On the horizon: forum cards, and facebook

Two cool features we're working on right now:

Planbeast cards. That's my working title for it, anyway. This will be, essentially, a little blob of HTML you can paste into blogs or forum signatures and the like, resulting in a nifty dynamic image that will let people across the web know which online games you've got coming up, by way of Planbeast.

We have a working design, but I made it myself, and so it's pretty ugly. Rather than foist them upon y'all as-is, I'm talking to Rob, the fellow responsible for the beautiful punched-out look that this site's miniviews sport. I hope to get some solid advice from him, and then turn this feature on next week.

Facebook integration. Through Facebook's new Connect API, websites can rig themselves up to allow users to log in and even create new accounts using their Facebook credentials. This can lead to a lot of cool stuff, such as having Planbeast stamp a notification on your Facebook wall whenever you create or join a game event, letting your friends know about your online plans.

We'd been talking about doing something with Facebook from way back when we were first plotting out Planbeast, so I was happy to discover the Connect API earlier this month; it really looks like the best way for us to hook into it. This is a more involved project, but I hope to see it happen before summer.

In other news, I totally just picked up Left 4 Dead, mostly due to peterb's review of it, which spoke directly to my totally-not-into-the-whole-zombie-meme self. (As well as my desire to go blow 50 bucks at Amazon, I guess.) Anyway, so long as I'm pretty much the only person making public events on this thing, I've made a few of those. Want to come shoot zombies with me?