Three Things You Didn&#8217;t Know

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.

Tags: #followfriday, Twitter

3 Comments

Happiness–There’s An App for that

June 27th, 2009 by AV Flox in iPhone

There seems to be an app for everything, but an app for happiness? Really?

I’ve been following the work of Signal Patterns Labs since I took a personality test of theirs a year or so ago. Signal Patterns develops psychology-based web applications like the personality test I took. Recently, they’ve been expanding their efforts and moving into the mobile territory with self-help, positive psychology apps that are supposed to “help people improve their well-being and relationships with others.”

livehappy Live Happy is one of these apps. Developed by the iPhone by the Signal Patterns Labs research team together with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of the book The How of Happiness and a professor of psychology, Live Happy offers mood tests, a diary for random acts of kindness, an album for photos so users may “savor moments,” and a way to track goals.

I bought it on impulse early one morning after receiving an e-mail from Signal Patterns. I’ve had it for a few weeks now and been surprisingly active in recording things like goals and things that make me happy. When my friend Atherton Bartelby and I were discussing useless but fun iPhone apps, I suggested it to him.

“That’s way too California hippie for me,” the Manhattan-based designer told me.

Maybe it is. But you know what? I kind of like it.

pass it on!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.

6 Comments

Twitter is a Spam Farm

June 17th, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter

“Twitter’s value is in links…. What happened when Twitter started, it was supposed to change the face of communications–what happened with all of that?” asks Loren Feldman, founder of 1938Media in his most recent diatribe about the tech industry. “It’s a link farm, it’s a spam farm. There’s no conversations. It doesn’t f*cking matter, you idiots, changing your location to Iran? Jesus, you’re f*cking stupid. Unbelievable! … It’s all a bunch of f*cking lies! No one cares about your Twitter. Just put up your link and that’s it!”

His outburst touches on several issues Feldman has with the 140 Conference, in particular comments made yesterday by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures who talked about the power of Twitter in getting links out.

The 140 Character Conference (#140conf) focused on how Twitter is changing the way individuals and industries do a lot of things. From the use of Twitter in diplomacy to breaking news, from personal relationships to connecting with our favorite stars, the world is no longer what it once was and the 140 Conference sought to explore that.

Whether or not the conference is essential or even beneficial, I don’t know, because I did not attend. What I can say is that Twitter is a great tool. Yes, you can use it for links, but the key word here is not “links,” it’s “use.” Twitter is a tool. You can create a spam farm or you can create conversation. You can follow people who primarily communicate with links, or you can connect with people who generate discussions. You can command an audience within your industry or network with friends.

It’s entirely up to you.

So if you wake up and one morning and find yourself buried in horsesh*t, well, baby, I guess you’re a horse.

pass it on!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.

Tags: #140conf, 140 Character Conference, 1938media, Loren Feldman, Twitter

9 Comments

From Flames to Fame: Views vs. Credibility

June 1st, 2009 by AV Flox in blogging

My Twitter stream and inbox caught on fire this afternoon following a post by Dave McClure, a software developer and marketing nerd in Silicon Valley, regarding the importance of visual cues in calls to action (CTAs).

McClure, who begins the post with a disclaimer that he has no professional training in user interface (UI) design, but goes on to say he has 25 years of experience, illustrated his point about visual cues by employing the rear of a woman shown bent over. In his post, The Faces! The FACES! It’s ALL About the F**king FACES!, McClure writes:

If there’s one thing i’ve learned from all that geeking around, it’s that UI typically works best when it’s butt-simple. As a famous PayPal colleague of mine once stated succinctly: “Users are Stupid… give them something to click on.” Wise words. You’ll do well not to forget them, Young Jedi.

However it’s not always enough to simply give people underlined text links to click on… rather, it’s important to have strong associated visual cues that encourage users to take action. Sometimes that can be as simple as just creating a beveled, slightly rounded, 3D-looking button with a color offset and some text that identifies a Call-To-Action (CTA).

Many people have become trained thru years of working with operating systems to click on things that look like buttons. particularly BIG buttons. particularly BIG buttons with pictures or icons. they are almost irresistible. Go on. Click it! you know you want to!

