After getting married this summer, we figured that with the real estate market doing nicely in greater Vancouver, and the low interest rates being offered right now, it’s a good time for us to move into something larger. Our place worked well when I was single, but with the two of us, a dog, and me working from home pretty often, we could use some extra space.

Anyway, I’ll keep this short and sweet. Here are the basics, and you can dig into the full listing on MLS or our photos on Flickr for more information.

#601 – 4132 HALIFAX ST, Brentwood Park, Burnaby, $389,900.00

*** OPEN SATURDAY NOVEMBER 14th, 2-4PM ***

Large 1 bedroom + den unit, huge kitchen, west-facing, 855 sq. ft.!

Smart, Simple & Sexy. The perfect solution for the Busy Urbanite wanting an upscale alternative to Downtown. An up-coming trendy area, Brentwood is filled with new buildings all over & lots of amenities including varied restaurants & easy access to everything from shopping to downtown, which is only 20 minutes by skytrain. A dream in Bisque & stainless steel with touches of pistachio is this WEST facing, well proportioned, extremely spacious & bright 1 bedroom & den home. The OPEN plan with its large kitchen with breakfast bar, fully applianced in stainless steel with granite counters is an entertainer’s dream.

The Marquis Grande, built by ONNI, is a modern building, like new, that offers endless amenities ranging from a gym & pool to bike storage & a live-in caretaker.

Showings by appointment. Listing provided by Prudential Sussex Realty.

MLS®: V795869
Finished Floor Area: 855.0 sqft.

REALTOR® Information:
Cherry Bouton
(604) 984-9711
http://www.cherrybouton.com

View this listing on MLS: http://is.gd/4Mff0

Halifax Street at Gilmore Avenue (google map) (yahoo map)

This post was originally published on my gaming blog, reroller. I’m re-posting it here because it’s also community-related and general enough to post here.

Microtransactions. There, I said it. A dirty word to some in the gaming industry. Or maybe just misunderstood and poorly implemented?

There’s a commonly-shared belief in the gaming marketplace that games with no monthly fee that are microtransaction-supported are unpalatable to the “serious” MMO gamer. Microtransactions, which offer an alternate (or additional) form of payment to the traditional subscription model, have been looked down upon for a long time, the general sentiment being that they encourage spammers, gold farming and sales, real-money trading (RMT), and pretty much every negative activity in the MMO book.

Now, I’ve written about microtransactions and real-money trading in MMOs before, but from a different vantage point. This time around, I’d like to explore a couple of options that I see as viable ways to monetize an MMO with microtransactions (and in turn, dropping costly subscription fees) in a way that doesn’t anger the majority of the player base and get a rise out of half the gaming bloggers out there. Obviously, this has been expounded upon by any number of gaming industry professionals and many people much smarter than myself, but I figured I’d take a stab at the concept coming from a the perspective of someone who develops web-based communities, as opposed to coming from a game developer’s mindset.

Challenging the misconceptions

The way I see it, MMOs are at their core simply online communities like any other format, be they social networks, message forums, etc. They engage and involve the user to an extraordinary extent, and provide a much richer user experience and interface, but they function based on the same principles that power most communities. And there are a few things you can do to encourage good (and bad) behaviour in most online communities.

The problem with the way microtransactions have been implemented in online games to date is two-pronged:

1. They remove the barrier to entry to the game, introducing undesirable users into the game. These users would then spoil the community via abuse of the system like gold sales, spamming, etc., encouraging negative behaviour in the process.
2. They alienate the actual gamers themselves by preventing them from growing their characters without spending money.

I’d argue that most or all of the worries people have about microtransactions are either unfounded or based on discrete examples of how they’ve been integrated into games in the past. MMOs have evolved, so why can’t the way payment is handled evolve along with them?

Microtransactions remove a necessary barrier to entry

The first misconception to challenge here is that moving from a subscription-based model to a microtransaction-based one will remove the primary barrier to entry to most MMOs. In most communities, strategically-placed barriers to entry are a good way to encourage good behaviour, and keep out the chaff. They’re used everywhere, in varying degrees and different flavours.

To take a page out of Derek Powazek’s classic book of the early social web, Design for Community, barriers to entry come in three distinct strengths: informal, formal, and extreme. Being interested in playing an online game would be an example of an informal barrier: if you have no interest in MMOs, why would you play Warhammer Online or World of Warcraft? That step already weeds out a good chunk of disinterested folk. Registering for a web site in order to be able to participate is definitely a formal barrier, although a weak one. Requiring a driver’s license is a slightly more formal barrier to driving a car. Being ultra-rich and having to be invited by someone else ultra-rich is a rather extra

However, take a look at YouTube. How many of you actually register for YouTube? What percentage of people actually rate videos, add favourites, or subscribe to other users’ video streams? How many people actually contribute content to YouTube versus the lurkers who just come to watch? That percentage is undoubtedly quite low compared to, say, active players of an online game. The moral of the YouTube example is that barriers to entry vary in their level of requirement. Some situations dictate harsher or more serious barriers, and some don’t, such as in YouTube’s case. They get what they need from the site without requiring users to register or participate, for the most part.

In the case of MMOs, the majority of triple-A North American titles charge a monthly subscription fee. In fact, the definition of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game often coincides directly with the term “subscription-based”. There are a lot of influential folks out there who decry microtransaction-based games as everything from unethical to evil, a cash-cow, and generally as an epic fail on the part of game developers.

That’s not always the case. As an oft-stated example of non-subscription games, Guild Wars was a game without a subscription model that succeeded both critically and financially, and had a pretty solid community to back it up. Of course, it didn’t use microtransactions, either. It had an alternate business model that depended on regularly-released expansion packs, which weren’t required to play, but were a viable way of producing additional content at cost to the players.

However, moving to microtransactions does not necessarily mean you’re completely removing that fiscal barrier to entry. While most examples of games monetized using micropayments, such as the majority of Nexon’s games, are free-to-download and free-to-play until you want to shell out real cash for armour, items, virtual pet, or ability upgrades, there’s nothing preventing game publishers and developers from still requiring that up-front investment from gamers. Buying the game box on the store shelf is an experience in itself, and Guild Wars did an excellent job of getting users to repeat that experience every six months. There’s no reason a micropayment-funded game couldn’t still require you to purchase a retail box, and not require a subscription. In fact, that’s what most of the subscription-haters out there gripe about; finding an alternate way to monetize that doesn’t require them to drop coin every month. Instead, make the games buy the box — and then charge them to promote good behaviour in the game, not bad.

Microtransactions alienate gamers and promote bad behaviour

This one is the easiest to quash. The main argument here is that most games that run entirely on micropayments are riddled with gold sellers, spammers, RMT, and are generally unsavoury places that “real” MMO players don’t want to be. Microtransactions themselves don’t promote bad behaviour. Bad design and implementation of microtransactions does that quite handily, though. If you build a system that encourages this kind of behaviour, it’s bound to happen. It’s all a matter of looking at alternate ways of monetizing gamers’ activities.

I look at games that run on micropayments as an extension of the freemium business model commonly found on the web these days. You get your basic package for free (or in the case of some games, with a one-time cost when you buy the game off the shelf), with a good set of features and tasks you can accomplish with the tools provided. If you want more, you pay for it in different increments. While most web sites that use the freemium model are subscription-based, there are plenty that require one-off costs to perform specific actions, which are undoubtedly forms of micropayment.

A good example of this methodology of how micropayments can be applied in the web world is Freshbooks. Freshbooks is a site for individual freelancers or small businesses that lets you track time and invoice your clients. The basic service is free of charge, or if you require additional services, or have a larger staff, you can upgrade for a monthly charge to a more performant account. Now, I’ve used Freshbooks myself and I’ve been quite impressed with it. One nifty trick they have up their sleeve is their invoicing system; if you want to send out an invoice via email, it’s free. However, they also offer the ability to send that invoice via traditional letter mail. In that case, they charge you a small fee, usually the cost of the stamp with a very slight markup. That definitely falls into the micropayment category and it works quite well.

In the console gaming world, take a look at the incredibly successful Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises (or hell, even an online service like Xbox Live.) Both games offer downloadable content (DLC) available via micropayments that allows users to continue enjoying the game after they’ve completed the basic content. Even popular console titles like Rockstar Games‘ Grand Theft Auto are expanding into the DLC arena with available-online-only expansions like GTA4: The Lost and the Damned. None of these micropayment-based systems are harming gameplay or hindering gamers’ enjoyment of the game, so why can’t the same be said for applying similar principles to MMOs?

Microtransactions aren’t evil; they’re just misunderstood

Seriously, folks. It should be obvious that there are other ways to implement micropayments properly, without pissing off the entire gaming community at large. It doesn’t all need to be about character customization and advancement. It should be possible to run a game on micropayments without resorting to cheap tactics like item purchases, character upgrades, or explicitly paying for XP. There are other features of MMOs that could be monetized, or at least work off of a freemium-style model, and wouldn’t disrupt the games’ ecosystems quite so much.

Here are a couple of examples, off the top of it head.

