Sharing the Controller

Apparently, McD’s doesn’t have more preservatives than the other guys, it’s just so full of fat and salt that there’s no room for moisture to get in to allow it to decompose. Somehow, that really doesn’t make me feel any better.

This strikes me as the sort of thing that I could get upset about in principle but not in practice. TIPB’s finding that friend requests from 501 on just never arrive; you get a new friend request immediately after deleting someone else from your friends list.

On the one hand, this seems arbitrary, but Xbox Live’s had an even more arbitrary limit (100) for years and that’s never been addressed. It could be there’s a good, technical reason for a 500 friend limit, like the amount of time to check all the challenges or scores when you launch a game takes too long. Or it could be that Apple just decided that 500 is enough.

And, really, for most people, it is. You may have more than 500 Facebook friends, but how many of them have newer model iPhones, and of those, how many are you realistically ever going to play Ms. Pac Man with? This smells to me like another issue which is going to get a lot of play in the tech press because they typically represent the extreme edge case for these types of things (I can only imagine how many friend requests the editors of TIPB have gotten between this and Ping) but which most normal users will never run up against.

This is, however, one more instance of disappointing design from Apple in this Game Center concept. Xbox Live didn’t become what it is overnight either, but for something that Apple spent a lot of time on, there are a number of design decisions that seem questionable at best that they really need to get ironed out quickly, because at the moment it’s not even more attractive than OpenFeint or Plus+, let alone Xbox Live.

Apparently people aren’t so interested in 3D once they have to actually put on glasses and try to watch something. This is something I’ve been thinking for a long time; the current 3D tech is better than we’ve had in the past, but there’s not enough content and there are too many hoops to jump through for the average person to be motivated enough to enjoy it.

The hardcore gamer stats (71% interested after trying it) makes sense to me, though. The only time I’ve legitimately been interested in 3D was trying a demo of a first person shooter at PAX East. Something like that, where you have one person putting all of their focus on the screen, seems like the real use case to me. I can’t see trying to get my daughters to sit still for two hours with uncomfortable, adult sized glasses precariously balanced on their faces just to watch Toy Story 3 in 3D. If the over/under on that lasting was half an hour, I’d take the under.