Once again, it’s the simple things…

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I am a personal fan (I like Zombomatic more than the later released Tunnel Trouble) of the gameplay, concept and execution. However, even with the game being promoted (it is featured on the home page) I would have guessed that the plug-in installation would have marginalized its potential.

Could Zombomatic make it to #1?

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I’ve tried a few free services and settled on one that does the job right.   It’s called readr.com.  The reason why I like this free solution the best is that it doesn’t monkey around with your feeds in a way that technically or aesthetically mucks up display on Facebook (which many other potential solutions did).  Setup is incredibly simple, and there’s more to aggregate than just RSS feeds.  Supported sites/sources include:

• MySpace
• Bebo
• Flickr
• Photobucket
• Blogger
• Wordpress
• Twitter
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• YouTube
• last.fm

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I also recently started a new online marketing blog - Online Marketing Performance.

These blogs were started as they held two of the main themes on this blog which were intertwined with a lot of posts of a fairly random nature.  I’ll continue to post to this blog, but both of the aforementioned blogs will likely bet getting more and more attention as time goes on.

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Zombomatic Swap the conductors to connect them into a path for the electricity to flow.

Play this free game now!!

A few months ago Terralever was again approached with a Silverlight game design and developement challenge: Create a casual/twitch game for Miniclip.com utilizing Silverlight 1.0. To be clear, Silverlight has evolved. The Silverlight team has released a more advanced Silverlight plug-in which allows far more flexibility in development. That said, Miniclip wasn’t looking to leverage that version of the plug-in. The game would need to be built with for the 1.0 plug-in.

Leveraging lessons learned from Zero Gravity, a team of Terralever designers, developers, and multimedia artists produced Zombomatic 3000, an addicting puzzle game. The game was created under an incredible time constraint, but the team wasn’t willing to push the game out until they were fully satisfied with the overall user experience.

 I did not have much involvement in this project, and have to say I was surprised (in a good way) at the resulting game. The extra effort the entire team put into “getting it right” shows. Zombomatic serves as a confident marker in the casual gaming space as the first Silverlight game to appear on Miniclip.com, one of the world’s largest causal gaming web sites.

Congratulations to The Terralever Zombomatic 3000 team (alphabetical order):

• Craig Budwitz
• Chris Hill
• April Holle
• Jen Johnson
• Robert Neal
• Joel Neubeck
• Shannon Owen
• Ryan Plemons
• Casey Rayl

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 How are they combatting automagic spam junk?  The community decides if content makes the mark or not:

At the time Epinions.com validates entries (some time shortly following the end of the submission period), each review must have an overall rating of at least “somewhat helpful”. Express reviews are not eligible. (Express reviews contain less than 200 words.)

Visit the site to help Epinions spend the remainder of their 2007 marketing budget.

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Facebook previously announced the availability of limited profile data to search engines. I’ve checked here and there and hadn’t seen any evidence, but Facebook profile data is now definitely being returned (by Google at least). A search for “Scott McAndrew” (yeah, that’s vain, I know) shows the Google result to be a standard search result listing.

When not logged-in to Facebook, a click-through to the Facebook site displays the limited profile data as shown in the screen-capture below. Although not logged in, and likely not an acquaintance of mine, you are still taunted with the offer to Poke me (please don’t).

More eyesight into the walled garden

Part of the excitement about Facebook Applications, lies in the ability to reach Facebook’s every growing, engaged user-base. That’s nice, but if you’re looking to launch on Facebook, you likely have grandiose visions for your application. A week or go or so the lack of visibility outside Facebook’s gates was addressed by Justin Mitchell in a Facebook blog posting entitled “Public Canvas Pages”.

In broad strokes: Facebook’s firewall quietly invited Googlebot to take a closer look at Facebook applications earlier this month. Depending on new settings controlled by the application developer Facebook applications can be fully functional to the casual browser (not require logging in to Facebook whatsoever), require login to be in any way functional, or (the most likely) fall somewhere in between the two extremes. Developers can find more information in Facebook’s Developer Wiki.

Per an October blog entry, applications that are in the Facebook Application directory are also automatically showing up in Google search results regardless of their stance on non-Facebook user functionality. If you search on “Apple Student Gallery” you’ll find a Terralever-built application’s directory listing in Google’s search results.

