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While it is hard to argue that Twitter is merely a fad and will soon blow over, we are beginning to see signs that opinion-polarizing micro-blogging service’straffic may have peaked. As if that news wasn’t bad enough, now it appearsthat the 19 million member strong social networking site Facebook may put an end to Twitter.

Facebook made some changes to the way they display users’ statuses on their site on Friday. All three of the changes are very important because they are directly targeted towards micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaikuwhich have garnered a lot of attention and have developed a loyal following in the past few months.

The first change on the list is a newly created page that aggregates the status updates of all your friends (need to be logged in to see). One look at this page and you can clearly see the similarities between this and the previously mentioned services.

The second change is the ability to subscribe to the status updates of any of your friends via an RSS reader, or via SMS. You can collectively subscribe to the updates of all your friends by going to the ‘posted items’ page, clicking on ‘my friends’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posted items’. And conversely, you can subscribe to any one friend’s updates by going to that friend’s ‘posted items’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posts’ from there.

The third and most important update is the ability to post status updates from your cell phone to your Facebook status page.

Given Facebook’s generally liberal stance on their open API I have no doubt that developers will come up with a similar arsenal of tools that currently exist for Twitter-like services, rendering them largely superfluous. This instance, coupled with Google’s recent move to replicate StumbleUpon does make me wonder more about the perils of developing any new service right now.

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Obviously, this isn’t true. Their underlying architectures are quite a bit different, Gnome looks different than the 7 UI, etc., but to an average 17-year-old, there just wasn’t any meaningful difference between the two operating systems.

The other day, I posted a blog titled “Windows 7: Good enough to pay for?” I described how I’d installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on my son’s computer for his take on the OS after living with Ubuntu 9.04 (and 8.10 before that) for a few months. It’s summer break, so he basically spends every waking moment when he’s not actually interacting face-to-face with friends on the computer. No better time to have a kid do some serious testing, right?

I asked him last night about his initial impressions of Windows 7 and, in typical teenage fashion, as he was bouncing between Meebo windows and browser tabs, he said it was “nice.” I managed to extract from him that his favorite feature was that he was able to use his Zune with it, something that had never worked terribly well with Ubuntu. Otherwise, he said, “Windows 7 is the same as Ubuntu; there just really isn’t anything different about them.”

Of course there isn’t. He lives in a web browser. The underlying OS is irrelevant. He has no need for Office 2007 and I expect his next portable music player will be platform independent.

For some, Windows 7 may, indeed, be good enough to pay for, especially if they are power-users of Windows-only software. For my oldest son, if he gravitates to any machine, it’s to my Mac because it’s so easy for him to create and share video content. For the average student, though, the old Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux debate may finally be dead. For someone who “hated Linux” a year ago to now happily switch between Windows 7 and Ubuntu in a completely transparent way certainly signals an end to that age-old flame war.

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On the back of the dotcom boom, Michael Simms ploughed £350,000 of his own money into a games company with the intention of bringing some of the most playable Windows titles to Linux.

Almost 10 years later, Linux Game Publishing, which specialises in porting Windows titles, is still going strong, releasing several titles every year. Linux Formatmagazine caught up with Michael on a recent trip and asked him about where the company will go from here.

Linux Format: What inspired you to start making games Linux-compatible?

Michael Simms: I started using Linux when I was at university, so I’ve been doing it for a long time. I did a few jobs in the Unix field and got to hear of Loki Software, who had just decided to make Civilisation: Call to Power. I got on to the beta for that, but I found it was hard to buy a copy of it when it came out. So I contacted Loki about becoming a reseller and that’s what started Tux Games.

When it became obvious Loki was going under, it was like: ‘crap, we’re going to have nothing to sell’. So we went to a company we knew weren’t able to make a deal with Loki, Creature Labs, and came to an agreement with them. We started off by publishing Creatures 3 and went from there.

LXF: What do you think Loki did wrong?

MS: Loki overestimated the market. It would spend a lot licensing a triple-A title and not generate enough sales, but carry on doing that again and again. A classic example was its Quake 3 special edition where it made 50,000 tin boxes and only sold a few thousand.

LXF: Didn’t you do a similar thing with X3?

MS: That was a limited edition of 500 rather than 50,000! We did it slightly differently. Just 500, and we won’t be making any more. We’ll carry on making the standard edition until whenever, but try to avoid making the same mistakes as Loki.

LXF: After deciding to port a game to Linux, what’s the next step for you at LGP?

MS: Once we’ve made the agreement, we get hold of the source code and then we just do whatever we need to do for the port. Usually, ports are fairly similar.

LXF: Do you choose games with a similar back-end?

MS: No, we choose games based on playability. I personally pick out a lot of the games because they’re what I like! But we’ve also got a few other people that we trust to give a balanced view of things.

LXF: Is there a massive difference between taking on something like X3 and a 2D puzzle game?

MS: We aim to do fifty-fifty top-end games to entry-level games so that we can pay equal attention to companies behind titles like Jets’n'Guns. We concentrate on both to make sure that we’re still seen to port big games, but we do small games so that smaller companies also have a route into the Linux market.

LXF: How long does a game like Jets take to port?

MS: Well, with Jets, we didn’t actually do most of the port. Rake In Games did it instead, we just added some polish and work at the end …

To do a port of something like Jets would take one developer a couple of months. Maybe a bit less. X3 – that’s more a team of four developers for five to six months.

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