Hi, it’s your friends from Capcom Unity! Did you know that’s just a bit over a year since Capcom Unity 2.0 went live? True story! Seth, Christian, Tom and I — and now Shawn and Joveth — have been so nose to the grindstone that we totally forgot that the post-Wordpress version of Unity exited the Beta stage in early August of 2008. At that point, we had just switched over from the Unity 1.0 Frankensteinien mish-mash of off the shelf blogging and forum software to the improved, slightly broken 2.0, which integrated site-wide IDs, email, forums, personal blogging and media hosting, groups and so much more.

Despite getting older, we’ve managed to actually become sexier. In the last six months, we’ve added a Twitter box to the site, become proactive on Facebook, integrated instantaneous translation support for seven different languages, added The Awesome box to let you know what stories we like/are important, launched Auctions and Raffles to give you something to do with your Unity points, branched out to being a part of the IGN community and added many, many behind the scenes tweaks to (hopefully) improve your overall experience. Oh yeah, we’ve also added two full-time Team Unity members, Shawn and Joveth. We’re slowly growing into an unstoppable army of internet dorks dedicated to helping you celebrate all things Capcomish. More information from the management, after the jump, so please follow along!

The last 24 hours alone have seen yet another signficant pile o’ improvements to Your Unity Experience (TM pending). Here’s what we’ve just bequeathed you, just in case you haven’t noticed:

1. Auctions now appearing on the front page. Yay!
2. Rejiggered The Awesome sidebar on the left to look sharper, give you more details when you mouse-over a story graphic.
3. Added a “Connect to Unity” box on the upper ight side that currently features links to our Twitter feed, the Capcom Facebook page, the Unity blog RSS feed (a game’s journalist’s best friend) and the Ask Capcom forum. We’ll continue to add to this as nerds create more places to stalk ex-girlfriends online.
4. More stories on the blog page = less scrolling for you!

What’s on the drawing board for the next year? Here are a few of the skunkworks projects that are slowly coming together:

1. Integrated chat feature. We’re talking with a major software developer about integrating your Capcom Unity ID with their chat software so that you will be able to instantly yak it up with other Unity folks the second you hit the site.
2. Streaming video. Yeah, all of our trailers are neat, but imagine if the Whiteboard actually streamed video? Or if we hosted game nights where we showed off new titles early. Or instant video feeds from Capcom events like CAPTIVATE and E3. My favorite possibility is picture-in-picture video streaming for Play Against Capcom Fridays, so everyone in Internetland can hear me swear as I lose to you guys in SFIV. 
3. The official Capcom Podcast is in the works, a joint effort of dedicated worker bees in Japan like Ben Judd and the Capcom Unity staff.
4. Adding tabs to the Twitter box to loop in individual Capcom product Twitter feeds like @Claire_Darkside and @DarkVoidGame alongside the almighty @CapcomUnity feed.

Stick around, we’re just getting started. And Happy Birthday to all of us in the Unity posse. I hope there will be cake.