Did you say Open? How’s this for Open:

In the (relatively calm) wake of last month’s MySpace/Google Open Social announcement, Facebook quietly blogged their counter-punch today: Facebook’s platform is that open, too. If you want to leverage Facebook’s innards to push out your own social networking site, have at it. As Open Social has yet to launch, the question has to be one of relevance (or lack thereof) at this point. An excerpt from the aforementioned blog entry by Facebook’s Ami Vora (emphasis and footnoting mine):

[…]we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins* — users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

This is just another step toward the vision of easy, open sharing of information. We look forward to supporting other social sites as they release their own platforms, and look forward most of all to the added benefit for developers and users.

* I’m relatively certain that Google, MySpace, and the rest of the Open Social club don’t include themselves as a part of the ‘everyone’ cited in the Facebook blog entry.

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The list of participating companies included:

• Blitz!
• Cynergy Systems
• iCrossing
• Sapient
• Schematic
• speakTECH
• Terralever

PhizzPop Judges included:

• Bill Scott, Director UI Engineering, Netflix
• Lou Carbone, Experience Engineering
• Jim Long, Gabriel Venture Partners
• Danny Stillion, Head of Interaction Deign, IDEO

Over the next few days I’ll place some reflections on the experience on this blog. To kick things off right I’ve included the Problem Statement provided to us on Monday morning. It’s receipt fired a virtual pop-gun for all the participants to start the scramble toward the inevitable presentation to the PhizzPop LA Judges at Elevate Lounge on the following Thursday evening.

Here’s the Problem Statement the teams received:

Congratulations!

You and your team have just been hired by a consortium representing all of the major Movie and Television studios. Your team constitutes the Office of the President of Products. You are responsible for determining the product strategy for this consortium. While your authority is considerable, it is not absolute.

You must pitch your product solution to the Board of Directors, also known as the Judges.

The media industry is facing an unprecedented set of challenges today. Digital distribution, a dramatic reduction in traditional advertising, the rise of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook and other factors have all combined to force a fundamental rethinking of the entertainment industry.

Your job is to:

• Find new ways to monetize the deep catalog of content that the consortium has. You should specifically be thinking beyond simply pay per download, subscriptions or advertising
• Look for new ways to create fans of our content. Sites like MySpace and Facebook (among others) have shown us that social networks are powerful tools. Figure out how to exploit the principles of social networking, integrate into existing networks, or both
• Look for ways to exploit the Long Tail. The consortium has a fantastic amount of old content that’s very valuable to many people. Figure out how to best help our users find existing content, discover other content, and share this with friends
• Figure out the device & platform landscape. Between iTunes, the iPod, Zune, Media Center, UnBox, Xbox Live, Joost, and everything else, it’s difficult to understand the overall experience system for our users. Explore creating your own, partnering, or both

A large part of this design challenge is to make whatever experience desirable, rather than simply a forced option. Specific features and functionality should be determined by the needs of the personas (see following pages). While your solution does not need to be functional, it must simulate the experience of each of the personas you’ve chosen to solve for.

Persona 1: The always connected gadget junkie

Name: David
Age: 32
Primary Computer: Sony VAIO running Vista; Alienware Mediacenter PC
Devices: iPod Touch, Zune, Xbox 360, 2 Tivo Series 3s, SlingBox HD, 2 AppleTVs, a 3G Phone (with SlingBox Player), PMP, Sony XBR3 LCD TVs, PS3, Wii
Internet Connection: FIOS 50Mbit downstream / 10Mbit Upstream

Overview: David is a high-tech executive. He’s the first to admit it: he’s a gadget geek. He as all the new toys, and rationalizes it by saying it’s important for his job. The truth is he just really likes toys. His secret love is when he has the gadget *before* Engadget or Gizmodo know about it!

David has recently had his house renovated. As part of the renovation, he had a high-speed network installed. Finally he can stream movies and TV from his media servers (iTunes and Media Center) to his various different TVs. Prior to this, David was very annoyed by the speed of his wireless network – he *hates* it when the program he’s watching skips.

David signed up for Joost when it was in beta, but it never quite clicked for him. He played with Democracy (now Miro), but could only deal with so much random and free media. I mean really, how many episodes of Democracy Now! can you really watch?

