RAPTR: Gaming made Social–All Your Communities Are Belong To Us…

I have been a Raptr user for a long time, since the companies initial beta. Long enough to have seen all the changes they have made to the platform. Lately, Raptr has gone through a lot of changes. Instead of simply a messenger product that allows you to chat across games, it is now also expanding as a social aggregation platform for gamers. Not only allowing you to interact with your friends across various platforms, but also as an aggregator to bring together gaming news that is actually personalized for you.

Since it’s creation, Raptr has allowed a lot of communication and interaction between gamers even when they are on separate platforms, overcoming some of the dividing walls that used to separate us as gamers. For example, I can now use one messenger client to chat with not only friends on Raptr, but also friends logged into Xbox live, Games for Windows Live, PSN, Steam, Facebook, MSN/Live Messenger, ICQ, etc… all from one client, and they can reply to me from their particular in-game client without having to have Raptr at all. On top of this, due to Raptr’s ability to cross the platform boundaries, it is able as a platform, to analyze your gaming habits. It can see the games you play on all platforms and get a better picture of your preferred gaming genre’s etc…

Now many of you may be familiar with gaming news aggregators like N4G, etc… but what really sets Raptrs News Feed apart from the competition, is that it shows you news based on your gaming habits. It looks at some of the following info:

• What games you play.
• How long/how much you have played them.
• How long it has been since you played a game.
• What new games have been added to your library.
• What your friends are playing.
• What Articles or Posts you have voted on, etc…

What it is really doing, is looking at what you do as a gamer, and personalizing the news feed to your particular tastes. There really isn’t another platform out there that can do this quite as well. The fact that Raptr has access to your gaming across Xbox 360, PS3 and multiple PC platforms and Games, means it truly does have the means to provide you with the news that you are most likely to be interested in.

What is also nice, is that those who are running sites, or writing articles and reviews, can also share links to their own sites/articles that can be picked up and shared out automatically to gamers who may be interested in your article based on their gaming habits. It really is looking like Raptr is leading the way in bringing together both the gaming community and the content that is of most interest to them. You can also share links to articles that you liked and those will be added to your friends news feed. You can also vote on items in the news feed similar to Digg or Reddit and that will help the article appear higher up in the news feed. Your friends activities can also be shared in the feed similar to how facebook status updates work.

Here is a summary of some of the News Feeds features:

• Story Submission and voting similar to Digg or Reddit
• Activity Feed and Comments functionality similar to Facebook
• Intelligence around what games you play & platforms you like via Raptr Tracking
• All wrapped into one place and personalized based on your gaming habits.

I am excited to see what comes next. I would love for the consoles to get a Raptr client as well, so I can chat with my friends that are playing on PS3 while I am playing on my Xbox 360… the possibilities seem endless as to what this type of social gaming platform can do.

For those who haven’t used Raptr, you can check them out here: http://www.Raptr.com

If you are on Raptr, feel free to send me a friend request: http://www.Raptr.com/SideWinder

And for a preview of what you can see on the newsfeed, here is a look at my current news feed, which has topics based on what I have been playing recently: