fabric of folly

What should Zynga do next?

2009-10-24T05:15:00.021Z

Ok, so it's not too difficult to look at a successful company and describe some of the smart things they've done and why they might be considered significant; much harder to say what they should do next. Here's my attempt to map out four next steps for Zynga:

1.) Enable interactions between games
The logical step on from cross-promotion - hinted at by their dynamic CTAs ("Did you milk the cow? Take a break with a milkshake in Café World!") - Zynga's portfolio of games is just crying out to be joined up at a more molecular level. What better way to increase reach and dwell time than to start create rich interconnections and dependencies between the games, enabling the pigs raised on your FarmVille farm to be dispatched to your Café World caf é (possibly via your Abattoir City slaughterhouse - you can have that idea for free guys ;-) You wouldn't necessarily need to own all the businesses yourself - your network of friends could form a mini cooperative (or cabal, should you be so inclined) with one venture supplying another (not hard to see how Mafia Wars might fit into this setup).

2.) Prioritise development of mobile apps
Zynga have already made a start with iPhone apps for four of their titles, but if I were them, I'd be inclined to bump mobile app development right to the top of my to do list. They wouldn't need to be Rolls Royce ports of the desktop browser games - pared down versions which enabled you to harvest your crops or take your dish off the stove would be sufficient at this stage. There's obviously huge potential for push notifications announcing calamity (or opportunity) in your game world and Apple allowing free iPhone apps to use in-app payments clearly presents some attractive revenue possibilities.

3.) Fill in the obvious gaps in its portfolio
Accusations of derivative / copycat games are rife in the social gaming space at the moment (Psycho Monkey has sued Zynga, Zynga has sued Playdom as well as a number of other developers) so Zynga would need to tread carefully in filling in some of the holes in its current portfolio. One of the most obvious gaps is pets, which are big business in the social gaming world, as Pet Society, Neopets, My Fishbowl, Animal Paradise and countless others will testify. If I was in charge of the 'what next?' list at Zynga, a pet game would be somewhere near the top...

4.) IPO (or get bought by EA)
Both have been rumoured, with the former probably more likely than the latter. Either way, the next 6 months look like a good time to capitalise on its rapid ascendancy and position as market leader. Who knows what the landscape will look like in another couple of years time?

Having said all that, they do seem to be doing ok without my advice... ;-)

6 reasons why Zynga is truly game-changing

2009-10-20T05:05:00.026Z

Chances are you haven't heard of Zynga. However, if you're a Facebook user (and 19 million UK Internet users reportedly now are) then you may well have played one of their games and have subliminally registered their 'powered by Zynga' logo (a silhouette of the founder's bulldog). With 45 million daily active users (yes, daily!) across their portfolio of games and an estimated $150 million in revenue this year, they have rapidly become a very big fish, not just in gaming, but in the online world more generally.

This astonishing rate of growth is best exemplified by their Facebook app Farmville, a real-time farm simulation game which launched in June 2009 and now boasts over 50 million monthly active users, making it the most popular game on Facebook.

So, what's their special sauce, magic ingredient? Here's six reasons why Zynga is truly game-changing:

1.) Smart leveraging of your social graph (it's only fun with friends!)
One of the big draws for Facebook app developers is the ability to leverage users' social graphs, not only to enable social play, but to encourage the viral spread of the application. Most early apps which attempted to exploit this tended to be crude 'you're it' type games (e.g. Zombies) which achieved a lot of installs but didn't offer the user any real depth of gameplay and soon became regarded by many as tantamount to spam. What Zynga have done (although there's undoubtedly still some residual app invite fatigue for them to overcome) is to make games which offer more depth than the one-trick pony 'you're it' games and provide a more nuanced reward mechanic, with genuine ongoing incentivisation for users to expand their 'neighbourhood' of friends via gifts (cannily limited to one-per-day-per-friend), offers of help/employment, and rewards based on acts of citizenship). In fact, those interactions are so key to the game mechanic, that it's really only fun with friends, as Alice recently bemoaned.

2.) Stickiness through Tamagotchi-style plate-spinning
Part of the reason Zynga's daily reach is so high is that it's games are invariably 'high-maintenance'; in order to maintain your hard-won status and progress, you must return on at least a daily basis (and are invariably rewarded for doing so more often). This model might prove frustrating on a more traditional gaming platform, where you have to find time to fire up the console and load the game, but works perfectly on Facebook where frequent repeat visits are already the order of the day, largely driven by communication tasks (messaging, status updates etc.) There's both carrot and stick in this equation as neglecting your Zynga game will result in dead crops, spoilt food and unhappy customers just as surely as regular visits will send your revenue and status skyward.

3.) Persuading users to make micropayments
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Zynga is the amount of revenue it is now generating. Building a sizeable web audience is one thing; successfully monetising it is quite another (hello Twitter!) People's willingness to part with real-life cash for virtual goods has been well established by immersive 3D environments like Second Life and WoW, but it's testament to the engagement that Zynga's casual games engender, that once users virtual currency runs out, a sizable number of them are willing to dip into their pockets to keep progressing.

4.) Exploiting the endowment effect
Another genius element of Zynga's game design is the way in which they exploit some very basic aspects of human psychology, in particular the endowment effect. Whereas many game worlds are populated with alien objects for you to navigate or obliterate, with the main protagonist your only point of identification, Zynga's games tend to give you immediate ownership of a domain in which you very quickly start to take civil pride. You care how your room/cafe/farm/theme park is perceived because it's very definitely yours (a point reinforced by the status boasts / screengrabs you are encouraged to publish to your wall and your friends' homepages).

5.) Easily repurposable game-engine
One of the best things about Zynga's recipe for success is how repeatable it is. The basic game engine for CafeWorld is identical to the one powering FarmVille, YoVille and Roller Coaster Kingdom. The ability to apply this model to new domains, and in so doing, reach new audiences (as well as extended reach/time spent with existing audiences) is a game developers dream.

