TriXie Interviews 360voice.com

Here's what my Xbox 360 had to say yesterday:

My Xbox 360 has something to say each day … and sometimes it's mad at me! I absolutely love 360voice.com so I had a chat with Xbox MVP and Xbox Community Developer Program member Fatty Chubs, who with his buddy ChangeAgent created this popular and always entertaining website.

TriXie: 360voice.com is such a unique idea—can you walk me through some of the brainstorming that went on between you and ChangeAgent?

Fatty Chubs: ChangeAgent attended the O'Reily Emerging Technologies conference where he heard a keynote about blogjects, futuristic objects that write blogs about their interactions with the world and other devices just like humans write about their interactions with the world and other people. After a quick discussion we both quickly realized that the Xbox 360™ was the perfect technology to try this on. We are both big Xbox® gamers and with the XCDP feeds it was a natural fit for us.

TriXie: Once you had the idea, how long did it take you to complete it? How did you divide the work?

Fatty Chubs: I had been working on processing the data feeds, all the good data that is displayed on your gamer card and your gaming history. So I do all the boring back end stuff that involves the data and getting it into the database. That was pretty much up and running when we came up with idea. ChangeAgent took that and did a proof of concept in about a day that put some random sayings around the data. After getting some immediate press on that, we cranked out a full version in another day or two.

The roughest part was the following weeks. Since we wrote the code so quickly it really wasn't optimized for the thousands of users signing up. We spent the next month or so rewriting the entire site and eventually having to move to a dedicated host to keep up with all the processing.  

We are constantly adding new features and have a long list of to-dos. We come up with new ideas and try and add them every week. We also try to incorporate any feedback we get from people who write in and we answer every e-mail.  

TriXie: Were you a member of the Xbox Community Developer Program when you started this project, or did that come after?

Fatty Chubs: Yes, I was member of the XCDP before; I got in working on couple of blander projects, but quickly switched focus to 360voice.com. ChangeAgent joined the XCDP after the site was launched.

TriXie: How has being part of XCDP helped or hindered the success of 360voice?

Fatty Chubs: The site wouldn't be possible without XCDP. It has also helped a lot to have other members to talk to; there are a lot of talented folks in the community that are very willing to share ideas, code, and experience. It has been a great experience, and a great resource.

TriXie: I see that you have over 40,000 users, congratulations! What sort of media attention have you had? Can you share any links with us?

Fatty Chubs:We were Nelson'd which we think is one of best links you can get if you are in the Xbox world. We are also proud to have been Dugg. The HardOCP guy has mentioned us in his blog a few times and he quickly shot up to the most viewed blog, even above Major Nelson. We always mention the sites that link to us in our Development blog, as we are generally fans of those sites and it's great they enjoy our site as well.  

Since I mentioned it, on our main page is a development blog. We post about all our trials and tribulations with the site, any press we are getting, and all sorts of goodies. We are very candid in the blog and respond to any comments that are left by our readers. We like keeping in touch with the community and this is our way of doing that.

TriXie: Who writes the hilarious blog posts?

Fatty Chubs: ChangeAgent has done almost all of them … he is a rockstar. Every once in a while I will contribute a few. He also tries to work in user submitted ones as well (generally with a few edits to make it fit our style and remove some of the more vulgar stuff users come up with).

TriXie: Our community? Vulgar? Noooooo! I love the leaderboard feature … it's sort of quirky like Harper's Index. Are there any plans to add more items to the leaderboard? I think I could make the page if you had "most time wasted on one game without benefit."

Fatty Chubs: The leaderboards is a really young feature that I quickly coded one weekend. Then ChangeAgent took it, formatted the pages around a bit, and we threw it up. It is still pretty young and we have a lot of great enhancements planned … but I don't want to show all our cards! We do want to add some leaderboards around each game, like whoever has played that game the most number of days. You are in the lead for Zuma® by the way, I think that's a good thing =)

TriXie: Wow! I rule! Either that or I am really pathetic. You and ChangeAgent both have full time jobs from what I recall when I interviewed you for your Xbox Marathon. How the heck do you find the time to live your life plus run 360voice and xboxmarathon?

Fatty Chubs: Yes, we are very busy! Like anything though, you find time for the things that are fun and 360voice definitely falls into that category. As long as it stays fun we will keep spending many hours a week working on it. The interaction with the community also keeps us pretty jazzed about it, so it is easy to set aside the time. www.xboxmarathon.com only really gets updated once a year when we do our 24hour marathon … so that is pretty easy right now. We are hoping more people will do marathons and send us details, so we can start expanding the use of that site as an additional resource for the community. But right now we are primarily focusing on 360voice.com. We have 40,000 and we would love to take that to 80,000 and higher. We have so many great features planned. We can't wait to watch this site grow over the next few months!

TriXie: We'll be watching too, Fatty! Thanks so much for your great contribution to the Xbox community.