14 DAY TRIAL // Did you know that they guy who created Napster, Shawn Fanning is a World of Warcraft player? So what? Some of you might say. This would be a legitimate question if Shawn Fanning hadn't been targeting World of Warcraft as his next project.
According to BusinessWeek Online, Fanning plans to develop "Rupture", some sort of a virtual social community for online gamers. Apparently, this project will be launched sometime in the near future. This idea came to Shawn Fanning as he was experiencing trouble when trying to communicate with other World of Warcraft players.
Rupture will take stats and data directly from World of Warcraft and publish information on personalized pages. Once you set up your own Rupture personalized page you will be able to send instant messages to other WoW gamers while playing and also keep a close eye on your guild's progress.
As far as it has been revealed, Rupture will be free of charge and will rely solely on advertisements for funding. Furthermore, this upcoming service will allow users to exchange info about their real lives, as this is one of its main goals. So far, only World of Warcraft was confirmed to have Rupture support, but maybe we will see Lineage or other MMORPG players instant messaging.
If you were to ask me, this will either be a huge success or flop big time. Remember that online dating service "World of Datecraft"? How did that turn out? I guess this will be another reason for argument between those who consider that WoW is ruining people's lives and WoW fans. If this goes through WoW freaks will have one more reason not to leave their houses.