While I'm a huge Minecraft fan, I've always been surprised at the lack of social features within Minecraft. When my sons get home from school, they call their friends on the phone and ask what Minecraft server they are on. And we yell back and forth across the house 'what server are you on?'. It reminds of the days of Halo before Xbox Live when my friends and I were using GameSpy and unlimited cellphone plans to play Halo across the Internet.
That was the start of an idea that is now called FriendsForMinecraft. It is a client mod, supported by a backend service that enables a number of Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare-like features for Minecraft. Here are some of the features:
- send messages/chat back and forth between friends regardless of what server they are on
- see when friends are online/offline and what server they are playing on
- a camera feature, allowing friends to share, comment and 'like' photos
- 'check-in' to servers, 'like' servers, discover trending/popular/new servers
- live activities feed / instant notifications and control over what/where/when notifications you recieve
- a one-click installer that installs Forge if necessary, installs the FriendsForMinecraft mod, and backs-up your existing minecraft.jar while doing so. :-)
I launched my private beta program last week and plan to go into public beta in the coming weeks. In preparation for handling what I hope is a bunch of users... I need more private beta testers to validate that we are indeed ready to go public.
If you're willing to give a fellow Minecraft fan a hand... please help me as a private beta tester before I open the doors to the public. It's really simple, just leave me your email address at http://www.friendsforminecraft.com and I'll send you instructions for testing. I pinky swear I will not spam your email or let it fall into the hands of anyone that would spam you.
Thank you!
nwkayaker
Founder: FriendsForMinecraft.com
