The History of Live Eye

The concept of theliveeye started from an idea David Larrabee (Squidpunch) had back on September 20, 2006, which was expanded upon greatly while discussing it with Luigi Violin (ZaaM IT). After a bit of discussion and fleshing out ideas the project was given a code name of 'BlueWhirl'. A test 'Watcher' was developed that very same week. Finally on September 29th we thought of the name LiveEye. As I sit here and go through our previous discussions on the topic, I notice how many other sites were working on similar type tools and how worried we were that they would finish first, since ours was completely secret at the time.

A furious amount of ideas and messages flew back and forth about what could be done, and alos concerns of how much power such a site would require to run effectively if it actually caught on. As I sit here and go through our previous discussions on the topic, I notice as the time went on, many other sites were working on similar type of tools - at least trying to log similar data in a similar fashion and how worried we were since ours was completely secret at that time.

The bare bones of the live eye started running on a junky little server in David's house for testing and development for about a month (and 19 pages of forum discussion back and forth with Luigi. We upgraded our hosting plan and - finally releasing a beta application in October 2006. The original concept was to show a players total online time, and then break it down by each game with a way to see a daily entry of your gaming by the hour. It grew to provide public apis for those that wished to use them, new features were added to your profiles like showing your achievement and gamerscore counts, leaderboards(that were up and down), custom signatures and gamercards, as well as one of the most recent changes the 100% clubs.

It was an amazing and interesting project to work together on, but unfortunately based on many limitations outside of our control a decision was made on Feburary 02, 2008 to shut it down. There were many factors and lots of discussions that brought us to this point, most of which we could have an answer for - but one problem still remained.

In the current way we must read data from xbox.com, and the limitations put on active connections to that data read, it is just not possible to support an application such as this - we loved it as much as all of you, but unless Microsoft themselves ran the site (its safe to assume they are gathering these stats on us - how else could Major Nelson report the top games of the week?) it just cannot survive. No matter how much money, how big of a server farm, or how much time and effort is put into it, a physical limit would be reached, and one which is out of our control.

The site officially was shut down on March 01, 2008, but to honor the last almost 2 years of Luigi & David's lives, we have compiled some interesting statistics of the site for everyone to see here.