For you the user, a large part of your experience on GreatGamesExperiment.com consists of building and customizing a profile page that best fits and describes you, your game, or your group. After all, half the fun of a social networking site is defining how you would like yourself to be presented to the audience at hand. We all know how boring straight up black text on a white background can be, so I want to present the toolbox that we have made available (and are currently expanding) to you, the user.

While developing GreatGamesExperiment.com, one thing the team has needed to focus on is security for you — the user. With the design and continual enhancement of profile creation tools, we are continually shooting to provide you with an equal balance of a comprehensive toolbox and safe experience for site users. Safety and security concerns arise when the community is allowed to insert their own code to embed items that are hosted off-site on a third party server. Through this juxtaposition of freedom and safety for users in our world [wide web] of user created content, we need to constantly be sensitive to the wants of the community, as well as the protection of individuals visiting and taking part in the experiment.

This is where GGE Code and The Widget Whitelist come in.

GGE Code was created as a simplified, expansive, and secure alternative to allowing open HTML on GreatGamesExperiment.com. By creating our own code within the GGE site, we can create intuitive ways for users to embed enriched content to their profiles by defining a few simple parameters. On our end we translate this code and display it within the layout of the site, helping to create a consistent browsing experience for users from profile to profile and from game to game.

The code tags — “[]” — are utilized to denote the beginning and end of a GGE Code definition. The parameters that are defined within these brackets are free form, specific to each content type as defined in the official GGE Code documentation. The first thing a tag should include is the content type you wish to define. For instance, if you are choosing to present some text as a quote on your game page, you would simple type:

[quote]My Quote Praising this Game[/quote]

If you wanted to add a stylized source to this quote, you can define the source as such:

[quote=Sean Sullivan]My Quote Praising this Game[/quote]

(Note: GGE Code is available throughout all profile modules, in any instance that a text area form field is presented).

This is the base of GGE Code, but what is The Widget Whitelist and what does it have to do with GGE Code?

One great thing about social networking and the “Web 2.0″ technologies is the opening up and free exchange of content that exists from service to service. For instance, YouTube videos are available to embed on your blog, off their site. Because of our belief in the importance of free flowing information, we want to be involved in the exchange of media and information from site to site. As far as getting your information out of GreatGamesExperiment.com, the Game Badges are providing a great step in the right direction. With badge improvement tools currently in development, these will prove to be a powerful asset in the area of sharing your game identity with individuals both in and outside of the Great Games Experiment. Our move to burning these badges as images (versus the previous method of embedded iframes) was, as we feel, definitely a step in the right direction. The flow of information out of GreatGamesExperiment.com is an important topic to us, however it is one I would like to focus on at a different date. For now, I’d like to touch on the topic of getting things into the site.

The need to allow widgets and services into GreatGamesExperiment.com, has resulted in the development of The Widget Whitelist. Through this list, we will be continually adding our support of a number of new web services into GreatGamesExperiment.com. We are constantly looking for innovative widgets being used throughout the web that will help us expand the profile creation toolbox available. In the past, we have made available Google Video, YouTube Videos, Google Gadgets, MSN Soapbox, and Xbox Live Gamer Cards. This has been a great start to opening our site to Video Playback (and a few more miscellaneous media types through Google Gadgets) through the simple inclusion of some GGE Code in your profile.

The next phase? To formalize the allowance and submission of widgets available for use anywhere on the site that GGE Code is accepted. This provides you, the user, a method by which you can help make your game profile stand out more than the last one a visitor was viewing. After all, those of us whom are here to share our games want as many eyeballs as possible, and those of us whom are here to find new games want to have those games presented as best as possible.

While the formalizing of The Widget Whitelist is not a groundbreaking idea or something that is going to incredibly affect the success of GreatGamesExperiment.com, I feel that opening our site up to as many external services as possible will help provide an element of openness and level of customization that “Web 2.0″ participants come to expect today and more so everyday from here on out.