But — and i do mean butt — even big buttons with big graphics aren’t always going to capture user attention. What has gradually happened over the past 10 years is that online consumer interfaces have started to zero in on basic human behaviors, recognition systems, and patterns. many of those offline interactions start with the simplest of human interactions — looking at someone’s face.

In fact, you could argue that much of the online experience these days is less about reading text, and a lot more about looking at faces, icons, and other visual representations of people.

The post makes good points, but the image employed, while it got him a lot of hits, took the attention away from the ideas McClure is trying to convey.

“I’m drawn to the button,” says Sean Percival, Director of Content at Tsavo Media. “I wouldn’t click it though–it looks too spammy to me. The colors and rounded edges are horrible–the pastel pink dates it extremely. It just doesn’t tell me enough about what I’m clicking.”

Visual cues are important. We click on hundreds of buttons on sites regularly, buttons that employ a single letter, or none at all. We know what symbol represents RSS, that Twitter is the blue t on the aqua background, that Facebook is the white f on the blue background–our minds have made those associations.

Just as they have made the association of scantily-clad human bodies with the likelihood of pop-ups, spam or porn.

McClure is making good points, but he’s undermining himself as an expert by presenting graphic elements that don’t resonate with the message–which is the importance of visual cues in UI design and the forward-looking applications embracing it.

I bring up the inconsistency with my good friend Atherton Bartelby, a graphic designer and associate at DMD Network, a firm specializing in integrated marketing.

“I think there’s a vast distinction between UI and this kind of shoddy attempt to get traffic,” he tells me. “This is not making a point with ‘design,’ this is visually pandering to the lowest common denominator of visitor that any site could possibly imagine. It’s offensive it was even brought into the context of design and UI! ‘Strong associated visual cues’ does not mean shoving an ass in someone’s face.”

Bartelby is not wrong to describe this as an attempt to get traffic. In the comments, a regular reader responds to an objector by saying: “This post is a very Dave tactic. Trying to shock to get attention for a (great) point he is making.”

We all want to be read–that’s how ideas spread–and an outrage gets views like nothing else. But how far can you go without destroying your credibility?

pass it on!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.

Tags: Atherton Bartelby, Dave McClure, DMD Network, Sean Percival, Tsavo Media

5 Comments

Spymaster: A Low-Maintenance Game for a 140-Character World

May 31st, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter

Spymaster

It’s five in the morning and I’m exhausted but I can’t get offline. The reason? A Twitter-based game called Spymaster, much like the Mafia Wars app on Facebook.

Mafia Wars never spoke to me, but Spymaster, with its espionage-based tasks and activities, had an immediate draw. Using OAuth, the game is directly linked to your Twitter account, so there is no need to create another profile to play. You simply click through from an invite on Twitter and begin.

You can pick from a selection of intelligence agencies including the British M16, the American CIA and the Russian FSB. For doing tasks like collecting dead drops or assassinating an ambassador, you get experience points and money–in the currency of the agency you have chosen. This money helps you buy weapons on the black market to increase your attack and defense sums.

Because this is a social game, your attack and defense sums are also related to how many followers you have on Twitter and how many of them you can get in the game.

The more tweeps you bring on board, the stronger you are and the less desirous other players will be of committing an assassination attempt on you. (If they do try and win, they can take a lot of your assets. If they fail, they lose assets to you.)

The game has spread in popularity because of the use of notifications on Twitter, which bear a link to the game and the hashtag #spymaster. Players have the option of turning these notifications on or off, though leaving them on makes a player more money every time he or she does anything. Savvier users turned most off, but many more did not, causing #spymaster to trend quickly, drawing the attention of even more Twitter users.

As of this posting, 140 of my Twitter followers are playing the game. This number includes programmers, graphic designers, CEOs, journalists–all of us deep in our agencies and assassinations ploys, playing at work and long into the night.

How did it come about?

“We all sat around one day, and decided we wanted to do something really fun on Twitter,” says Chris Abad, CEO at iList, the company that created Spymaster. “Eston Bond has been obsessed with the whole spy genre, so we took all that obsession and random knowledge and ran with it.”

iList has developing Twitter-related technology for the past year, but this game didn’t come into being until a couple of months ago, Abad tells me.

