little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

BravoNation

(I’ll make this post short and sweet, as I accidentally lost my previous blog entry. And honestly, I’m getting tired of seeing embedded videos of myself.)

But yes, I can now officially talk about BravoNation - the project a group of us been working on in the past couple of months and one of the main reasons why I returned to Yahoo! after a four month stint working in Canada. The product is currently in a closed public beta, meaning we’re currently offering invitations for people to check out the system and give constructive feedback. (And yes, if you want an invite, go ahead and contact me - I’ll see what I can do.)

What is BravoNation, you ask? BravoNation is an achievements community website and API platform. Andy Baio has written up a pretty in-depth overview of the system, and Gordon talks about it a little bit on Yahoo! Next* as well, so you can read all about it there. For those of you that aren’t so much techies as you are gamers, think “Xbox Live Achievements, but for community websites.” (For those of you that aren’t gamers, think “the bastard child you get when you cross a thank you e-card with Magic: The Gathering,” or something like that.) If it sounds like there’s a lot of gaming elements in the product, it’s because there is - most of the team are huge gamers, and we adopted a lot of gaming principles into the application. It’ll be interesting to see what crosses over well and what doesn’t. It’ll also be interesting how the product - and our roles - will change and evolve over the next couple of months. And by “interesting,” I mean a mix between “exciting” and “petrifying.”

For those that couldn’t give a shit about BravoNation, I offer this personal moment: everyone on the team sits together. We also just happen to all be Asian American. And because we’re politically correct like that, we called ourselves “Chinatown.” Gordon even brought moon cakes once for the Lunar Festival! Seriously, you should see us do a dramatic recreation of San Francisco’s Chinese New Year’s Parade - it’s good times.

(Somewhere in Sunnyvale, someone at the Yahoo! Human Resources Department just buried her face in her hands and started sobbing.)

But in the meantime, yay us. I’m going to bed.

Ernie — congrats! BravoNation sounds very interesting; would love to check it out if you can spare an invite.

“Seriously, you should see us do a dramatic recreation of San Francisco’s Chinese New Year’s Parade - it’s good times.”

That’s just too funny. I’d like to see a photo of that posted on your blog.

hey ernie!

interesting concept — legitimizing achievements in the social networking space. congrats!

any invites left?

I’d like an invite if possible!

Well, gee, when I first saw “API” I thought Asian/Pacific Islander, then realized it was a programming thing. Then it turned out to be Asian/Pacific Islander after all. Not enough acronyms to go around, what?

I have an invite and I’ve been kicking the tires.

The only constructive feedback I have to give are all things you know already: I’m really excited for the day when I can upload my own graphics, I want to be able to browse random bravos easily, etc.

I’m really excited about this thing. Congrats on the work so far and I hope the coming months are exciting for you.

Another technology offering to make our complicated world simple….

This looks interesting. If you have an invite to send my way I’d really appreciate it.

Invite pls?

You know I am a invite whore…

Merry Christmas, Ernie!

Could you send me an invite, if you have any left?

I would love to have an invite please.Thanks for the consideration

[…] like any good web application, BravoNation, the site I’ve been working on at Yahoo!, also offers a badge. This is ours, developed by Jeffrey […]

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