There are a few people I know are using Skritter in my Chinese class, and so I found myself wondering about Skritter Friends. It may seem kind of pointless, but I was thinking about "competing" against each other (whether in total practice time, retention rate, number of characters learned, etc) as an incentive to practice. Between friends this could be simple comparison, but in the context of a class, this could be a measure of completion of the vocab list everyone is working on (which lends itself well to teacher/student accounts, ostensibly a part of volume licensing).

In the list of "things that are unlikely but sound fun" is actual competition, where players match up to write characters the fastest from a set list in a multiplayer game.
Following in the vein of games, for people who want to just read characters, you could have something similar to Kanji Invader ( http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/JapanProj/KanjiInvader/KanjiInvader.html ) where you type the pinyin for characters or character phrases to make them explode à la Space Invaders.

This would be excellent fun.

Those are some good ideas. I like the "friends" concept, although all of us are a little Facebook-sick, so we'll try to keep it focused. It'll be a while yet before we get time to building more social features.

Competition and minigames are going to be really fun to do, but are a lower priority: probably not in the next several months. Kanji Invader reminds me of Typing of the Dead. There's just stupid amounts of fun to be had there. I'm looking forward to it.

Is that the typing game you and Scott were playing that one time? Where you had to type words to kill things? I keep forgetting to ask you what game that was, because my brother never really learned to type and wants to learn and I told him about that game and he said it sounded perfect.

Also, I'm considering posting a bunch of pictures of you on facebook, and then commenting on them and sending you all sorts of requests and stuff.

Actually, I'm not. I lied.

Yep, that's the one. This topic reminded me of it too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuxlPhks2UY&feature=related