He’s also dabbled with P2P networks (shhh! don’t tell anyone), but recently has been spooked by the RIAA. On a more practical note, it’s a real pain when you almost get a file and then the last host drops. He doesn’t mind paying for the movie or album, he just can’t always find what he wants. He’s terrible with names, and usually remembers TV shows or Movies by scenes, rather than by actor or name.

iTunes, XBox Live, along with Amazon UnBox help, but he gets frustrated with having to split his catalog between services. Amazon / Xbox Live have some of the movies, TV shows, and songs he wants, and iTunes has others, but it still means that he has to have multiple accounts with his services, have multiple devices when he travels (and he does a lot), and multiple devices attached to his TVs. He also gets frustrated with ripping his NetFlix rentals. It should just be easier.

His other frustration is that all of his friends are scattered across all the different services. He know what he likes, but is only deep in certain areas (cartoons, crime movies, and electronic). He really relies on his friends to show him new options (and Amazon’s recommendation engine). With his friends so spread out, it means, gasp, he has to actually speak with them.

Persona 2: Isn’t impressed, and doesn’t care

Name: Erica
Age: 38
Primary Computer: ThinkPad X61 running Vista
Devices: iPod Nano, Verizon Chocolate phone, Bose Lifestyle 48 Series IV Entertainment System, Tivo Series 2
Internet Connection: Cable via WiFi

Overview: Erica is a corporate lawyer at a big firm down town. She just recently made Partner, and works long hours. Her focus is Entertainment Law. While she knows the legal issues surrounding digital distribution backwards and forwards (at $400 per hour, she’d better), digital media just doesn’t connect with her.

On the few moments she does have off, she usually spends them at the gym. Her iPod is always attached to her, and is the only thing that gets her through her hour long runs. She’s experimented with buying TV shows from iTunes Store, but hasn’t been happy with the quality (either the fact that she has to watch it on her very small iPod Nano screen, or when she hooks her iPod up to her TV). It just hasn’t seemed worth it.

She bought a Tivo Series 2 a couple years ago, which she uses a lot. That is to say, she has a lot of season passes but she almost never makes it through a show without falling asleep. At the end of the day, if she’s going to spend the time watching anything, it needs to be much higher quality than she’s seen to date. She’s got so little time, that she wants to feel like she’s spending it wisely. After all, she did buy that Bose thing.

At the end of the day, she just doesn’t care about the tech, or the ability to get new music, TV shows and Movies. What she’s seen hasn’t impressed her, and she doesn’t have enough time to find something she might like better.

Persona 3: Tastemaker without the matching wallet
Name: Jake
Age: 23
Primary Computer: MacBook
Devices: iPod
Internet Connection: DSL

Overview: Jake graduated college last year. His ‘day job’ is as a personal trainer at the local high-end gym. At night, he practices with his band as much as possible. He’s got a MySpace page for his band that’s gotten a lot of traffic, and he thinks he’s close to ‘making it.’

His life is on his MacBook he bought during his senior year of college. It’s his juke box, his recording studio, and his home theater. The only time it leaves his side is when he’s doing a training session at the gym.

Jake ‘gets’ it: He knows that people deserve to be paid for their work. He also knows that he gets inspiration from lots of different sources and he’s not able to afford the amount of music he listens to, or the number of shows and movies he watches. Whenever he does get some cash, he tries to buy the best stuff he’s sampled. Before the internet, Jake’s most hated experience was buying a CD after hearing the single on the radio, only to find that the rest of the album was trash. Part of the reason he spent so much time on Napster was to get back at the record companies. The rejection letters he’s gotten in the past don’t help either.

Jake spends a lot of time on P2P networks right now - so much so that his cable modem was been shut off for ‘exceeding bandwidth limits.’ It’s now back on, since it’s in his roommate’s name, and he’s trying to be more careful. Also, his neighbors don’t seem to have mastered turning on security on their wireless network.

Jake is ‘the man’ everyone goes to for the newest music, TV or movie trend. His clients at the gym always ask for suggestions. Amazingly enough, they keep asking for more. Through his MySpace page, he’s also gotten a lot of people (700!) to sign up for his Twitter feed. He was amazed to get 300 people to his last show at the local bar.

Now that he’s trying to get into the industry, and more than that, understands how much work it really is to produce a song, much less a record, he wants to be certain that artists get paid for their efforts. After all, he’d like to stop working at the gym sometime.

At the end of the day, he really wants to support the artists that are good. He buys as much of the movies and music he really likes (most of the time he can get it at the used CD store). He drives so many sales, shouldn’t the industry be happy with what he does?

