GuppyLife pre-registration is now open

GuppyLife will be released in English shortly. The pre-registration is now open! GuppyLife is a MMO / virtual world targeted at tween girls. It has been out in Danish since October 2008. GuppyLife has several unique features starting with the 3D style and Guppy AI. If you are interested to know more, check out GuppyLife.com and pre-register to the grand opening of the English version of GuppyLife.

Measuring and visualizing the Internet

Lately I have been checking out Quantcast internet statistic tool and IBM's Many Eyes data visualization tool. I have to give props to both -- both of them are really interesting and valuable tools for many. At Twitter I gave some criticism to Quantcast regarding provided data about gender of the users. Even if it is hard to get exact information of the female and male users at a particular web service, Quantcast gives a lot of very interesting data / estimations. Definitely worth checking out.

I didn't play with IBMs Many Eyes myself, just checked out what type of visualizations other users have done so far. I searched "internet" related data and got a long list of graphs from internet penetration to use of web services. Check out the pics. Naturally one challenge with internet-related data is that data about web services from 2007 means the data is already badly outdated. The other pic "age vs. internet use" is an autobiography but it inspired me to look for similar data. We did an extensive survey on youth and social internet in Japan, South Korea and Finland. The data was gathered 2006-2007. Should be possible to look at different age groups (from 15 to 29), compare them with each other and generate similar maps of the data. I already know there are big differences between teens and 20-something when it comes to use IM vs. e-mail. Supposedly social networking and online gaming would also make differences between age groups or genders. I have to do my own Many Eyes and post the data to my blog at least!

% of girlgamers on the rise - 31% of WoW players female

I spent some time browsing comScores data from 08. Lately I have been looking at MMOs and girls' online activities. I have posted quite a few messages to Twitter on the subject (check out souplala if you are interested to find some data about girls' online activities and MMOs).

comScore also provides somewhat interesting data regarding girl gamers. They indicate significant user growth among teenage girls between the ages of 12 and 17 and women between the ages of 55 and 64.

I was also a bit surprised that no more than 31% of WoW users are female but considering the huge number of players (nearly 12M) it might not be that surprising after all?

The last graph is not 100% relevant for this post but I though of putting it there anyhow. Even if it does not talk about gaming or SNSs it nicely highlights some differences between female and male consumers. If consuming virtual items is anyway in line with this it reveals something about general interests and potential activities online.