Life Is Just A Game. And Then You Buy.
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 24, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Are we all just becoming unwitting players in a huge video game?
 In the future, shopping may be a little more like Minority Report than we’d like. |
I’ve been working on a project for awhile that involves turning pretend money into real money. Sounds crazy, right? People generally think so when I mention the basic idea, but when I go into the details, they say “aha” and want to invest in it. For what should be obvious reasons, I can’t go into those details, but I can give you a few little clues. It involves cognitive dissonance, self-esteem, and the excitement of buying things. I actually thought maybe the idea was crazy, until I watched a presentation (videos below) that Jesse Schell (founder of Schell Games) gave at DICE 2010. In it, he discusses a lot of ideas about augmented reality and consumer habits, the insane amounts of money made with Pengin Club, FarmVille and Mafia Wars, and how life is really just a game in which we’re slowly becoming unwitting players. One example he uses is how the Ford Hybrid SmartGauge EcoGuide dashboards are really just a game that makes the driver “drive greener”. He also explains why the iPad is “stupid”, likening the iPhone to a Swiss Army Knife, and suggesting the iPad is a “Swiss Army Knife of Kitchen Utensils”. He reminds us that NO-ONE expected the success of games on Facebook, the Wii
Privacy & Social Network Contact Management
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 13, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010Think you’re building a powerful contact list with sites like Facebook? Try exporting your contacts. AND: Why you might as well get used to a new definition of the word privacy.
 Online privacy? Puh! The future probably lies with initiatives like the DataPortability Project |
I was amused recently when people expressed surprise that Mark Zuckerberg publicly declared privacy a thing of the past, and wondered if the alleged tell-all by a former Facebook employee was for real. Please, people. How can you possibly expect to share vast amounts of personal data online using shopping sites, Facebook, and cloud services like Google Docs and then expect to maintain any semblence of true privacy? This apparently may be a generational issue, and personally, I find myself bridging the generations on this one. This whole issue was driven home hard for me recently, and here’s how: As part of my work over the past ten years, I’ve experimented casually with forms of social networking going all the way back to the now-defunct GeoCities.com. Although I’ve often consulted with clients to implement the various available tools, I’ve done little to use them myself in a purposeful way; although I’m a very social person, I’m also a very private person. As an example, although I’ve logged into Facebook daily for over a year, I don’t use it as a serious business tool, and don’t very often share serious personal thoughts on issues there. I’ve mostly used it to reconnect with old friends, meet a few new ones, and banter humorously with them. I also only have about 150 friends, because I’m not what what in pop lingo has been called a Facebook Friend Whore. In spite of this, and in spite of not being active on LinkedIn, Xing, or other more business-oriented sites, I have a primary network of about 300 valued contacts, and an extended contact list of maybe 1500 people. So while preparing to launch some new projects this year, I was aware that I’d have to update and verify my contact lists, which I try to do annually. The problem? Like me, you may have noticed (depending on your tech lifestyle) that – because of the pervasive adoption of texting, Skype, and Facebook – your e-mail volume and phone time have dropped off significantly over the past year. A lot of casual connecting – which is the very basis of successful networking – happens on sites like Facebook. Historically, I would maintain most of my contacts in Outlook or Thunderbird, and export this info to Excel to “massage” the data. This became profoundly problematic this year, when I was reminded that Facebook and other sites make it nearly impossible to export your contacts. In fact, they may shut down your account if you use certain tools to do so. So after doing a bunch of research, I ended up Read the rest of this entry »
Did Facebook Pay Miley Cyrus To Quit Twitter? Do We Care?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 30, 2009 by admin in Technology
Friday, October 30th, 2009As Web 2.0 becomes so old it starts actually smelling bad, Social Networking starts a slow and ugly death. Don’t worry. The Real Time Web will save us all.
