Rupture for World of Warcraft Networking

Posted by Colbert Low on December 26th, 2006

You might have not heard of Shawn Fanning before, but I am sure most of us would know or at least have heard about the P2P music sharing application, Napster. Well, he was the owner of Napster before he decided to sell it to Bertelsmann for $8 million 2 years ago.

He then went on and started a new project - Snocap. Guess what, it’s music-related, too. But it was said to be better than Napster and was able to do what Napster lacked previously. And it was a success. It even partnered with Myspace to make Snocap’s music store available to Myspace music artists not too long ago.

And now Shawn is working on a new project that he called Rupture and surprisingly, this one has nothing to do with music at all. Actually, there’s a story about how he came up with this whole Rupture idea. It all started after he sold Napster. Shawn immediately got a copy of the World of Warcraft. He loved the game (who doesn’t?) and soon enough, he saw a problem: it’s hard to communicate with other players.

Online games usually have their own followers and these people are always out there looking for ways to communicate with each other. And although they can use instant messengers to contact each other, it is usually quite troublesome to discuss the game without having any image to describe the situation they are in. Shawn Fanning actually made Rupture so that it would tap into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site for each player.

Rupture will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to discuss any good strategies they can use to improve their gaming experience. This is definitely something that new players will value very much: they will be able to play their game without having much trouble. By joining Rupture, players will be able to chat in groups or with other individuals. Rupture will also be a place to download add-ons and game demos available.

Talking about competition, Rupture is nothing new. WoW players have a myspace profile with over 100k of friends and a similar community called the Warcraft Social Network with more than 2,000 members. That is a very impressive number of users. And they also spend a lot of time online. No wonder that Shawn saw the potential and made a better online community for WoW players.

Rupture is still in private beta and has not been released to the WoW players yet, but you can opt for a notification once they are open for registration. If this project is successful, it will be realistic for us to expect more similar social networking sites that are created based on any online gaming communities that already exist. But I personally already feel that this is going to be another one of Shawn Fanning’s success stories.

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