Shawn Fanning Launches Social Network for Gamers

Posted on December 1, 2006

Heather Green at Blogspotting reports that Napster creator Shawn Fanning is going to launch a virtual social nework for gamers called Rupture. Heather Green says that Fanning is an avid World of Warcraft player and the new social network will tap into the World of Warcraft to extract information about people's characters.

I haven't seen the service but Fanning explained it to me this way: Using an add on or a software download, Rupture taps into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site. Rupture will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to organize their playing. As Rupture tracks each member's playing over time, these personalized profiles evolve.

There is already one World of Warcraft social network called the Warcraft Social Network (more details here). Although it isn't quite as slick and commercial as Rupture probably will be the Warcraft Social Network already boasts over 2,000 members.