“We all kind of knew people were going to like Spymaster,” he says. “As we played in-house, we found ourselves becoming pretty addicted (which subsequently made it a little difficult to stay focused and developing). However, I don’t think anyone predicted the ridiculous levels of growth we’ve seen since the past few days.”

They started sending invites outside the company late on Thursday of last week. Since then, the game has exploded.

What drive in us does it so deeply satisfy that we can’t put it down? I contacted a friend of mine at the University of Melbourne, Darshana Jayemanne, whose studies on social theory and recent work exploring the video game as a form of art are incredibly relevant to the topic:

How has social media changed the way we play?

Games used to have a ritual or ceremonial character, in which a community could reaffirm its sense of cohesiveness and perhaps correct for traumatic events (think of Hektor’s funeral games in The Iliad).

So many of our collective behaviors are affected by technology, it kind of takes the place of ceremonial forms in traditional societies. So it’s small wonder that we observe play-behaviors accumulating around these supposedly utilitarian devices.

Why is Spymaster gaining so much popularity?

The game is similar to some other stuff that’s going around on other sites, and there’s a lot that could be said in general about why these games work. In particular though, I think the sync between the espionage theme and Twitter in particular works very well–Twitter itself feels kind of clandestine, like you’re immersed in these minutiae of other people’s lives as well as sharing select bits of information yourself.

The Twitterverse exists parallel to the mundane
world, a bit like Mail Art or the Trystero in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The stress of just how much to share is central to the spy thriller genre in which various bait-and-switches, mirroring and foreshadowing techniques are similar to the feeling you get piecing together someone’s life from a stream of terse messages.

An unexamined life is not worth spying on.

The other thing is that we all tend to carry around more devices than any ’60s supervillain anyway. And we love to use them for fun as well as business, to use our devices in support of our vices. It’s a quasi-fetishistic activity, in fact, what Walter Benjamin would have called “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”

What drive does it satisfy?

It’s all in the design. Games are set up to organize desires around reward structures. So the design sets up the drive. Once you’re hooked to the reward structures, and can compare your success or failure to others (through points or money or what have you), it’s a self-sustaining process. Or so the designers hope. The “become a vampire/werewolf/zombie/banker/whatever” game apps on Facebook got old quickly–their scope was too limited.

Spymaster, on the other hand, is constantly developing.

“As the game unfolds at higher levels, the storyline will become more intricate and involved and there will be surprises along the way,” Abad tells me. “We really want to push more real-world cooperation and collaboration between players. Especially the experienced players who’ve mastered the basics and really want to get creative.”

Creating a successful game, Jayemanne tells me, “involves carefully gauging the resources you’re asking the player to invest among other things. With Spymaster, for example, they may have got the balance right for their platform. Unlike a video game where you have these huge overheads in terms of time spent playing, equipment investment, social ostracization and so on, Spymaster keeps it simple.”

It’s what he calls an “‘interstitial game’ which appears in the cracks between work and life situations rather than requiring the undivided attention implied in Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ theory.”

“With mobile devices becoming smarter and ever-more pervasive, these games will come into their own,” Jayemanne says.

Abad is aware of the importance of mobile technology. So far Spymaster can only be played on a browser. He tells me that one of the comments they most often hear (other than “can I play?”) is whether they have an iPhone app out yet. It’s in the works.

Now you can really kiss all your productivity bye-bye.

Comments by Chris Abad were appended on June 2, 2009.

Three Things You Didn’t Know

There will be more awesome games like Spymaster. iList has built a platform around this technology and, according to Abad, “intend to aggressively pursue this direction.”
Usually players are wounded in assassination attempts. But they can be killed. Killing them takes them completely out of the game for 15 minutes.
You can’t buy the title of Agency Director in the game with n00dz. According to Abad, only the product team get that title. You’re welcome to send them to me, however. If I like them, you can even come play at my safe house.

Of possible interest:
The Spymaster Backlash Begins by MG Siegler at TechCrunch

SPIELRAUM: Games, Art and Cyberspace by Darshana Jayemanne at the University of Melbourne

Photo montage features an image of me by Derek Overbey and an image of a steam pipe explosion in New York by Peter Foley

pass it on!

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Copy HTML:

If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed or Email Feed.