ChrisCarella.Com

This presentation provides a nice primer on Facebook games. Some...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:09:00 -0500

This presentation provides a nice primer on Facebook games. Some of you have alreday graduated past this presentation but others still think monetizing Facebook games is a new and untested idea.

We continue to make great progress on BlitzPick Baseball. There...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:04:00 -0500

We continue to make great progress on BlitzPick Baseball.

There is just 25 more days until Major League Baseball’s opening day. Head over to BlitzPick Baseball to sign up for our Facebook fan page and bookmark our app!

"From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit"

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:29:16 -0500

“From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit”

- John Edson, Lunar Design via Work Matters

Gaming to Save the World - Jane Mcgonigal’s appearance on...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:04:27 -0500

Gaming to Save the World - Jane Mcgonigal’s appearance on CNN to discuss Evoke. A great primer on the game.

Pay attention to Evoke, which is combing games, education, entrepreneurship, and world change.

The Progress Bar

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:51:00 -0500

We are starting to see a widespread adoption of the progress bar game mechanic to motivate user behaviors. LinkedIn has been doing this for a long time. Facebook games are now using it to motivate players to bookmark and fan their app, since in a post-notification world that allows the game to communicate with the player more easily. Finally, a number of new non-gaming web startups (like Homerun.com) are using the progress bar to take users through sign-up and profile creation.

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-3-7)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:57:56 -0500

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-3-7):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Gabe Zichermann’s funware for (non)profits.

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:50:30 -0500

Gabe Zichermann’s funware for (non)profits.

Game incentives are the carrot

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:11:35 -0500

This Farmville promotion grew Bing’s Facebook fan page from 100K fans to over 500K fans in the 24 hours the campaign ran. Singing up for a fan page is an easy way to get virtual currency compared to entering a credit card or participating in an offers program.

More at Inside Facebook

Photo

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:00:43 -0500

WoW is still king

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:32:00 -0500

This caught my eye today from an Inside Social Games post titled, Social Games Plant the Seed for Growing Online Communities:

According to WoW statistics, the average user spends 22.7 hours per week playing the game. Contrast that with a recent PopCap study, which showed that only 12 percent of social gamers are addicted enough spend 10 or more hours per week gaming. But WoW has about 12 million players, while FarmVille alone has 83 million monthly active users.

WoW’s 12M players pay them $14.99 a month while Farmville’s average revenue per user is probably closer to $1.50. That puts World of Warcraft around $180M/mo and Farmville near $125M/mo.

Approaching the Body as an Input Surface More gestures and...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:39:18 -0500

Approaching the Body as an Input Surface

More gestures and alternative input research technologies.

A follow up on Facebook notifications

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:07:35 -0500

AllFacebook reports:

Just over 24 hours after Facebook turned off application notifications, developers are reporting a dramatic decrease in traffic. Speaking to a number of developers, we’ve heard traffic has decreased in the range of 10 to 50 percent, depending on the application, most hovering between an 18 to 27 percent decrease. While our poll sample was small, Facebook developers are now entering the “post-notifications era”.

Game Mechanics in Software Engineering

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:25:00 -0500

Unit Testing Achievements

Unlock achievements for running your test suite!

Works with nose, unittest, and Django

Tested with Python 2.6 and 3.1

Entry points for discovering more achievements

Score achievements for unit testing! Some of the achievment names are hilarious and its a great commentary on using game mechanics to motivate user behavior.

Unit Testing Achievements on Github (thanks @d_a_l_l)

who killed the creative process?

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:27:00 -0500

I was looking for a bit of inspiration tonight and started to Google Blog search for posts about the creative process, a topic I think a lot about. I’m interested in the general concept of the creative process but even more interested in understanding and optimizing my own. I came across this great post by @PMmashable and @leximaven about managing the creative process in the work place. I thought the entire post was a great read for managers and creatives alike but this point jumped out at me with regards to my own process :

From the PM:

Remove distractions from their work day. Have you ever tried to work with your young child asking you a million questions? It’s not easy. Same rule applies to a creative person. The more interruptions to their creative flow, the less likely their creative ideas will grow. Make project rules of engagement that reduce the amount of interruptions to the creative team. Schedule and stick to meetings, so they know when they need to go into meeting mode and leave creative mode.

From the Creative:

A child asking a million questions is a child being himself. However, nothing is worse than having to switch directions 542 times a day, then still being expected to deliver top-notch projects. We need to focus; we need to tune into the highly creative parts of the project (and our brains), because they’re often the most time consuming. Expecting us to be able to “turn on” at any time and not respecting our schedules is extremely frustrating—and so inefficient. Instead, understand how we like to work. We get that you’ll need to talk to us. We’re open to that. Most often, though, give us a head’s up so we can mentally change gears.

Working with startups, I get interrupted frequently. I wear a lot of hats, gets asked to impromptu meetings and help solve fire drills. At the same time, I have the flexibility to make my own schedule and can often block out part of or full days to explore the creative process.