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Terralever was invited to participate in the Los Angeles Challenge. Other cities which are also hosting PhizzPop include San Francisco (the San Francisco event ran under another name), New York, Boston, Austin, and Chicago.

Last week (on the 29th and 30th of November) we attended the training in LA. Tomorrow (Monday, the 3rd of December) morning we receive the Design Challenge. After its receipt, we have until 6pm on Thursday to concept and create our solution. Our work and that of the other competing agencies will be judged on Thursday evening at Elevate Lounge in LA. Winners of the Los Angeles Challenge will then move on to compete with the other regional winners at SXSW 08.

Terralever’s team is made up of myself, Joel Neubeck and the blogless Craig Budwitz. Details of our sprint to Thursday will be posted here, but likely not until next week.

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More information:

• Machinist: Facebook: Shut down that privacy-invading ad program!
• Slashdot: Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking
• Wired Blogs: Facebook Backs Down: Beacon Now Offers Partial Control Over Your Data
• TechCrunch: Facebook Beacon 2.0: What You’ll See

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The still before the video started reads:

Keepon, the dancing yellow robot, was designed and built by his video co-star, roboticist and psychologist Hideki Kozima, for his clinical research with autistic children. Mark Michalowski is the grad student who programs Keepon’s smooth moves.

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1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

Execution against these goals resulted in a very casual online word game which, for each correctly answered multiple-choice question, contributes 10 grains of rice to end world hunger.

In a quick session (that actually became somewhat of a contest with my wife) we contributed several hundred grains. It doesn’t sound like much, but it all adds up—between October 7th (when the program launched) and yesterday (November 20th) over 3 billion world-hunger-ending grains of rice have been racked up. Yesterday alone FreeRice donated over 218 million grains.

Wondering who is paying for all this? There are small advertisements placed on the FreeRice site. The money generated by the advertisements buys the rice. Thankfully the ads are placed on the site in a restrained manner. A ClickZ blog posting notes that Apple, American Express, Toshiba and Macy’s are among the participating advertisers.

The game itself (while incredibly simple) is fun, has an addictive quality, and provides an assessment of your progress by way of 50 game ‘levels.’ The game was designed with everyone in mind:

FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level. You then determine a more exact level for yourself as you play. When you get a word wrong, you go to an easier level. When you get three words in a row right, you go to a harder level. This one-to-three ratio is best for keeping you at the “outer fringe” of your vocabulary, where learning can take place.

There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.

Ready to test your vocabulary? Go help end world hunger! Report back with what level you made it to!

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This is the first time the revolutionary XO laptop has been made available to the general public. For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. $200 of your donation is tax-deductible (your $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will be receiving).     

It was also announced last that Maxis (Electronic Arts) has donated the original SimCity game to the project, allowing for free distribution of the addictive classic which was originally developed for the Commodore 64.

Don Hopkins created a UNIX variant of the game in the past and has been advocating the use of SimCity for educational purposes for years. Hopkins commented on a Slashdot article earlier this year:

“The goal is to enable the open-source community to renovate SimCity and take it in new educational directions, by applying Seymour Papert’s ideas about constructionist education, Alan Kay’s ideas about interactive user interfaces and object-oriented programming, Ben Shneiderman’s ideas about direct manipulation and info visualization, and many exciting ideas about multiplayer games, blogging, storytelling, game mods, player created content, and lessons learned from World of WarCraft, The Sims, Spore, etc,”      

The cause sounds noble. One way or the other games will make it to the OLPC. Let’s hope the educational angle triumphs.More about SimCity on the OLPC XO from Don Hopkins:

• SimCity for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child): Applying Papert’s Ideas About Constructionist Education and Teaching Kids to Program
• History and Future of OLPC SimCity/Micropolis

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Ease of development is emphasized. Projects begin with a BUGbase which is described on their web site as “…a fully programmable and ‘hackable’ Linux computer…” Examples of modules you can snap to the base include a GPS unit, a Digital Camera/Videocam, a Motion Detector, and a color, touch-sensitive LCD screen.

Bug Labs envisions device building as an experience that can be enjoyed by both the novice and the advanced do-it-yourselfer. Since the hardware clicks together, the next engineering challenge is the underlying software. A description of the software environment from the BUG site is quoted below:

BUG is built entirely with open source software. BMI, the BUG Module Interface, attaches devices to the BUG. Device-based services and applications are dynamically available based on which modules are connected to the BUG. Higher up the stack is Java, which hosts a service-oriented component runtime called OSGi.

