It has been a fairly Googlerific past few days for me. I have been making use of a couple of new features that have been a lot of fun to play with. The first feature, and one that I have been meaning to do for a while, has been the Google Apps for Domains. Now when I say meaning to do for a while I have to qualify that. What I have been meaning to do for a while is to try and organize a group of gamers, on the south side of Houston, so that we all can find opponents when needed. I was planning to register a domain name and host it at LREHosting, where seanandmelissa.net is hosted, but I decided to try a slightly different approach.
The other day I decided to register a new domain, using Google Apps for Domains, and begin the process of putting together the South of the City Gamers. I don’t know how many of you are from Houston, or have been here, but it is a huge city. It takes a good hour to drive from one end of the metroplex to the other when the traffic is non-existent. Finding gamers close to home is a very, very good thing. South of the City Gamers is a group, and set of applications, designed to help people find gamers close by. In this case focused on gaming south of Interstate 610 in Houston. Why Google Apps for Domains? I thought it would be interesting to see if a community could be built around the common application tools that the service offers. When you use the Google Apps for Domains you get access to a branded version of Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar, as well as the Google custom start page. You can also create additional pages using the Google Page Creator tool.
My hope is that by offering a custom set of tools to some serious gamers the community can be formed, and will thrive. I do feel that four major Google services are missing from the Apps collection, Google Reader, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Groups. I have created accounts for all of these services to leverage for the South of the City Gamers, but it would be much nicer if Google would include them. Giving people the option to read feeds (and maybe let the admin create a folder or two of default feeds), write a blog (the blogs could pick up the site’s look and a widget could be written to show updates), and of course I think the inclusion of a Group be default is key. It has been fun so far. I have a lot of work to do before I start advertising to the masses of Houston area gamers, but it is shaping up.
I have also been playing around with Google Base. I have been toying with the idea of creating a database of my game collection. It would include all of my games (card, board, video, miniatures), and would be mostly for my reference. Then I started thinking, I already have that collection information on Ma.gnolia by looking at my game & owned tags. What I really want is a way to point people to my collection and have information at their finger tips about that game. For example, if I plan to bring a new board game to work for us to play at lunch, I would love to have a website to point people to that has the overview, rules, FAQ, and quick reference information about the game. Saves time if even one or two of the guys reads the rules. So my thought is to create an entry for each of my games in a local database, and use the bulk upload feature of Google Base to populate my collection. I am still trying to work out how exactly I will get all of the detail in place, but you can check out some samples I created for Memoir ‘44 and Battleground: Fantasy Warfare.
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