In spite of the fact that hillbilly superstar Miley Cyrus (c’mon, her dad’s name is Billy Ray, and he’s from Flatwoods, KY, population 7605) thinks that everyone should leave Twitter and it should be banned from this universe, it’s not likely that social networking or the real time web is going away any time soon. As it turns out, Web 2.0 (whatever it really was) was clearly a failure. Otherwise, we’d be talking about “Web 3.0″ or “Web 2.1″, right? And in spite of the fact that “blog” was Merriam Webster’s 2004 word of the year, the average person still barely understands what they are and how much they’ve really impacted the web in general, and search results in particular. So as a buzzword-hungry world of business & finance struggles to settle on its latest vaporware startup terminology, we’re left with the tragic results. Soon there will only be two relevant search engines, largely driven by social web results. And to aid the SEO-spammed utter banality of it all, camera manufacturers are marketing cameras either for obssessively taking your own picture or constantly photographing your life as it occurs. Please. I don’t know about you, but my life is generally boring enough in person that sharing it with others could serve no rational purpose. We originally wrote about the real time web and social networking in August 2008, we had just hoped it might go away by now. Maybe little Miley is right. Maybe the Internet is a “dangerous place“. Let us heed her ironic megastar attention whore warning: “honestly, people…you’re unhealthy…you need to get out and do stuff and be in the world instead of all hunched over your laptop…all I did was lay in bed on my computer and sit there and eat ice cream late at night.” Personally, I think her claim that she quit Twitter to “protect her privacy” is complete twaddle and she’s probably being paid by Facebook. Besides, Twittew pwobabwee has a Pwivacy Powicy at weest as sowid as Googoos.
Social Search: Who Gives A Twinglebook?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 24, 2009 by admin in Technology
Saturday, October 24th, 2009Will Social Search be an awesome new way to search the web, or a sewage-filled spam hose?
I was wondering why no-one seemed to give a twinglebook about the fact that Microsoft struck search deals with Twitter and Facebook, and that Google not only has their own deal with Twitter, but plans to launch their own “Social Search” in the near future. Then I remembered that the average person doesn’t know their Firefox from a hole in the ground (YouTube link, video is also below). Well, I have to admit that I care; depending on how both Microsoft and Google choose to integrate real-time search results from social networking sites, this could either be really interesting, or really annoying and/or paranoia-inducing. More so the annoying part; ever since SEO became a parasitic, opportunistic business instead of an integrated part of web site development, search results have become less and less useful on a steady downward curve. The beauty of Twitter Search is its real-time results; the ugly downside is that all those results are spam-infested Tweets! Who cares how fast you can search multi-level marketer’s tweets (see Will the Twitter Firehose Become a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose) ? In my opinion, the only real value of these relationships the two search giants are building with Twitter would be real-time search of everything but Twitter noise. Hopefully they’ll pursue that, but Bing’s beta version of Twitter search appears to be just, well, Twitter search. How mixing this stuff in with regular results is going to benefit anyone is beyond me. These moves also come at an odd time, when both Facebook and Twitter’s growth are flattening out. And the paranoia mentioned earlier? Google’s Social Search will require you to be logged in with a Google Profile, and will connect additional search results via your existing “friends” on various social networking services, thereby tracking all your searches and connecting them with people you know. But perhaps I fret about this sort of thing too much. After all, Googoo has a excewent pwivacy powicy. Read the rest of this entry »
Your Facebook & Twitter Activity Is Tracked More Closely Than You Think
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 25, 2009 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009Sentiment Analysis & Social Media Monitoring are compiling massive amounts of data for trend tracking, but as a side effect, compile massive amounts of data about individuals as well.
Next time you’re Twittering your thoughts, making a status post, or taking a quiz on Facebook, remember that not only are you creating part of an eternal online identity and probably sharing your information with more people than you thought (especially see question 3 in that ACLU quiz), you’re also helping shape marketing and political decisions. We’ve written jokingly about Googlewanking and Googlewashing before, but the two latest big things on the web – Social Media Monitoring and Sentiment Analysis – are making the web a different place. On the abstractly interesting side of this, sentiment analysis sort of renders the typical CNN or Time user poll (typically called a Voodoo Poll) even more absurd than they were. Online polls have always had major shortcomings, but the main one was that of limited demographic diversity, i.e.: only dorks who take CNN polls take CNN polls. A recent classic example of their susceptibility to gaming and inaccuracy was when “moot”, the 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, became the “World’s Most Influential Person” in a Time user poll. The difference with these newly evolving data mining tools is that they Read the rest of this entry »