Since being released for 3DS just over a month ago, 10 million notes have already been exchanged through Swapnote. Considering the size of the 3DS install base is still relatively small, it’s an impressive achievement. Swapnote is, however, hardly perfect, and a lot of that has to do with the limitations of the 3DS itself as Jeremy outlined last month. Namely, it’s impossible to share notes with strangers or anyone beyond the 100 people you’re limited to being friends with on 3DS. There were ways Nintendo could have worked around this, but the situation was almost far worse. As discussed at length in the latest edition of the roundtable Iwata Asks discussion series, Swapnote was originally developed for the DSi and was nearly ready for release at the end of 2009.
Even before the idea of a picture diary for DSi came up in late 2008 (as a response to the lack of downloadable software for the system), Daiji Imai of Nintendo’s Network Business Department had been interested in creating a maternity health record book. The idea was to keep a record of a child’s development that could then be shared with him or her once they were older. This morphed into an idea of a picture diary that was iterated on numerous times. One of the keys was that notes would not be typed; handwriting was deemed to be a warmer, more capable way of expressing one’s feelings. And while it can be hard to read people’s scribbled notes at times, that decision was without a doubt for the best.
