^^Well yeah, my avatar on Home is a dude. That doesn't stop other guys from wanting to form a fudge train. It's not my fault my avatar makes straight men want to be gay. u___u

haha... j/k. My avatar is a girl.

You must have missed the stripper poles they have in the EA Sports Fight Night space. Right by the Rock 'em Sock 'em robots. Yes, I know you're joking, and no I am not; they really are there. Home is wacky.

But no, there is still no money to be made in Home; I haven't seen anyone trying to promote some lame website almost since the open beta started.

Sony ain't giving up on Home.

Meh. I just use it to talk to multiple friends at once.

It's one of the easiest ways to stage a game playing session. Probably The easiest way to stage an impromptu gaming session if you have enough friends on your list or you don't mind gaming with someone you just started talking to 5 minutes ago.

Ye, i really like PSHOME. People are too quick to put it down, its developing and some people are so ignoranus to the fact things can change completly dismiss it.

home is brutal. Who wants to wait in line to play a mini-game?

I didn't know that it was. I think home needs more activities with less waiting.

Home still falters on the most basic level. It's just not a good social service. People for the most part don't go in there to hang out. They just go in occasionally to check out the latest spaces. They go in to look at stuff, and that's about it.

Imo, three things need to be changed to improve Home:

1. Allow you to save some spaces permanently to your HDD if you so choose, making access between areas easier.
2. Improve loading between spaces, possibly making some sort of streaming system.
3. Get game launching to work with all games, and make more spaces like the Warhawk space for other multiplayer games like Killzone.

In other words, they need to make everything more seamless, both space to space and space to game.

They also need to link your avatar to your profile, so that if you lose your data (like me) you don't have to start from scratch.

All of the spaces visited are stored on HDD from what I can tell. There are "install" loads when you enter a new or refreshed area and there are basic loads that occur every time you enter a new area.

Load times seem excessively slow for the amount of data being loaded, but I realize a large chunk of the loads include streaming data from all the other avatars in a given space (each with its own unique model modifications and visuals).

Because of the way Home is structured, it does feel very compartmentalized as though each area is its own little chat room rather than one giant interconnected series of virtual space like the typical MMORPG.

Avatar data is actually stored in the user preference file (game save data). I haven't actually tried transferring this file between consoles, but I'll give it a try some time to see if it works.

Game launching is completely dependent upon individual developers to include or not bother with, so that's not something that will be "fixed" unless SCE requires mandatory Home support (bad idea IMO).

From my own observations, a lot of the users are using it specifically for hanging out and chatting about everything from games to the typical school hall banter. It's mostly the strictly gamer people who are only using it to check out new spaces, collect stuff and then log off rather than stick around and talk to people on their friends list or anyone online.