Wii The People

The Wii News Channel, one of the most recent updates to Nintendo's groundbreaking next-gen system, was definitely designed with visual appeal at the forefront. The cool way words slide across the screen as you zoom in or out of a story, the impressive globe view as well as the impressive 'stacking' effect of stories by location definitely give reading news with your Wii a boost over the typical browser experience. A lot of thought was put into making the New Channel visually intuitive.

There is one problem with the News Channel, though. A video game system is defined by its interactivity yet the News Channel is a one way feed. The most interactivity a user gets is in seeing how fast you can spin the globe. In our world RSS aggregators and social news sites like Digg have changed the news reading habits of users. Customization and user input are key factors in creating a two-way dialog that has blurred the line between publishers and consumers.

For an interactive system is the News Channel just a novelty? Is it merely a small ember of the true potential the system could be or is it a waste of time to develop it further? After all, people by consoles to play games not read news.

As the News Channel is today, I would rather just play games. There's no draw for me to continue using the service. It's something cool to show people when they come over but I'll get my news from my laptop. Of course, the potential is still there to make something that is cool, interactive and very social. Nintendo just has to follow the same principles used by today's most popular social web sites.

First we need customization. Customization will require some user input on their preferences along with some (voluntarily supplied) demographic information. The Wii already has the perfect system for storing this information in the user designed Miis. The cool thing about using your Mii to store your info is that you can already take your Mii with you anywhere in your Wii-mote! You could easily go to your friends house and view your personalized News Channel.

The next thing we need is user input. User submitted content, like that seen on Digg and YouTube, may be a hard sell for Nintendo but the one thing they could easily implement would be a rating system not unlike Digg's. Depending on the demographic data attached to your Mii stories could also be filtered by those liked by users with similar interests. You could even create different Miis with different likes and dislikes. You could have a Mii only interested in science news and another who loves gaming and world news. Just pick the Mii you feel like that day.

The last thing is we'll need for our News Channel is for Nintendo to release a Wii RSS standard and add in search/aggregator functionality. Anyone should be able to set up their own RSS feed and register their feed with Nintendo. Users could search for and subscribe to those feeds through the News Channel.

There is a lot of potential for the News Channel. It can remain an interesting trinket or become a powerful and highly useful service that adds even more demand for an already in-demand product. Even if only a few of the features I've discussed are implemented it would be a great improvement. It's hard to tell exactly what Nintendo has planned for the future. All I know is that there are a lot of open channel slots with the Wii, and they can't all be meant for virtual console games!