6.) Effective cross-promotion / upselling of its other games
With 17 Facebook games now in its portfolio, Zynga does an extremely good job of upselling its other titles from within the individual games. In addition to a carousel running underneath each game promoting their big ticket releases, dynamic CTAs are also inserted above the Flash app (e.g. in Farmville: "Did you milk the cow? Take a break with a milkshake in Café World!")

It's worth saying that Zynga aren't the only company pushing the envelope in online social gaming at the moment (check out Playfish), they just happen to be doing it bloody well.

30 Must-Download iPhone Apps

2009-07-26T12:00:00.004Z

So, you've just purchased a shiny new iPhone 3GS and you're wondering which apps to download? Here's an update on my previous lists, this time organised by category:

Best utility apps
The apps you'll fire up again and again
1.) Tweetie (£1.79) - the best iPhone Twitter app bar none
2.) London Tube Deluxe (£0.59) - a must for all Londoners without chauffers
3.) National Rail Enquiries (£4.99) - never have to call 08457 48 49 50 again
4.) Urbanspoon (Free) - find an eatery by location, cuisine and/or price
5.) Ocado (Free) - the weekly food shop just got even easier
6.) Stanza (Free) - eBook reader. $200 cheaper than a Kindle :)
7.) Movies (Free) - find out what's on at your local cinema
8.) Spoonfed (Free) - find out what events are going on near you in London
9.) Dictionary.com (Free) - check words without a web connection
10.) RadioTimes (£2.99) - the best of the UK TV listings apps

Best games
The apps which will make even the longest train journey fly by
1.) The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (£4.99) - pocket sized version of one of the best games of all time
2.) Fieldrunners (£1.79) - fiendishly addictive tower-defense game
3.) California Gold Rush (£1.79) - engrossing gold mining puzzle game
4.) FlightControl (£0.59) - draw finger-fightpaths to safely land aircraft
5.) Toki Tori (£1.19) - Lemmings-style platform puzzler
6.) Bejeweled 2 (£1.79) - a great port of the gem-swapping classic
7.) Rolando 2 (£5.99) - quirky platform puzzler, which makes full use of the iPhone's accelerometer
8.) Let's Golf! (£1.19) - the best golf game for the small screen
9.) Stoneloops! of Jurassica (£0.59) - Bejeweled meets Space Invaders
10.) Wurdle (£1.19) - no, not the word cloud generator, but a rip-off of that old family favourite, Boggle

Best novelty apps
The apps you'll show your mates that will make them want an iPhone
1.) Face Melter (£1.19) - hideously distort your friend's face and then animate it
2.) QuadCamera (£1.19) - passport booth in your pocket
3.) Rimshot & Crickets (Free) - for all your badum-tish needs
4.) Ocarina (£0.59) - turn your iPhone into a primitive musical instrument by blowing into the microphone
5.) Photoswap (Free) - creepy real-time random photo-swapping

Best music apps
The apps which make the world's best music device even better
1.) Simply Music 2 (£3.49) - remotely access your computer's music library
2.) Last.fm (Free) - stream over 5 million tracks for free
3.) Shazam (Free) - algorithmically identify that mystery choon
4.) midomi (£2.99) - Shazam for hummers
5.) GuitarToolkit (£5.99) - tuner, metronome and chord database

Recent BBC Vision web launches

2009-06-20T09:29:00.022Z

Quick round-up of some recent BBC Vision web launches which I've had varying degrees of involvement with:

Robin Hood game

Noteworthy primarily for its use of the Unity plug-in which renders Flash-beating in-browser 3D graphics - definitely a technology to watch. Game development by Playgroup and Specialmoves. BBC credits: Marc Ramsay, Richard Lynton-Evans, Paul Thomson and Rosie Allimonos. Trailer embedded below.

Adam Curtis Blog

Peak inside the mind of the legendary documentary film maker (The Power of Nightmares, The Century of Self, The Trap) and find out about his forthcoming collaboration with the Punchdrunk theatre company, It Felt Like a Kiss (see below trail). All I can claim credit for here is the green-on-black retro screen font which I used in a presentation I pulled together for Adam last year. The real props go to Nick Cohen, Roo Reynolds, Cathal Coughlan and Lucy Kelsall.

Comedy Extra

Made-for-the-web comedy clips from a mix of established and up-and-coming talent, including Adam Buxton, Mitchell & Webb, Matt Lucas & David Walliams, Stewart Lee & Armando Iannucci and the don't-try-this-at-home Amazing Wizards. Credit due to Al Boley, Martin Trickey and Will Saunders amongst others.

Remember, you can keep track of all new site launches from BBC Vision at the BBC Vision site launches blog.

BBC Apprentice clips widget

2009-06-09T12:07:00.003Z

Suffering Apprentice withdrawal symptoms after last Sunday's final? Here's a bundle of best bits (including James' car-crash interview - "In a nutshell, I put a leash on people who spunk money up the wall..." and "I can bring ignorance to the table") in an embeddable widgety package. No link back to bbc.co.uk unfortunately, so I'll have to provide one myself: Lots more good stuff on The Apprentice website and keep an eye out for more BBC widgets.

'Search online for...' - The return of keywords in advertising

2009-05-30T04:06:00.012Z

Hands up who remembers AOL keywords? Back in the late-90s / early naughties (when AOL was still spamming the world's letterboxes with CD-ROMs) it was commonplace to see an AOL keyword alongside, or occasionally in lieu of, a regular URL on marketing materials. Movie trailers and posters, in particular, would often carry them (see posters for 2001 box office stinkers Swordfish and 15 Minutes).

Fast forward to 2009 and search keywords in advertising seem to be experiencing something of a renaissance, although this time it's Google rather than AOL who are the go-to guys for finding stuff online. However, where AOL keywords were tightly controlled (check out the official Keyword Guidelines), keywords input into Google will return results entirely at the mercy of Google's special sauce search algorithms.

