While trying to catch up with all kinds of geek/techie/gaming news today, I found this article at TwitchGuru about the XFire instant messenger/gamer tracker. After reading the article, I’m actually a little surprised to see how popular XFire is. I used the program about 3 years ago, maybe even 4. Perhaps I just didn’t have enough gaming friends to appreciate it, but I didn’t find it particularly useful or in any way more outstanding than ICQ/MSN/AIM/whatever. That said, I can see the usefulness – maybe I got in too early to benefit from the unique twist XFire offers.
If you haven’t tried XFire, and you have a lot of gaming buddies, try downloading it and using it. Once installed, you can see what game someone on your buddy list is playing. You can get stats on your buddies. You can use the program to send snapshots if you see something in-game that makes you think you just have to grab a picture. I may even install it and try it again.
How fast has Xfire grown? On average, nearly 300,000 new users register and download the software each month, which means Xfire adds approximately 10,000 new customers every day. Xfire has become so hot so quickly that Fortune Magazine’s David Kirkpatrick recently wrote that Xfire “could be the next MySpace.” It’s an accurate comparison. The best way to think of Xfire is as a combination of a social networking site and an instant messaging platform. In addition to allowing users the ability to text message or voice chat with other Xfire members, the software allows users to create an entire online community. “We wanted to find a better way for people to interact through video games and be able to communicate with one another,” Fong says.
[tags]XFire, Instant Messaging, Social networks, gaming[/tags]