I tend to have my Eureka moments after traditional work hours, during walks where I start out by brainstorming on other things or during mindless moments like washing dishes. They usually come after hours of web research, brand immersion (if required) and leisure activities including music, media and video games.

The night before...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:34:00 -0500

Facebook is deprecating application notifications tomorrow. Notifications are the messages Facebook games send you with application news (e.g. “new crops available”), social activity (i.e.”Becky just sent you a gift”) and calls to action (e.g. “your pet misses you. Visit him now”). Notifications were viewed as spammy and Facebook has removed them to enhance the overall user experience. They have added the application and games dashboard to replace some of the notification functionality and they are now letting applications request a users email address for direct communications.

It should be interesting to watch apps change their communication and and engagement strategies tomorrow. Some game developers have told me that notifications account for over 50% of their games traffic. We saw similar numbers during our BlitzPick play-testing. New engagement strategies will be an important part of the social games business. Some developers have already been testing new strategies, but starting tomorrow they will no longer have notifications to fall back on.

InsideFacebook posted the following tips in January:

5 Opportunities to Re-Engage Users

So under the new system, what actions do you need to take to ensure users come back to your application? Here are the various phases of the application engagement funnel:

Collect Email - When a user installs an application you’ll have the option of collecting their email. Whether or not you should prompt them to disclose their email immediately should be determined through A/B Testing. Ultimately this will become one of the most important methods for re-engaging users.

Bookmark Users - Whether or not you get the user’s email, you should encourage a user to bookmark your application as soon as the user installs it. As they interact with your app you should continue to promote the bookmark application. Bookmarked applications get a clear benefit over other apps so this step is the most critical.

Recently Used App News Items - If the user didn’t bookmark your application and you don’t have their email, you need to take drastic action. By posting news items, there’s a chance they will be visible under the recently used applications area of the Dashboard. As we mentioned above, you aren’t one of the three most recently used applications they will be pushed onto another page.

Counters - If the user did bookmark your application you are fortunate. You can now post counter updates to notify the user that there are recent activities within your application that they should take note of. As soon as they click on the counter they will be brought to your application.

Fan updates - The last model for engaging users is through targeted updates, if they became a fan of your Facebook Page. You should have a place throughout your application which encourages users to become a fan. This provides yet another way of engaging users.

It’s important to note that these are not the only ways to get users to engage with your application. The remaining methods are based on user-to-user communication about your application. The two primary user-to-user methods are: stream stories and a new inbox tool for applications.

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-2-21)

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:25:36 -0500

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-2-21):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Using Ice Cream to Understand Frequent-Flier Miles

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:32:41 -0500

Using Ice Cream to Understand Frequent-Flier Miles:

I dug up this old (but good) NYTimes article today for something I am working on. It’s about game mechanics (points) and ice cream… everyone loves at least one of those topics right?

Students were given a choice between two simple tasks. One would take six minutes, and the students were told that they would get a gallon of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream as a reward. The other would require seven minutes of work, and the payment would be a gallon of Haagen-Dazs pistachio.

Not surprisingly, since the second option involved more work and a less popular flavor, only about a quarter of the students chose it.

But the researchers also repeated the experiment with a couple of tweaks. In the new version, the six-minute task led to a payoff of 60 points, and the seven-minute task brought 100 points.

The researchers then told the students that anyone who finished with between 50 and 99 points would be given a gallon of vanilla ice cream. Anyone with 100 points would get pistachio.

Practically, there was no difference between the two experiments. But the outcomes ended up being very different.

With the lure of points added to the mix, more than half of students chose the longer task and the less desirable pistachio prize that went with it. Independent of their actual value, “points” apparently give people some satisfaction.

Full article at NYT

Safer Driving Through Gaming

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:44:00 -0500

Safer Driving Through Gaming:

GreenRoad is applying very simple game mechanics to make people safer drivers. Like the Prius’ game mechanics teach people to be more fuel efficient drivers, GreenRoad teaches people to be safer drivers.

The GreenRoad system looks simple from the outside: There’s a two-inch device on the dashboard that starts the day with a green light. If a driver brakes hard, swerves or turns recklessly, the light turns yellow. If the driver continues to drive erratically the light stays yellow. If it gets worse the light turns red. That’s it. But like a lot of apparently simple ideas, there’s a lot more going on under the hood.

[Read More]

Enjoyed Jesse Schell’s Dice talk on the upcoming...

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:34:44 -0500

Enjoyed Jesse Schell’s Dice talk on the upcoming gameification of life. Worth the 30 minutes.

"Since June, I have been hanging out in the New York tech scene (and getting back into the NYC-kicks..."

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:44:51 -0500

“Since June, I have been hanging out in the New York tech scene (and getting back into the NYC-kicks scene as a sneakerheadVC) and think the environment that cradled jazz and created Hip-Hop is now supporting a new generation of creative talent.”

- Phin Barnes, NYC: a winning culture and the start-up