Dan Romero

I figured that I would resolve some housekeeping business with a post:

• Facebook does have some RSS - I stand corrected. After complaining about Facebook's lack of RSS a few weeks ago, I discovered today that your notifications can be read as an RSS. Unfortunately, I already get most important notifications sent to my mobile via SMS. This also doesn't address the Newsfeed RSS problem either.
• Wider blog design - Unlike the NYTimes, which seems to be getting more narrow every time I visit (more on this in a later post), I increased the width of the blog by about 60 pixels. The non-designers reading won't care, but I did this to increase my line lengths.
• New domain names - So I now have a whole bunch of domain names that I own: danielwromero.com, blazamos.com, dratius.com, coupondj.com, he.rodot.us, milliondollarhillary.com, feehanbooks.com. And now I have two more: danromero.tv and kville.tv. What they will be use for, that's still up in the air.
• Upcoming birthday - A much less pertinent piece of info, I will be turning 20 on the 12th. Scary.
• iPhone typing speed - I have been using the iPhone for over a month now and I just want to say that I can type very fast on the keyboard (with thanks to the auto-correction software). I will be doing a complete "one month after" analysis sometime next week.
• Next week - Expect some posts about Twitter/Pownce/Facebook next week. I also think a post about the new MMOG company Multiverse and Indiana University's The Synthetic Worlds Initiative. Exciting stuff.

I have been playing EVE Online since February 2006 (not very much over the last 8 months). Recommended by a friend, I was initially attracted to the vastness of the game. Instead of running on hundreds of separate servers (shards), like World of Warcraft, EVE runs on a single cluster, with 20 - 30 thousand players logged on at given time.

After a couple of months of playing the game, I became fascinated with EVE's highly complex and realistic economy. Nearly everything within the game is player made, allowing for economic opportunities on a number of levels. From miners to traders, manufacturers to pirates, it was quite obvious that the driving force behind this virtual world was its rich and dynamic economy.

Well aware of this, EVE's parent company, CCP Interactive, recently hired an in-house economist, a first of its kind for any large MMORPG. With duties including macro-economic analysis and fiscal policy, Dr.EyjoG will be providing very interesting reports in the coming months.

Moves like this are why I find EVE to be superior to other MMORPGs (even despite the recent developer cheating allegations). CCP takes EVE very seriously and strives to make the game as engrossing and fun as possible. From my own experience (and from the hundreds of thousands that subscribe), they are doing a pretty good job.