danielskog.se

The online football manager game Hattrick has been around since 1997 and is still one of the most popular with almost 1 million active users. I joined Hattrick seven years ago and became a devoted manager. My team “Lokomotiv D” started in division 6 but advanced to division 4 during the first couple of years. Then it went downhill again. My team now resides in division 5 but the future does not look bright.

I remember being very passionate about Hattrick a couple of years ago. Logging on to Hattrick was a part of my daily routine and when my team was playing I quite often sat in front of the computer to watch the live updates. But I guess everything must come to an end and lately I have been a sloppy manager. I am now seriously considering to let go of Hattrick. When I signed up, a couple of my friends also had teams and it was fun to compete against each other. Now, almost everyone has left and I have never been an active community member at Hattrick.org – I just liked the game part of it. This is probably the main reason to why I don’t bother anymore. Hattrick has become quite complex which means that you can not cheat if you want to have success. You have to be committed and spend lots of time – I have decided that I can’t do that anymore.

But it is hard to let go because I’ve been there for so long. Even though I almost never log on anymore I will miss the opportunity of being able to. Goodbye Hattrick – I will remember the good times we had.

Yesterday I was a guest speaker on a course at our department, called “Creating Experiences in Digital Media”. The course belongs to our undergraduate program on “Digital Media Production”.

I was asked to say something about success factors in relation to online communities, and although it’s not something that I usually talk or write about it was an appealing challenge to summarize my thoughts on this topic. Below you can find my PowerPoint slides (in Swedish). The message of my last slide is “Think community before technology”. I think that is true if you want to have success building an online community. However, my PhD work actually focuses on the real importance of technology and points out the need for an awareness of the complex relationship between social interactions and technical features in online communities.

Accordning to Dagens Nyheter, LunarWorks is up for sale. LunarWorks owns not only LunarStorm, but also photo-sharing site Bilddagboken and translation site Tyda.se. With the arrival of Facebook in Sweden, both LunarStorm and other national community sites have seen their population decrease dramatically. Therefore it seems likely that both Bilddagboken and Tyda.se are more interesting acquisitions than former flagship LunarStorm.

Even though Facebook probably has something to do with the “fall” of LunarStorm as the most popular community site in Scandinavia – I can’t help but thinking that the consequences of having founder Rickard Eriksson leaving LunarStorm might have been greater than expected. Rickard left in September 2006 and even though i don’t have the statistics I would say that it has been going downhill since that day. Perhaps Rickard could sense that the era of LunarStorm was about to end. Or perphaps LunarStorm just lost its soul when the originator decided to move on.