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.

Development was originally scheduled to take only three months, though it ultimately took three years. One of the early delays came as a result of the realization that, as a product from the Network Business, it should have some kind of network feature -- the ability to share. Another important breakthrough followed that, which is the ability to watch a note be drawn rather than the end result appearing all at once.

As 2010 was approaching, Swapnote was nearly done -- all that remained was to debug it before it could be released. But as alluded to above, the frustrating limitations of Swapnote on 3DS were even more extreme on DSi. With no system-wide friends list, that functionality had to be built directly into the software. Worse yet, the friends list was limited to just 18 people, less than one-fifth of what's possible on 3DS. That alone would have killed much of its appeal and made it more difficult for unintended uses to develop such as Ben Gray's tabletop RPG seen in the video above.

The Iwata Asks provides some interesting insight into the way the developers tried to tackle problems like keeping people coming back, as they discovered many people lost interest in keeping a physical daily diary before long. It also sheds some light on features that I had taken for granted such as SpotPass/StreetPass providing a notification for when new notes have arrived. On DSi, users were forced to manually look to see if any new notes had been received. Removing the disappointment and hassle of that makes the app a great deal more attractive to use to a person like me who can't draw (and therefore has little interest in attempting to create notes) but enjoys seeing what others have been cooking up.

It would have been nice had Swapnote been included with the system at launch, but it seems like we had to wait for all of the good stuff to show up on 3DS -- Swapnote, the eShop, and games worth playing. Swapnote has been a particularly pleasant surprise, and for me it's been the best reason to continue building my friends list. (I know I can't be the only one that continues to use the 3DS as a primarily single-player platform, Mario Kart or not.) It's hardly reaching its potential due to the restrictions on sharing that are still apparent in the 3DS version, and I'm hoping Nintendo will realize the opportunity for Swapnote to become even bigger if it were to introduce the ability to share with more than your 100 friends. The subject was never broached in the interview, but just thinking about a YouTube for notes located within the app gets me giddy about what Swapnote could evolve into, should Nintendo feel so inclined.