This presents a bit of a dilemma for marketeers; whilst inviting users to Google for your brand more closely mirrors online behaviours (80+ percent of online journeys start with a search), you don't have control over what appears on that results page.

The first URL-free ad I noticed recently encouraging users to search for a keyword was the Orange 'I Am Everyone' campaign, which boldly invited users to "search online for 'I am'", complete with magnifying glass icon (which seems to have inexplicably become the universally recognised symbol for search - I guessing either Microsoft or Apple is to blame...)

The problem was that the newly-created campaign site i-am-everyone.co.uk was decidedly short on Googlejuice (the top organic search result for 'I am' was i-am-bored.com on Google and i-amonline.com on MSN), forcing Orange to shell out for Sponsored Links (still live at the time of writing). Whether the additional cost of the Sponsored Links was offset by a greater response rate to the search-based call-to-action (or the insight they got from being able to more easily track the response rate) would be interesting to know (although the figures from Compete don't speak of a unqualified success).

The decision to promote keywords over a URL is probably easier when you feel confident of getting and retaining the top spot in organic search results. Tamlyn Rhodes points to More4 and Act On CO2 both using the 'search online for...' CTA; both having sufficiently distinctive names and Googled-up parent domains (channel4.com and direct.gov.uk) to ensure they secure the top spot. Warner Brothers also recently adopted the 'search for keyword' approach for elements of their Watchmen marketing campaign, banking on keeping the mighty IMDb off the top spot. Dyson went for belt and braces after its TV ad invited users to "Search online for dyson ball", taking a Sponsored Link as well as the top two organic search results.

Another example which recently caught my eye was the TV and poster campaign for Dido's forthcoming album, 'Safe Trip Home', which makes no mention of Dido and looks more like a movie campaign, inviting users to "view trailer now" by Googling for enigmatic keywords such as 'Lady Landfill', 'Mother Lay-By' and 'Blackeye Lashes'. What's interesting about this one is that the top matches are all YouTube videos which - YouTube being a Google property - get a thumbnail and visible rating; far more eye catching and inviting than your average search result. The video then directs users onwards to the official album site.

Despite the potential pitfalls of promoting search keywords in advertising, it seems likely to increase as marketers seek to respond to how users actually navigate to content online and counter the URL blindness which I'm certainly starting to suffer from. Just watch out for a resurgence of Google bombing/washing...

Holiday reading

2009-05-17T14:20:00.012Z

Just returned from a week's holiday at the Likya Residence and Spa in Kalkan (thoroughly recommended if you're looking to get away from it all - see Flickr set) and thought it was high time I ended my three-month blogging hiatus with a gentle re-entry post. So, with a nod to Roo Reynolds, who's 'recent reading' post format I've cribbed, here are the books which kept me occupied on the sun lounger:

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson - probably not a book that I would have picked off the shelf in a bookstore (the cover gives some of the wrong signals - the likely subject of a future blog post), but a loan from my brother, whose literary recommendations I trust - a trust rewarded with a thoroughly engrossing novel exploring the universality of love and loss through a rich tapestry of interwoven narrative strands and the birth of an irresistible hero in the shape of private investigator Jackson Brodie. I already have the next in the series (One Good Turn) lined up on the shelf.

Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody - an eminently readable, if ultimately inconsequential, memoir from the writer of 2007 indie hit, Juno, which pretty much does what it says on the tin, serving up enough memorable characters and anecdotes to justify the 200+ pages.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - probably still best-known as co-editor of Boing Boing (but better known to me as Mr Alice Taylor), Cory conjures a hugely engaging narrator and protagonist in Marcus Yallow, a 17-year old tech-head, battling to outsmart the Department of Homeland Security as it clamps down on civil liberties in the wake of a major terrorist attack. The book was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license and can be downloaded from Cory's site. Go do it.

Twitter play: Lyric for the day

2009-02-14T14:26:00.005Z

Four weeks ago I set up a new Twitter account called Lyric for the day and started posting snatches of song lyrics on an (almost) daily basis. I then tweeted it's existence on my main Twitter account, encouraging fellow tweeters to guess the track and artist by replying to @lyricfortheday. 28 lyrics later and the account has 37 followers and a burgeoning sense of competitiveness, as well as some indie snobbery. There's only one rule (no Googling!). Below is the high score table (one point for the first correct answer) and the answers to date (only three of which went unguessed). Come play! :)

Lyric for the day hall of fame:
R4isStatic (4)
aarons (3)
LouiseBrown (3)
onpause (3)
willhowells (3)
chunkylover (2)
dogwinters (1)
helenroper (1)
ms_jackson (1)
rooreynolds (1)
slim_cop (1)
SplintUK (1)
tbgkerry (1)

Answers to date:
1. Sympathy For The Devil - The Rolling Stones (onpause)
2. Abattoir Blues - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (aarons)
3. Babies - Pulp (rooreynolds)
4. Our Mutual Friend - The Divine Comedy
5. Sit Down - James (willhowells)
6. O Maria - Beck
7. Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand (willhowells)
8. When The Sun Goes Down - Arctic Monkeys (R4isStatic)
9. Faith - George Michael (slim_cop)
10. Mexican Wine - Fountains of Wayne (helenroper)
11. Mrs Robinson - Simon & Garfunkel (R4isStatic)
12. Playground Love - AIR (chunkylover)
13. Singing In My Sleep - Semisonic (R4isStatic)
14. Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) - Kenny Rogers & the First Edition
15. Fat Bottomed Girls - Queen (SplintUK)
16. Me In Honey - R.E.M. (chunkylover)
17. Cabron - Red Hot Chili Peppers (R4isStatic)
18. Mile End - Pulp (aarons)
19. The Bends - Radiohead (aarons)
20. Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol (dogwinters)
21. Where Is My Mind - The Pixies (onpause)
22. Don't Speak - No Doubt (LouiseBrown)
23. First of the Gang to Die - Morrissey (willhowells)
24. Tiny Dancer - Elton John (onpause)
25. Mysterious Ways - U2 (ms_jackson)
26. Shakermaker - Oasis (tbgkerry)
27. Bohemian Like You - The Dandy Warhols (LouiseBrown)
28. Frontier Psychiatrist - The Avalanches (LouiseBrown)

Job opportunity: Head of Multiplatform Products, BBC Vision

2009-02-14T08:26:00.004Z

Looking for an exciting new job and at a loose end this weekend? Why not spend it applying for the role of Head Of Multiplatform Products for BBC Vision? Don't know what any of those words mean in this context? My earlier post on my elliptical job title should explain some of them.

