Mention the name Shawn Fanning, and most people still picture a kid in his dorm room at Northeastern University in Boston, cooking up Napster, a file-sharing website that let users trade songs for free and triggered a financial tsunami in the music industry.
Fanning, now 28 and living in San Francisco, is not only long out of college, but he's also moved on to his third company, Rupture. (His second one, music licensing company Snocap, was sold in April 2008 to Imeem Inc., a social networking site.)
This third venture is related to one of Fanning's personal passions: games.
Pick any year between 2009 and 1989, when he played his first game, the Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Entertainment System console, and Fanning will tick off a list of hot titles for that year. Most people mark their lives by major events; Fanning marks his by the releases of new games.
He started Rupture in 2006 to help gamers find out what their friends are playing and connect. He sold Rupture in June to video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. for $30 million. But Fanning remained at the San Francisco start-up to see his newest brainchild through to launch, which is expected this summer.
Fanning this week gave The Times a sneak peek into the service, as well as shared his thoughts on games and, of course, music.
Here's an edited version of the conversation:
What is Rupture?
It's Twitter for gamers. Our focus is to build a platform to automatically track your game accomplishments on all the different platforms, including consoles and PCs. But being able to track what your friends are playing is the beginning. It's also the social interactions between gamers. We're trying to create a framework around these interactions, like a metagame.
Sounds like what several sites are attempting to do, including GGL.com in Culver City. How is Rupture going to be different?
It's definitely a space that's heating up. We feel we have a unique and compelling approach. The key challenge is creating engagement. News feeds of what your friends are doing are interesting. But most of the time, it's just overwhelming. We need to make sure that the service we're building is focused on maximizing engagement. Just aggregating game data is not enough to create an engaging social experience.
What about pulling in user-generated content like Machinima, where players stitch together an original movie using game-play footage?
