The video is Carnegie Mellon University Professor, games developer and former Disney imagineer Jesse Schell on the surprise success of the likes of Farmville, Webkinz, Club Penguin, Wii Fit and X-Box Achievements. All of these are concepts that must have sounded insane on paper when they were proposed three-or-four years ago and then went on [...]
January 14, 2010
Late December and early January see the seasonal appearance of a popular type of blog post: ‘My Predictions for [Next Year]’. They’re a great stock-in-trade because you can say whatever you like and nobody can prove you wrong until the end of the following year, by which time everyone’s forgotten. I’ve written a couple in [...]
January 11, 2010
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reported as having changed his mind about privacy. The recent set of changes to the site’s T&Cs in December – which rendered members’ names, profile picture, gender, network, fan pages and friends visible to the world unless they explicitly changed their settings – merely reflects societal norms, Zuckerberg says. People [...]
December 22, 2009
The latest data from Hitwise suggests that the battle between social networks is pretty much a one-horse race. Facebook wins. Top 10 Social Networking Websites & Forums – November 2009 Facebook gets four times the traffic of its closest competitor, MySpace. Twitter – so beloved of the media and apparently the word of the year – will [...]
December 21, 2009
The FT reports that The Economist plans to make headroads into social networks: The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, in another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers. via FT.com / UK – [...]
October 18, 2008
Twitter has been going mad today on the subject of Qwitter (There’s also Twitter Karma, much the same thing, but I became aware of it earlier than Qwitter thanks to @ssethi). The basic function of these sites is to show people you follow (receive updates from) who aren’t receiving your own updates. So what’s the point of [...]
November 26, 2007
Whisking through my unread posts today, two items struck me as demanding a little follow-up. First of all, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship. The nature of the paper is pretty obvious from its title, though that is not to imply that it is not well-written, intelligent and provoking. [...]
November 9, 2007
News Blog – Daily Brief: Official: Facebook Poised to “Take Over The World” – Portfolio.com Among other things, it will allow businesses to set up their own Facebook pages and then reach out to real, live users — that is, potential customers — based on the interests they have described in their profiles. If those interests [...]
June 29, 2006
The signs of Web 2.0 are clear. Look for some aspect of community collaboration, of user-generated content, of the ability to customise the content, of a desktop-like application experience. But why exactly should we care? In the words of a BusinessWeek headline on June 5, 2006, why is that “Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning� Users [...]
March 4, 2010