This is part of a blog series to document the evolution of this community, year over year.

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The Births of tWiiter, DS Opera SDK, and Gabriella

I had no clue what this new Twitter fad was until seeing an episode of The Colbert Report in early February, when he sent a tweet from his cell phone on live TV. I thought that this would be a neat idea to integrate into the Wii, so a new subdomain for Wii Opera SDK was born: tWiiter! It opened for beta on February 27th with the ability to email [a=mailto:twiit@wiioperasdk.com]twiit@wiioperasdk.com[/a] from the Wii registered with HB Online, and the message would show up on the website.

On March 3rd came DS Opera SDK, the scaled-down version of the Wii Opera SDK for the April 5th release of the Nintendo DSi, which was to have a newer version of the Opera browser than the Wii.

On March 27th, Gabriella was welcomed into the world as tiny creature with a powerful set of lungs. Although her size has changed, she still has a powerful set of lungs - especially when yelling "NO!"

On April 5th, tWiiter saw its general release and a week later added the support to directly email Wii-to-Wii without having to register between consoles beforehand. Members of the community would just email from the Wii to twiit@wiioperasdk.com with a message that contains the first line "Dear [username],". On the 19th, support was added for tWiiting directly from the Nintendo DS or Nintendo DSi browsers at twiiter.wiioperasdk.com/ds.

Around this time, Jerason Banes opened DSiCade. In the ShoutBox, we discussed our ideas for the Nintendo DSi browser, based on the capabilities we had determined through various tests and benchmarks: it had good JavaScript support, crippled HTML5 canvas, and the ability to read some of the buttons. That was kind of a mixed bag of abilities.

I ported over some of the tech demos from Wii Opera SDK to DS Opera SDK and figured I'd go ahead and pull the Chatroom from HB Online over to the website (basically unchanged), as well. The log in system had not yet been set up, so the Chatroom just displayed IP address. I continued to work on SDK tech demos for a few days and decided to randomly check the Chatroom one evening. There were maybe 4 or 5 people talking it.

Now, let me stop right there because this is a pivotal moment in the history of the entire community. If the Chatroom had been empty, I probably would have not given the whole social aspect much of a second look. Yet, since there were people in the Chatroom, I immediately set up a log-in system on the website that tied into the HB Online/tWiiter accounts to display usernames (while still allowing logged-out IP addresses) and split that Chatroom in two: Chatroom A and Chatroom B. These chatrooms became such time wasters!

After the suggestion of a few members, I spent a few weeks porting HB Online to the Nintendo DSi browser for a May 15th release of HB Online Lite.

Sometime in late May, and idea hit me: the Nintendo DSi's stylus basically makes the handheld like a drawing pad. I wondered if there could be potential in creating a Web app that allowed "painting" pictures and saving them as PNG images to share online. Thus, June 6th finally saw the release of DSiPaint! Initially, these paintings could be set as avatars on tWiiter and viewed in a gallery. Voting and actual account creation came the moment the Web app surged in popularity. Since more people were visiting for the painting than to download the SDK, the website was rebranded to DSiPaint.com.

Over the next few weeks, Wii Opera SDK received the Chatroom from HB Online, the sign-up system from tWiiter, and got its own paint app. That way the community was not just limited to those on the new Nintendo DSi but those on the older Wii, as well.

This was the first Northern Hemisphere summer of the community. I remember spending so many hours talking with some of the early members, like Timodachi, Master Chief, Smashmaster, NeoMewga, and others. The chatrooms underwent a redesign to a similar format they have today. They were split into Super Mario Bros. character names. They had a game show feature hacked together in a couple hours. The first admins had red names and abilities to oversee all features that came up later in the year. If you speak with anyone who joined at this time, they will tell tales of these nostalgic days of Summer 2009.

It was this year when I announced through a teaser that I wanted to revive an old game I had been making in the 1990s. I was never able to finish the game, due to the busy school schedule of those days and MS-DOS being left in the past by the nifty new Windows 95. This game is known as The Mystical Journey.

As the community continued to grow during the year, it gained blogs and profiles (Oct 18th), messaging (No friends list yet), weekly(-ish) polls, and the Nintendo WiFi scheduler. Viewership climbed from 50 visitors per day to 1700 per day. Of the 13000 members, there were 10,000 paintings. Chatrooms would frequently see 40-50 people at a time in the American evenings...

... But 2009 was just the beginning.