BBC widgets

2009-01-17T06:57:00.004Z

At the tail end of 2006, I confidently predicted that 2007 would be the year of the widget and thanks in no small part to Facebook and iGoogle both 'going large' in that year (see respective news stories), I wasn't embarrassingly wrong.

Yesterday marked a more modest milestone in the 'mainstreamisation' (warning: made up word alert) of widgets as some of my colleagues quietly launched bbc.co.uk/widgets. It's pretty light on widgets at the moment (four at the time of writing) but I've got a feeling that could grow pretty quickly, even if all it does is aggregate more of the BBC widgets already out in the wild (e.g. LiveUpdate, Lily Allen, Glastonbury, Olympics).

One of the new widgets available is the BBC iPlayer widget (embedded below) which promotes a selection of TV and Radio content available to consume on-demand via BBC iPlayer, with some very light-touch personalisation built in (thumbs up, thumbs down). You can't actually watch programmes within the widget (I guess the viewing experience might be slightly sub-optimal at 300 pixels), although the Clearspring wrapper provides easy integration with an extensive range of social media sites (incl. Facebook and iGoogle) as well as the vanilla embed code.

Designed more as a proof of concept than a major distribution play, it will be interesting to see whether it garners many installs. Of course it'll need to get linked to first; here's link number one for Google to spider: BBC Widgets. Now go forth any embed...

Best Films of 2008

2008-12-28T09:18:00.005Z

From music to movies, the year-end list-making continues...

I'll spare you the lengthy preamble on this occasion and get straight to the list.

Usual rules apply (i.e. all films must have been released theatrically in the UK in 2008).

		No Country for Old Men (dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Cohen)
		Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman)
		There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
		Man on Wire (dir. James Marsh)
		Changeling (dir. Clint Eastwood)
		Juno (dir. Jason Reitman)
		Gone Baby Gone (dir. Ben Affleck)
		Gomorrah (dir. Matteo Garone)
		4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (dir. Cristian Mungiu)
		The Baader Meinhof Complex (dir. Uli Edel)
		The Wave (dir. Dennis Gansel)
		The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (dir. Julian Schnabel)
		In Search of a Midnight Kiss (dir. Alex Holdridge)
		Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (dir. Alex Gibney)
		The Visitor (dir. Thomas McCarthy)
		W. (dir. Oliver Stone)
		My Winnipeg (dir. Guy Maddin)
		Lust, Caution (dir. Ang Lee)
		Of Time and the City (dir. Terence Davies)
		Son of Rambow (dir. Garth Jennings)
		Charlie Wilson's War (dir. Mike Nichols)
		Water Lilies (dir. Céline Sciamma)
		The Duchess (dir. Saul Dibb)
		Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (dir. Sidney Lumet)
		Quantum of Solace (dir. Marc Forster)

Pop quiz: which actress has roles in three of the above movies?

Related posts:
My Top 25 Films of 2007
My Top 30 Films of 2006
My Top 25 Films of 2005
My Top 20 Films of 2004

Top 20 Best Tracks of 2008

2008-12-24T11:15:00.000Z

Hot on the heels of my round up of 2008's best long plays, below is a run down of the top twenty tracks which have most tickled my musical fancy over the past 12 months, including a couple of shameless pop confections (stand up Katy Perry and The Ting Tings). As always, let me know what epic choons I've overlooked...

1. One Day Like This - Elbow

2. Colette - Langhorne Slim

3. I Stand Corrected - Vampire Weekend

4. Kids - MGMT

5. Sex on Fire - Kings of Leon

6. You Don't Know Me - Ben Folds feat. Regina Spektor

7. That's Not My Name - The Ting Tings

8. I Kissed a Girl - Katy Perry

9. Skinny Love - Bon Iver

10. Modern Guilt - Beck

11. Hey Ma - James

12. White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes

13. Butterflies And Hurricanes - Muse

14. A&E - Goldfrapp

15. Pork And Beans - Weezer

16. Dig, Lararus, Dig!!! - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

17. Dr. Yang - Ben Folds

18. M79 - Vampire Weekend

19. Time To Pretend - MGMT

20. The Greatest Man That Ever Lived - Weezer

Related posts:
Best Albums of 2008
Top 20 singles of the year (2006)

Best Albums of 2008

2008-12-21T10:40:00.000Z

Yes, it's that time of year again; when Dan makes lists. First up, my top albums of the past 12 months; a list which seems to get shorter every year (25 in 2006, 20 in 2007, 15 this year). Not sure if I'm getting more discerning, more narrow-minded or just don't find enough time to listen to new music anymore. Whatever, there have been some cracking releases from a mix of old and new artists (ok, mostly old). Interested to hear what you think's missing...

