Portable Open Persona

On the nintendo wii you are represented by a character known as a Mii -- a little avatar that represents yourself. It has a cartoonish appearance, reminiscent of those WeeMee characters I've seen around.

Here's the clever bit:

This same avatar can be taken from one game to another, and even from one Wii console to another.

Extending this idea...

Extending this idea -- there could be a type of avatar that moves not only within nintendo consoles and games, but into games on PS3, Xbox live and other consoles.

Extending this extended idea -- there could be a type of avatar that moves not only within game consoles, but into MMORPG's (WoW) and applications like Second Life, Instant Messaging, Skype, online forums, chat groups and so on.

This has some surface similarity to the idea behind the Gravatar implementation (and the related Pavatar concept).

At a deeper level, it's probably more similar to the idea of an OpenID.

(What ever happened to OpenID, by the way? In February it was the Next Big Thing... 5 months later and I've hardly heard a peep about it)

If custom attributes can be added to an OpenID, then this could include avatar information, or even a set of different avatars.

Anyway, that's the million dollar idea for this morning. Go build it, fat head.

(btw, I'm not one of those wacky second life addicts [hat tip to "you know who you are" ;-) ] -- but I can see that this stuff is gaining traction quickly. Also I deliberately don't own any game consoles)

Here's some more nintendo Wii links:

• WiiWare: Develop Indie games for the Wii (and sell them through nintendo)
• Managed Library for Nintendo's Wiimote, from Brian Peek
• WiiKey: Open source project to use WiiMote for Powerpoint, Zoomit, and more
• Rejected Wii Games

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