First of all, let me apologize for having pretty much abandoned this place. I was out in San Francisco looking for new ideas, I played a game with Jane McGonigal, I met the guys of Playtime Antiboredom Society and all in all I had a great time. But, enough with personal statements.

I just discovered that finance managing service Mint is trying to make saving money more fun by implementing game-like features in the platform. That could really be a nice example of playful design, and it’s more important as it is applied to a very serious software. Raph Koster have some thought about the idea, and an interesting insight about Ultima Online status-symbols.

Unfortunately the new features are for now in private beta (and I cannot try them anyway, as Mint doesn’t support Italian banks) so if someone is trying it, I would be happy to hear comments about that.

Web applications can be considered as virtual spaces. There’s no need to be Second Life to be a virtual space. And I will drop the “virtual” adjective too, because I think there’s nothing virtual about the relations and the experiences happening on those spaces.

I think I will call them “experiential spaces” (or maybe “possibility spaces” *wink*). The name is not important, though. Raph Koster has this great article about empowering social interactions inside a whatever space. And I think they should be kept in great consideration when designing a social web application in a playful way. Check it out.