		The Seldom Seen Kid Elbow Standout tracks: One Day Like This, The Fix
		Only By The Night Kings Of Leon Standout tracks: Sex On Fire, Use Somebody
		Langhorne Slim Langhorne Slim Standout tracks: Collette, Worries
		Way To Normal Ben Folds Standout tracks: You Don't Know Me, Dr. Yang
		Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes Standout tracks: White Winter Hymnal, Your Protector
		Oracular Spectacular MGMT Standout tracks: Kids, Time To Pretend
		Haarp Muse Standout tracks: Butterflies And Hurricanes, Knights of Cydonia
		For Emma, Forever Ago Bon Iver Standout tracks: Skinny Love, Flume
		Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend Standout tracks: I Stand Corrected, Oxford Comma
		Modern Guilt Beck Standout tracks: Modern Guilt, Walls
		Dear Science TV On The Radio Standout tracks: Halfway Home, Golden Age
		Hey Ma James Standout tracks: Hey Ma, Waterfall
		Seventh Tree Goldfrapp Standout tracks: A&E, Some People
		Weezer (Red Album) Weezer Standout tracks: Pork And Beans, The Greatest Man That Ever Lived
		Accelerate R.E.M. Standout tracks: Supernatural Superserious, Man-Sized Wreath

Top Ten Best iPhone Apps (updated)

2008-11-29T14:19:00.001Z

When I wrote my original list of top ten best iPhone Apps back in July, the Apps Store was only three days old and boasted under 700 apps. Fast forward four months and there are now over 8,000 apps available for download.

So, which of the 8,000 are most worthy of your attention? Well, I can't claim to have tried them all, but of those I have, these are the ten which I find most valuable.

(NB. I've only considered apps which can be downloaded from the Apps Store eligible, hence no Hahlo or BBC iPlayer - see also: Round-up of best made-for-iPhone web sites/apps).

1.) Last.fm

The web's best music app in your pocket with an interface Apple would be proud off; what's not to like? Offering access to the main profile elements (Top Artists, Albums, Tracks, Recently Played, Events and Friends) and streamed radio stations based on your library, recommendations or an artist of your choice. The Information button, including tour dates overlayed on an Apple-esque calendar, are particularly invaluable and give it the edge over other iPhone music apps such as finetune.

Best for: Music geeks

2.) Google Earth

Not an app I use on a daily basis but Google Earth earns it's spot in the top ten by virtue of being so fricking cool. Fire it up and you're greeted with a distant view of our blue planet. Tap the geo-locate button and the globe starts to spin and in you zoom, until you're looking at a birds-eye view of the roof of your house. Factor in the app's use of the touch screen to zoom in and out / rotate the view and the accelerometer to tilt towards the horizon and you've got one of the most sophisticated and intuitive users of the iPhone's many virtues to date.

Best for: Globetrotters

3.) NetShare

Sadly no longer available for download from the App Store after a couple of brief periods of availability, NetShare let's you share your iPhone's 3G/Edge connection with your laptop - super useful when you're without Wi-Fi coverage but need the software and/or bigger screen that your laptop affords.

Best for: Mactards

4.) midomi

Whilst Shazam remains the app of choice for algorithmically identifying recorded music, midomi has an additional feature which makes me more likely to load it up at a party; the ability (at least in theory) to identify songs when sung or hummed. The fact that it's very rarely on the money (which, come to think of it, may be more of a comment on my friends' singing) simply adds to the fun as you wait to see what your butchered version of Dancing Queen will be identified as and, on the rare occasions when it does correctly identify a warbled tune, its extra satisfying.

Best for: Parties

5.) Stanza

Whilst clearly not the ideal device for reading an eBook on (screen size and contrast obviously compare unfavourably with dedicated eBook readers), the iPhone is the first mobile phone where it's not a wholly unbearable experience. Stanza brings an impressive 40,000 books and periodicals to the party and enough customisation options for the users to find a configuration that works for them.

Best for: Literary travellers

6.) Tube Status

Simple, single-function apps are great and they don't come much simpler than TubeStatus which provides an at-a-glance view of the current status of the various London Underground lines. Will be even more useful once there's ubiquitous Wi-Fi or mobile phone coverage on the tube.

Best for: London commuters

7.) Wikipanion

A simple but effective reversioning of the main Wikipedia site in an iPhone friendly format. Perfect for settling arguments / cheating in pub quizzes.

Best for: Pedants

8.) eBay

Like the Nintendo Wii, the eBay iPhone app is a textbook lesson in less-is-more design. The home screen has a search box and eight boxes telling you the status of the items you are watching/buying/selling.

Best for: My Dad

9.) Facebook

Whilst the genius of Twitter, the removal of Scrabulous and one too many crap applications have all conspired to keep me away from Facebook, I still log-in occasionally and when I do, it's usually on the iPhone where the clutter-free implementation (and absence of Werewolves/Zombies/Funwalls) makes it not such a painful experience.

Best for: Nosy-parkers

10.) PhotoSwop

Brilliant and scary in equal measure, PhotoSwap does exactly what it says on the tin; you take a photo using the iPhone's integrated camera and then swap it, randomly, with another PhotoSwap user's photo taken at roughly the same moment, with limited accompanying metadata (including geo-location data if they've opted to share it). Most of the time you get back a blurry image of the corner of a room or someone's thumb (at least, you hope it's their thumb...); nevertheless, the instantaneous global serendipity of it all is curiously compelling. Once sent, there is no way of recovering your photo, although you do have the option of responding to a photo with another photo of your own.

Best for: Stalkers

Top 12 best ever songs used as samples

2008-11-09T20:19:00.000Z

I had my first ever up-close-and-personal experience of karaoke on Friday night at K-Box off Leicester Square. And which song did I lose my karaoke virginity to, I hear you ask? Why, it was 'Islands in the Stream' by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton of course (although I really hit my stride with 'Suspicious Minds'...) Anyway, as a song whose melody I knew primarily from Pras Michel's 1998 hit single 'Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)', it got me thinking about the best songs which have been sampled for contemporary hits. Thanks to the wonder that is YouTube, my top twelve are embedded below (NB. it's the quality of the original hook that I'm ranking here, not the track which makes use of it - hence two entries by the decidedly uncool Coolio...) Let me know what I've missed using the comments form below or over on Twitter.

