The Next Big Thing: Frictionless, Wireless, Virtual Economies
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 27, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Will the mobile phone powered transfer of virtual currencies created by online games and social networking allow the millenials to Twitter away their inheritances?
A couple of years ago I had a neighbor who made a few hundred extra dollars a month playing online games. How did he get paid to play games? By acquiring virtual goods like magic weapons and selling them to other numb-nuts who would actually pay real money to advance in the same online games. If you’re not already familiar with the idea, it may sound absurd, but it has become quite an industry, sometimes referred to as Gold Farming. And over the past year, it’s started taking an even stranger turn. The web sites IMVU and myYearbook have established a cross-site virtual currency exchange, and some think Facebook Credits will not only expand the site’s revenue by hundreds of millions of dollars annually, but may even become the de facto currency of the Internet. Although as of this writing, the idea of connecting these “economies” into a larger exchange remains in its infancy, IMVU and myYearbook have also launched Currency Connect, which promises the rollout of more virtual currency partners throughout 2010, and VirtualCurrencyPlatforms.com currently lists 27 viable platforms. So how seriously should we take these new virtual economies? Pretty seriously, according to the Chinese government, which fears that instabilities in virtual economies could destabilize real money, among other things. Add to the speculative possibilities of all this real and imaginary money changing hands the emerging models for frictionless and inexpensive money transfers using mobile phone-based tools like Twitpay, Square, OboPay, GetGiving, Zong, and Kwedit, and the possibilities for truly viable virtual economies are enormous. Below are a few demos of the leading-edge startups, and quick summaries of how each service works. You can also find a more in-depth look at these “frictionless” transaction ideas in this Wired piece. 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 »
No Need To Get Graphic
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 15, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Saturday, August 15th, 2009Or is there? These handy infographics of Aircrashes and dead Twitter users could save your life and your time.
Statistics Of The “Social Media Revolution” |
If you want to die on your next flight, take an Aeroflot DC-9 from the United States to Russia in August, and make sure to get a seat in First Class. At least that’s what this interesting chart suggests. Sometimes an infographic can say so much more than words, which makes the fact that I’m writing about it a little ironic (see infographic below). As I’ve pointed out before, 78.6% of all statistics mentioned in casual conversation are inaccurate. But I still find infographics and flowcharts fascinating. How else could you really wrap your mind around what a million dollars looks like ? This set of graphics, for instance, speaks volumes about how projects really evolve, and in a way that almost every guilty party involved would probably find amusing. And in spite of all the hype about Twitter (including the info in the clip at left) this set of graphics quickly puts things in perspective. The GOP/Dem debates about war and health care that I recently mentioned in this piece can also be summed up more quickly with two photos and some simple copy. What I’d really find interesting though, is if someone made an interactive graphic of how people from a broad set of demographics use their time throught the day. Oh wait. Never mind. Have any interesting infographics of your own to share? Read the rest of this entry »