typical example of an application with a strong network effect: As long as there are few users, the application simply doesn't do anything useful. Only if tens of thousands of players would sign up for it, would it become really good. I sure would like to find back some of the people that I played Everquest with in 2000/2001, but it is highly unlikely that they are on that site. And if I would find them, they would most likely be on a different server than me, and one of us would have to change servers to play together. Multi-game guilds, while having other problems, are still your best chance of playing different games with the same people.

Another possible problem is anonymity. Once burned, twice shy, I'm not even mentioning my characters names on this blog any more. The last thing I want is somebody who flamed me in my last guild drama being able to find me on the new server I moved to. If somebody *wants* to play with me, he could always send me an e-mail, and then I can decide whether that person is somebody I want to tell my current server's and character's name.

But for people who don't have a multi-game guild, or a blog and visible e-mail address where others can always find them, Guildmates might be at least worth a try. As I said, network effect, the more people that actually give the site a try, the better it will work. The service is free, financed by harmless advertising. So go ahead, and check it out!