1. 'Stand By Me' - Ben E. King (1961) sampled by 'Beautiful Girls' - Sean Kingston (2007)

2. 'Islands in the Stream' - Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (1983) sampled by 'Ghetto Superstar (That Is What You Are)' - Pras Michel featuring Mýa & Ol' Dirty Bastard (1998)

3. 'The Way It Is' - Bruce Hornby and the Range (1986) sampled by 'Changes' - 2Pac (1998)

4. 'Every Breath You Take' - The Police (1983) sampled by 'I'll Be Missing You' - Puff Daddy and Faith Evans (1997)

5. 'Walk on The Wild Side' - Lou Reed (1972) sampled by 'Can I Kick It?' - A Tribe Called Quest (1991)

6. 'Under Pressure' - Queen (1981) sampled by 'Ice Ice Baby' - Vanilla Ice (1990)

7. 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' - Gary Numan/Tubeway Army (1979) sampled by 'Freak Like Me' - Sugababes (2002)

8. 'Parce Que Tu Crois' - Charles Aznavour (1966) sampled by 'Breathe' - Blu Cantrell ft. Sean Paul (2003)

9. 'Super Freak' - Rick James (1981) sampled by 'U Can't Touch This' - MC Hammer (1990)

10. 'The Last Time' - The Andrew Oldham Orchestra (1966) sampled by 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' - The Verve (1997)

11. 'Pastime Paradise' - Stevie Wonder (1976) sampled by 'Gangsta's Paradise' - Coolio (1995)

12. 'Canon in D major' - Pachelbel (1680) sampled by 'C U When U Get There' - Coolio (1997)

US Election punditry: 47 out of 50 ain't bad

2008-11-06T20:56:00.008Z

Whilst I waited nervously for the US election results to start coming in on Tuesday night I decided to have a crack at predicting the state-by-state outcome using the CNN Electoral Map Calculator. Once completed, I took a screengrab, uploaded it to TwitPic and then tweeted a link to it (timestamp: 11:53 PM). Fast-forward a few hours (although it has to be said, they didn't go particularly fast) and 47 of the 50 states had gone the way I'd predicted (I got Montana and Indiana wrong whilst Missouri was too close to call). Does a glittering career in US political punditry await or was it, despite all the noise, actually quite an easy election to call? Either way, my faith in the American electorate has been restored, Barack Obama is on his way to the White House and, praise be, they had to update this website rather than this one.

Crowdsourcing my next holiday

2008-10-29T23:55:00.004Z

Life is short. The economy/climate/world is going to hell in a handbasket. What's to be done? I think a vacation is in order...

Unfortunately my borderline OCD means that I normally spend more time researching my holiday options than I do actually on holiday. Therefore, building on the success of my attempts to crowdsource my reading and choice of mobile phone, I am asking you, dear reader, to choose where I go on my next trip. You will have to weigh up the damage a long-haul destination will do to the environment (and my wallet) versus the comedy value of sending me to Kazakhstan.

Since blogs are so over I'm going to ask for suggestions via Twitter - just reply to @fabricoffolly and/or mark your suggestion with the hashtag #dansbigadventure.

I will then total up the votes and (finances permitting) book a trip to the most popular destination. Photographic evidence will then be posted on Flickr.

David, it's over to you...

BBC Vision website launches

2008-10-19T09:37:00.006Z

As previously posted, my job requires me to have an overview of the whole of BBC Vision's online portfolio. Until recently, my record of new site launches comprised a TextEdit document on my laptop (edited on a daily basis) and an Excel spreadsheet on a shared drive (updated, er, less frequently). A couple of weeks back I decided that a far better tool for maintaining and sharing this information would be a simple blog.

As well as being naturally geared towards the chronological presentation of information (with posting dates corresponding to approximate site launch dates), a blog also enabled the easy addition of screenshots (captured using the super-useful WebShot) and tags to enable filtering by various metadata facets (e.g. commissioning genre, associated broadcast channel). Crucially, it also enabled me, in keeping with the renewed spirit of openness, to open up data which had no reason to reside within the confines of the BBC's firewall. I haven't had time to tart up the design yet although it feels like less of a priority in the age of feeds (here's the FeedBurner feed).

For a less Vision-centric view of recent BBC website launches check out Ryan 'Up Your Ego' Morrison's post on Wide BBC pages.

Ben Folds 2.0

2008-10-11T08:42:00.000Z

I wrote last year about the progressive approach of Ben Folds and his record label (Epic) to utilising the web as a platform both for participation and for distribution, referencing his 'create your own Bitches Ain't Shit video' YouTube group, his forays into Second Life, his live-by-request MySpace webcast (featuring a "guitorchestra" - see below video) and his iTunes/Rhapsody Originals downloads.

It's fair to say he's not been resting on his laurels since then, having launched (deep breath) Ben Folds TV (full screen video channel hopping with user comments running along the bottom of the screen), a Front to Back MySpace concert (rebroadcasting Ben Folds Five's one-off live performance of their final studio album together) and a YouTube covers contest which has now morphed into a planned album of a cappella covers (check out the awesome video embedded below).

He's also recorded and leaked fake album tracks and partnered with iTunes for a live music download series called 'The Sounds of Last Night... This Morning', described in his email newsletter thus: "At select shows on his Fall Tour, Ben Folds will pick a live song from that show and make it available to fans exclusively via the iTunes store by the following morning" (which I'm guessing would have got more press if Radiohead had done it).

Of course, no 2008 web offer would be complete without widgets and there are a couple of choose from - an audio jukebox and, for those of a more visual bent, a video/slideshow player (both embedded below).

And just to prove no-one can always get it right on the web, there's the recently relaunched Official Ben Folds Site, which is a complete navigational car crash, with different navigation on the homepage and sub-pages (where it takes up the whole page above the fold) and spread across multiple domains (benfolds.com, benfoldswebstore.com, thepfoj.com). Hey, nobody's perfect :)

BBC Search relaunched

2008-10-07T22:59:00.004Z

In case you missed it, the BBC's internal search engine relaunched today.

