The Wall Street Journal has published recent comments made by Playfish’s CEO, Kristian Segerstrale. They are among the first public comments since Playfish’s acquisition by Electronic Arts late last year. One of the more notable comments made by Kristian was that Playfish plans to release a social game based on a well-known EA brand this year.  This brings some meat to EA’s stated plan to transition from their console retail business suffering to a digital distribution model.  Specifically, they are tying their existing and well-known brands with the gaming expertise of high-quality social game makers, Playfish.
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Google has been attempting to compete with Facebook and the social market by attempting develop their social identity.  With the releases of OpenSocial Widgets, iGoogle, Social Gadgets for iGoogle widgets and their connections of Google accounts to Youtube, Blogspot and others, the goal of a unified Google identity is certainly a feasible competitor to a unified Facebook identity.  Google recently announced Google Social Search, and is attempting to make another move on the social space.
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There is certainly no lack of Apple Tablet information circulating the news web these days, but as the January 27th announcement date approaches, some of the key information is beginning to firm up.  As the feature-set becomes more concrete, the implications of the device become clearer – specifically, the potential increases for the Apple Tablet to be a new avenue for social games.
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As an avid social gamer, I find myself constantly seeking out different ways of finding new games on my iPhone and on Facebook. If I stick to making choices based on recommendations from the same people, I’ll end up only playing games of a certain type, and may miss out on the wide variety presented by these platforms. That said, I often find myself wondering how the current Facebook and iPhone application directories contrast in their job of presenting a user with interesting new game content. I analyze that here, looking at the areas of first discovery, navigation, sorting and suggestions.
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As an amateur video maker who works in social games, I find it extremely surprising that Social Games, once derided as having no possible profit potential, are able to generate powerful revenues. Because in the video world, ‘monetizing content’ is still a far-away dream.
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Last night I got into a conversation over dinner with one of my friends about the consolidation of platforms, the ubiquity of data, and cross-platform applications. It’s something which I’ve been thinking about increasingly as I want to be able to purchase various digital devices and easily access my own information and applications on those devices without any time consuming configuration process. While we aren’t there yet, we are rapidly watching the technology industry solve many of these problems. Below are some of my observations about the state of the current shift toward a multi-screen, single platform, app economy.
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It’s all too often that I see a new company unleash a new design and I immediately think to myself “What the hell they were thinking?” The page may look good from an aesthetic standpoint but when it comes to usability, it’s clear that the company could have improved the way things were laid out. This blog as well has some significant design issues (which are currently being improved) but it doesn’t mean we aren’t paying close attention to the metrics.
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Every morning I wake up and click through my blackberry to see what messages I’ve received. For the most part, I don’t receive anything important between 2 AM and 8 AM but there are still large numbers of messages that I sift through. The most annoying of those messages are the night time spam comments on this blog. Disqus does an absolutely horrendous job at filtering out spam which means 10 to 15 minutes of my morning everyday are spent sifting through spam.
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A new report published by eMarketer today suggests that one of the best ways brands can capture the attention of internet users is by “providing relevant news and analysis” as well as providing “new ideas and thinking”. In other words, brands need to educate the user. By providing educational content, the theory is that internet users will reciprocate by providing support to the brands that educate them.
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If you have a lot of traffic, you instantly get a large valuation in the internet industry but what if your service stops working as it’s supposed to? Digg had a novel solution to the social discovery issue: let users vote on the articles they like most. It’s an effective model however it is most effective at doing one thing: determining what content its community likes most. Want to know what the general web likes or what various segments of the internet likes? You won’t be able to find that out with Digg.
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