As the development community shares their hardware and software creations a programming-free scenario also emerges. In a recent podcast Bug Labs’ CEO Peter Semmelhack describes a future where a builder combines a few bricks together and interfaces with the BUG SDK where (s)he is presented with the top applications currently being used for that hardware configuration. Software can be downloaded onto the device without the need to start from scratch.

The BUGbase, aforementioned modules and SDK are all slated to ship before the end of the year.Interested? You may want to catch BUG Labs speaking at SXSW 2008. For more information including a list of additional modules visit the BUG Labs web site.

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What’s the XO got going for it? A lot. Again, it’s not going to replace your business productivity laptop anytime soon (nor is that its intention), but it has plenty for its sub $200 price tag (David Pogue sums it up well). A few standouts:

• High-resolution (1200 x 900 200 dpi) reflective, sunlight readable display
• Sealed keyboard, sealed case construction
• WiFi (802.11 b/g) and Mesh (802.11 s)
• Can be charged without an AC outlet (physical process)
• Integrated game pad
• Integrated touch pad
• Speakers
• Integrated 30 fps video and still camera

It’s not running Vista or XP, nor is it running OS X or Linux. The OLPC’s operating system and software is all open source. It’s a laptop for education geared toward countries where technology is inaccessible, and, conditions may be less than hospitable for the device.

Now, a bit for the philanthropists and the geeks. There’s a few ways you can score some good karma with the little laptop that might:

Philanthropists: You can donate an OLPC for a child in need. They’re $200 each (of course, you can donate more than one).

Philanthropist Geeks: You can donate an XO for a child in need, and get an XO for yourself with the “Give 1 Get 1″ program. $399 pays for both laptops (yes, it is a tax write-off). This is a limited time program starting on November 12th.

I’m anticipating some great XO stories next year and sincerely hoping the domestic “look what I did with my XO” stories are the exception, not the rule.

Learn More:

One Laptop per Child
Give 1 Get 1 Program

UPDATE: 8 November 2007
As noted by Dan in a comment below, the gOS is Linux. I was typing a little too rapidly when I said that the XO wasn’t running Linux. It’s been stricken above-thanks for pointing it out, Dan.

UDPATE: 27 November 2007
You haven’t missed out on this yet! Going beyond the initial 2 week Give One Get One promotion, it was announced last week that the XO will remain on sale in North America through the 31st of December.

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Source: Silicon Insider

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I briefly blogged about the Facebook Developer Garage Phoenix a ways back (it’s coming up on November 14th). One of the traditions of the Facebook Developer Garage is to open up the mic for anyone who is developing or conceptualizing a Facebook App who would like to get some feedback from the collection of Facebook minds at the Garage.

It’s a unique opportunity—it’s not often that you get have the ear of a group of Facebook App developers and marketers (including the likes of Dave Morin, an incredible mind from Facebook).

That mic is also open for those who would like to speak about Facebook applications from a marketing perspective, what’s happening with social networking, etc.

If you’re interested in speaking, let me know-I’ll put you in the right hands.

And, of course, if this sounds like something you’d like to experience come to the event!

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Situationally, they’re in a can of worms here. For their strategy to be effective, they’d really need to check sites by hand to decide if they should be put on their demotion list. On the flip side, if they do nothing at all, the burgeoning text link ad business will run amok, adding false positives to Google’s view of all things meta.

What to do, Google… what to do. Clearly this is the safe route, and one that is hard to challenge at face value: Kick the link farms in the stomach. But, many sites of a different caliber have reported negative repercussions (read the SEOmoz article below). Forbes? The Washington Post? I had heard rumors that there were a good number of highly respected sites that have stealth pages (that users never see) where they sell text links for top dollar. Maybe it is true.

Regardless, Google policing in this manner when looked at from a slightly different perspective is unsettling. Want to get a leg up on your competition? Buy them a nice present. Hook them up with involvement in some highly visible link farms. Get them some text link ads from a really visible source, too. Google will help you screw them over.

Read more on TechCrunch:
Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms

SEOmoz is also providing commentary and the effect on more mainstream web sites:
Google Toolbar PageRank Losses For Hundreds of Websites

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