Apart from a lick of Barlesque paint, the main changes are:

- the addition of a 'TV and Radio programmes' module returning results from both /programmes and iPlayer
- 'BBC Best Links' are no longer badged as such (apparently people thought they were sponsored links and ignored them) - they just appear as the first results
- where one area of bbc.co.uk has multiple page matches for a search query, the second result is indented (a la Google) with a link to More results from "name of site">> (which stops the page getting swamped by results from just one area)
- the phasing out of the wider web search (although a module for results from 'Elsewhere on the Web' remains, bottom right)

Some nice example searches:

Big Cat Live
Merlin
Ian Hislop
Barack Obama
Fashion
Climate Change

This is the first in a number of incremental improvements to BBC Search over the coming months. I think it's a small but significant step forward that will help users find what they're looking for (esp. programmes) more easily and more quickly. I also think it starts to show how our search, topic and genre index pages are all part of the same continuum. Looking forward to reading the Martin Belam verdict.

Read more about the relaunch from Matt McDonnell on the BBC Internet blog.

Trends in gaming

2008-10-04T16:28:00.000Z

As promised a while back, below is a pull together of what seem to me to be some of the most significant trends in gaming at the moment. Let me know what I've missed.

1. New input devices / interfaces
The last few years have seen an explosion in the number of innovative new gaming input devices; dance mats, the EyeToy, the DS touchscreen and stylus, Buzz!, the Wiimote and Balance Board, Guitar Hero/Rock Band and the iPhone. Next up: the Neural Impulse Actuator (no really). See earlier post: A visual history of the evolution of video game controllers.

2. Digital distribution
It's been talked about for years but the digital distribution of video games is finally becoming mainstream thanks to the online stores of the 7th generation consoles (PlayStation Store, Xbox Live Marketplace, Wii Shop Channel), the growth of Steam (not being bought by Google after all) and, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, the launch of the iTunes Apps Store (100 million downloads and counting, many of them games). Digitial distribution is also enabling the little guys to get their games out there (check out the wonderful Ben There, Dan That! from the two-man Zombie Cow Studios).

3. Social networking
Gaming and social networking are coming together in a variety of different ways; via casual games / social objects in existing social networks (e.g. Facebook applications such as Scrabulous, Texas HoldEm Poker and the supremely annoying Vampires/Zombies); via games which work across networks (e.g. Mytopia, Come2Play); via social networks dedicated to gaming (e.g. Raptr, Character Planet); via casual gaming sites with integrated social networking functionality (e.g. Cafe.com, MuZui, doof, i'm in like with you) and via browser based games with a social dimension (e.g. PMOG, WebWars: EVE).

4. User-created games
Once the province of the bedroom-coder, it's getting easier and easier for non-technical users to create their own games thanks to sites such as The Sims Carnival and PlayCrafter. The visual richness and complexity of what it's possible to produce is also increasing with the advent of more sophisticated 3D engines like Atmosphir. Sites such as Kongregate and YoYo Games enable amateur developers to get their games out to a wide audience. Creating elements within games is also becoming increasingly commonplace with games such as Spore and LittleBigPlanet taking the creativity offered by The Sims to the next level.

5. Free-to-play games
It looks like Chris Anderson might be right (again) - the shift towards free is gradually starting to permeate the games industry. Whilst freeware has been around for years it's only relatively recently that it's started looking like a viable option for bigger games companies as ad supported gaming and alternative revenue streams (e.g. clothing for avatars) become increasingly commonplace.

6. Personalised avatars
The days of choosing between Pac-Man and Ms Pac-Man are long gone. Fully customised 3D avatars are increasingly becoming the norm in gaming environments. Online virtual worlds and MMOGs such as Second Life, MTV's virtual worlds, EVE Online and City of Heroes set a new benchmark of avatar personalisation which is now starting to percolate through to console titles. WeeWorld and Nintendo also helped shift expectations with their respective WeeMees / Wii Miis.

7. Real-world gaming
The number of gaming experiences tempting joystick junkies beyond their front doors has been on the increase over the last couple of years; from ARG's like I Love Bees and Perplex City to geo-location games like PacManhatten, Crossroads, Conqwest and Plundr. Whether these games transition from the geek-elite to the mainstream remains to be seen, although Akoha (which bills itself as "the world’s first social reality game") looks interesting, as does Zyked (think Nike + on steroids).

8. Episodic gaming
A logistical nightmare when shipping physical product, episodic games becomes achievable when delivered over IP. Telltale Games is at the forefront of episodic gaming having published three separate series: Bone, Sam & Max and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (with Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures coming soon). Other high profile episodic games include GameTap's American McGee's Grimm, SCE's Siren: Blood Curse and Kuma's controversial Kuma\War. BioWare provided additional downloadable episodes for Mass Effect and Warner Bros. Interactive are reportedly planning to release the Watchmen video game episodically. A somewhat lower profile example is Channel 4/LittleLoud's Bow Street Runner (see earlier post).

9. Casual games
The casual games market has gone through the roof in the last few years. Uber portals such as Pogo, Miniclip and AddictingGames attract millions of visitors a month whilst series such as Virtual Villagers and Mystery Case Files have been downloaded many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of times. There's also the occasional David amongst the casual gaming Goliaths, with individual titles like Line Rider and TypeRacer capturing the public's imagination and spreading virally.

10. Into the mainstream
Extensively documented elsewhere, there's little doubt that the Wii, Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, Brain Training and Nicole Kidman have all done their bit in helping move gaming beyond the hardcore to members of the family whom previous gaming eras couldn't reach. Will be interesting to see how much further gaming can diversify in order to reach new audiences or whether that particular market strategy has now been exhausted.

Photo: Matt Watts. Used under license.

Googling for brands: Is BBC weather really more popular than porn?

2008-09-17T22:11:00.000Z

Interested by the recent Experian / Hitwise release which reports that 88% of UK Internet searches in May 2008 were for branded search terms (up from 65% in 2005) with ‘facebook’ topping the list (accounting for 1 in every 72 searches).

