Dang, I was hoping this was some kind of virtual scavenger hunt on the CIC.
No, but something like that might happen via the Facebook page in the future!
EDIT: Did some thinking about this after hitting the facebook group to 'like' it and I realized that in the future sites like the CIC won't exist. New Games coming out will have 'facebook groups' instead of having to set up their own websites and forums for blogs, news and discussions. How crazy is that?
That thought hit me many many years ago. Fan sites died off at least half a dozen years ago, long before Facebook took off. Back in the '90s when a new game came out, you'd have dozens and dozens of fan sites pop up, potentially hundreds for the biggest games. People maintained websites just full of links to the hundreds of other Wing Commander sites on the web. The CIC came from the merger of several of those sites. Back then everyone made a personal homepage/website, and a game site would often be an offshoot of that. That stopped when people started "blogging" (and then everyone realized blogging was way too much work and for something nobody cared to read). I feel very very nostalgic about the way things used to be, but I can't blame people coming online in 2010 for the way things are now - it's better overall.
Facebook makes making a personal webpage a hundred times easier than before, and the way it makes connecting with your real life friends is very well done. Just for photos alone, it's extremely useful. It's the natural extension of the digital camera - nobody prints photos anymore, and why would you when you could snap a picture with your cell phone and instantly have it in front of all your friends and family. And only in the last couple years has it expanded to connect communities in a decent way. ZorPrime made us a Facebook "group" in 2007, but this Facebook "page" has much better tools for getting us in front of fellow fans. The streamlined auto-community that Facebook facilitates is much better than just plugging into a forum at GameFaqs or Wikia or something like that.
And some of the more clever uses of Facebook pages are just as a complement to a primary site like the CIC. We recognize that there's about 2000 core fans that visit the CIC every day, but I think there's probably thousands more than stop by much less frequently. It's not that they're not Wing Commander fans, but there's a lot of people out there that don't check webpages much anymore period. A lot of people do the majority of their web browsing on their cell phone today, and they're only hitting a couple of primary sites there (Facebook, Google, a couple news sites, etc). So we're not going to just use the Facebook page to mirror CIC news stories. Big breaking news stories probably will show up on the CIC Facebook page, and that way we'll loop in lots of people who would have missed them at the wcnews.com front page. In turn, they'll have the opportunity to come back to the website, visit the Crius Forums and get drawn back in. I'm really excited about this potential.
We also know that a lot of our most frequent visitors will also follow us on Facebook, so this gives us an opportunity to also share something with them that wouldn't otherwise make it to the front page. Sometimes Kris will make an offhand reference to some cool CIC factoid. It's not particularly newsworthy that the CIC bandwidth has grown from 10 gigabytes/month to 10 terabytes/month in the last 10 years, but some of our visitors would find it interesting. That's an easy thing to post on the Facebook page. Sometimes we're working on something cool for the front page, and before it's ready to go completely live, it'd be super easy to provide a sneak peek on the Facebook page. I see lots of possibilities. The goal is to increase our total community involvement at wcnews.com, crius.net, Facebook and more by having them all work together.
I must be one of 42 people on the planet refusing to use Facebook.
You and Kris! You actually don't even have to use Facebook to use the new CIC Facebook page. If you just bookmark
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wing-Commander-CIC/123510034330325 and check that (or hit the Facebook link in the upper right front page menu), you'll see most stuff. Registered Facebook "likers" will be able to post to the discussion board and will see CIC updates in their news stream.
