The PS3 is more or less "around the corner" - at least for the US and Japan, while Europe is left behind in the x360 world for another few months. Eurogamers have posted an interesting preview of the online solution Sony is developing - featuring easy friends list, multiple accounts for family members and a store with "actual" prices rather than points. But the one big unknown, which should be evident for Sony that they have to deal with (considering the Final Fantasy and Ratchet style games with tons of hidden goodies to find/solve/get) - is, as pointed out in the article, the achievements on Xbox Live. A common interface for displaying your deeds and skills is a nice add-on for any community based system, and without a basic framework in place the Sony offering becomes yet another 'also ran' along the lines of the Net Walkman.
Another game-related story is from DrDobb - an interview / product preview with Chris Crawford on storytelling and his upcoming SWAT tool. He has ambitious visions for the future, but is open enough to admit that it is basically a gamble on how he thinks things might pan out;
"computer games are a tiny subset of — what? That thing doesn't exist yet, but when it does, it's got to be, ... much bigger than computer games."
And I got a bit sidetracked based on his mention of Eclipse - since it can also be used for mobile devices, with a collection of acronyms such as eRCP and SWT doing most of the job for you. Might be worth some further investigation as a supplement to .Net - if there is a good set of database sync solutions available to rival the MS solutions.