So, why should this be the case? Robin Goad (co-author of the report) is clearly right in saying that "much of this branded search is navigational in nature – people type a brand name into a search engine or browser toolbar with the clear intention of navigating to a particular site", but why? Do most UK internet users genuinely not know the difference between their browser address bar and search box (perhaps a forgivable mistake in light of recent developments) or are we just tired of playing URL roulette when Google can confirm our desired destination in a fraction of a second? Most likely a mixture of the two.

Another reason is the sample size; absent from the headline but present in the main body of the release is the fact that this percentage was drawn from an analysis of the top 2,000 UK search terms. In other words, the long tail is missing; a long tail which I suspect contains a higher percentage of non-branded search terms.

Another potential omission is adult search terms which invariably get filtered from these sorts of rankings (if you want to see the frightening reality of what people are searching for in real-time, check out Dogpile SearchSpy). Google Trends (Google having an 87% market share of UK search) certainly suggests that 'porn' is a much more common UK search term than 'bbc weather' (see chart). It also places 'google' above most of the search terms in the Hitwise Top 10 (see chart), although I'm not entirely sure what that tells us.

So, what are the takeaways from this report? Brand searches certainly appear to be becoming more prevalent, at least at the head of the curve. One possible response is to actively target your competitors keywords through sponsored links, as Sky are currently doing for some key BBC brands like EastEnders, to try and take advantage of the 8.7% of searches for one of the top 100 online brands in the UK which result in a visit to a website owned by someone other than the brand owner (something Hitwise charmingly refers to as "brand leakage").

Another option is to try and harness these popular search terms via optimisation for natural search. Whilst you'd need to have a hell of a lot of googlejuice in the bank to come anywhere near page one of the results for these terms in isolation, when coupled with one or more other keywords, you could be in the money (one of the most consistently viewed posts on this blog is my Top 10 best Facebook applications, despite being over a year old).

A couple of other takeaways:
- Don't assume users will dutifully type in the URL you've spent thousands of pounds marketing - they'll probably just Google your brand.
- Try to take account of possible misspellings, colloquialisms and phonetic interpretations of your brand in your SEO strategy (note 'youtube' and 'you tube' at numbers 4 and 5 in the below table and the cautionary tale of Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment).

Radio Pop: Last.fm for BBC Radio

2008-09-06T11:58:00.000Z

Just wanted to add my congratulations to my old colleagues in BBC Audio & Music Interactive on the launch of Radio Pop, a "social radio listening" prototype from the small but perfectly formed BBC Radio Labs team which promises to do for BBC Radio what Last.fm does for music (i.e. scrobbling your listening, connecting you to friends, letting you favourite/bookmark - a.k.a. "pop" - and generating lots of pretty graphs and charts). It's replete with RSS feeds, APML data and some tasty extras: embeddable badge (below), Mac Dashboard widget, and integration with real-world radio Olinda.

It's a bit unfair requesting new functionality less than a week after launch, but hey, if you don't ask you don't get :-)

Radio Pop feature wishlist:
- Flash streaming (please don't make me download RealPlayer on my MacBook Air!)
- 'Now playing' info
- Details of "popped" tracks (linked to the BBC Music beta, natch)
- Recommendations based on your listens/pops
- Cross-scrobbling to Last.fm
- iPhone version
- Chumby version (ok, maybe a little bit niche)

Read more on Radio Pop on the BBC Radio Labs blog and on the personal blogs of creators Tristan Ferne and Chris Bowley and their boss, James Cridland. Great job guys.

Roll your own lifestream with Sweetcron

2008-08-31T21:26:00.000Z

Whilst there's certainly no shortage of hosted lifestreaming services to choose from, almost all of them are limited in the degree to which you can customise them. Sweetcron, on the other hand, is self-hosted (i.e. you install it on your own server) and open source, so is fully customisable / extensible. Created by an industrious Tokyo-based freelance web producer, Yongfook, it's an absolute joy to use. My current job means I don't get the opportunity to get my hands dirty with code anymore, so I've been enjoying tinkering around with Sweetcron's PHP and CSS to create my own lifestream and modules (the Last.fm module in the above screengrab is of my own composition). The only limitation of Sweetcron versus the current market leaders (apart from the barrier to entry created by self-hosting) is that it doesn't enable you to follow other users' lifestreams (although every instance of Sweetcron produces an RSS feed you can subscribe to). It's actually closer to microblogging service Tumblr in functionality and is likely to appeal to users who would otherwise have downloaded Wordpress.

Paying for paper: the great magazine mystery

2008-08-25T21:54:00.001Z

I spend so much time reading text on a screen these days that it's been both a novelty and a pleasure to have a couple of decent length train journeys this weekend to give my eyes a break and do some old-school magazine reading. After some prevaricating in Smiths, prompted by the bewildering array of titles now on offer (Media UK lists 1,956), I plumped for Wired, EDGE, T3 and Retro Gamer with my subscription copy of Empire tucked away in my bag for good measure. The total cover price? £21.88 (an average of £4.38 per title).

What struck me about this (apart from how readily I seem to part with money at train stations) is how much of the content I am paying for in dead-tree format is available for free on the net. (all the Wired articles, all the EDGE and Empire reviews, much of T3's news and features). And I'm seemingly not the only one shelling out in this way. According to a recent PPA Marketing overview, consumer expenditure on magazines has increased by almost 50% in the decade since the dawn of the internet (11% in real terms) with more of 'the internet generation' (whatever that means) reading consumer magazines than any other age group.

So, why do we do it and will this behaviour change once high-speed wireless internet access becomes ubiquitous and eMagazine readers become affordable (or, more likely, their functionality starts being adequately replicated on entry-level mobile phones / other multi-function devices)? I suspect it's a mixture of habit, convenience and a well-established relationship with the physical product which keeps us buying and which wireless devices and electronic ink cannot yet match and may never totally supplant. I also wonder if there's something reassuringly finite about a magazine in this era of unlimited information; a bound and curated volume of stuff that an editorial team has deemed worthy of my attention versus an increasingly unwieldy feedreader with hundreds of unread items...

Do you still buy magazines which offer some or all of the same content online for free? If so, why?