• Charge users to operate (or participate in) micro-communities.
  What does this mean? It means that you buy the game off the store shelf, sign up without paying a monthly fee, and then if you want to start a guild, you pay a small chunk of change to do so, potentially on a monthly basis. It’s even possible that you could create a sub-economy within the game where guildmasters could charge their own players to be part of a guild, recuperating some of the money they’ve invested in forming the guild, and developing a bit of a reseller mentality. All of the financial dealings could be handled via the game’s interface and be one-clickable; the best micropayment systems are the ones that are totally transparent and easy to use —Apple has recently become the master of this: think iPhone App Store, or iTunes, or even the new features being built into iPhone OS 3.0. Not only would this approach create a formal barrier to entry for guild creators (and/or members) and limit the amount of bogus guilds and dead micro-communities in MMOs, it would increase the responsibility (and potentially, respect) granted to the role of guildmaster, and really make gamers think twice before joining a guild, or guild-hopping at a later date. Financial investment tends to create a sense of attachment that you don’t really get otherwise. This would be beneficial to both people operating guilds and to the guilds as a whole.
• Charge users for premium services within the game.
  Instead of charging gamers for shiny new armour or to buy yet another virtual pet, why not charge for premium services within the game? Here’s an example of a common MMO feature that could be revamped using this notion: auction houses. Now, I’ve complained in the past about the simplicity of WAR’s auction house, and how it could use additional features to bring it up to par, or surpass, existing auction house systems in other games. How about if instead, some of those features were only available if you were to shell out a little cash to subsidize their operation? You’d still get all of the basic features of the auction house, but if you want to be a real pro auctioneer, or just streamline your user experience by adding a bunch of additional ways to utilize the system, you’d have to pay a small amount. Let’s say you want to re-sell your own services as crafter on the auction house. You could pay a small fee to list yourself via a paid advertisement, and in turn, you might be compensated by other users who want to request your services, who could be charged a small sum to find out your in-game contact info or place an order. This would allow the game publishers to makes some money off both parties, and would allow you to re-coup a little (or all) of your investment/costs, and eventually maybe even make a profit. This would only apply to the subset of gamers who really want to use the auction house to its full potential, and wouldn’t interfere with others who just want to play the game and not bother with getting that involved in these more specialty-oriented features.

I realize that the examples I’ve presented are small and probably wouldn’t come near compensating for the loss of subscription revenues, but they’re only two options to consider. There are any number of other ways you could monetize MMOs and forego subscription fees in addition to what I’ve suggested above — and to do it in such a way as to not alienate gamers or make them think they’re being ripped off. These are alternatives to the present implementation of microtransactions that provide additional services to those who require them, but don’t hinder gameplay or allow only people who can afford financial investment to succeed in the game. They don’t interfere with game mechanics and even could go so far as to improve or extend MMOs’ economies in ways that aren’t really being attempted yet.

Are microtransactions really the end of the MMO world? Or are they just poorly implemented right now? What other in-game services could be monetized without breaking gameplay and hindering users who don’t want to pay, or don’t have the resources to do so? I’d love to hear what you guys think.

Photo courtesy of wa?.ti? on Flickr.

Isn’t it funny how things you take for granted in the web development/tech industry break into the mainstream, and you suddenly take a look back at them with a slightly different perspective? When you think about it, this happens across the board, from a favorite indie band “selling out” and going all Top 40 on you, to a respected boutique advertising or design firm garnering awards, gaining recognition and supplanting a more staid, traditional agency.

The shift in how you think about these services just seems to be a little more noticeable when applied to web technologies and services that were originally very niche-market or highly early-adopter centric like Twitter or even the popularity of the Web 2.0-style design movement.

Resurrecting an old debate

I was watching a new sitcom a couple of nights ago and the main character made a reference to “twittering“, and the episode was discussing one of the characters’ newfound addiction to MMORPGs (namely Funcom’s Age of Conan.) I found the whole thing quite amusing, and — to my own amazement — I even enjoyed the show, which doesn’t happen too often these days considering what’s on the tube.

Much as they do in the world of message forums — for kicks, primarily — one of my handful of blog readers dropped me a line earlier today asking me to revive an old discussion and relate my current thoughts on the Twitter vs. Facebook issue (in terms of microblogging/lifestreaming, not general platform usage.) The email was with respect to my previous post on this topic from nearly eight months ago, and brought to mind the sitcom I’d watched earlier in the week. Unsurprisingly, my stance has changed somewhat based on my usage of both services for the last few months. From a high-level perspective, my Facebook usage has dwindled while my Twitter usage has either increased or stayed around the same, depending on when you sample it.

Focusing on the content

Facebook is effectively an oddity, a singular instance of a system that doesn’t work particular well anywhere else. Despite Josh Porter’s assertion in Designing for the Social Web that the best social media sites are the ones where most of the interaction is centralized on specific activities or types of content (think Netflix with DVDs, Delicious with bookmarks, and even Protagonize with short stories), Facebook is a pure-play social network; a site whose only purpose is to let people connect, socialize, and share miscellaneous media and content. There is no content object sitting at the root of this interaction, barring the user’s profile itself; most other systems using this kind of model tend to either stagnate and stay small, or to fall apart and decline in usage (*cough* Friendster *cough*) when the user has nothing to do other than update their profile and look at those of others. Users get bored, run out of things to do, and move on unless you give them a specific, enjoyable activity to pursue.

This all comes back to a core design philosophy: do one thing simply, and do it well. It’s an old adage, but it holds true in this case.

Doing one thing well

Facebook thrives mainly because they have a clean, streamlined visual design (though the latest update to their layout may cause many to disagree with me), appealing to a very broad market. It doesn’t have the chaotic mess of MySpace, or the usability issues inherent in other social networks. Facebook now owns a massive share of the market; their community is endless and very nearly monopolistic in size, even with respect to MySpace’s tens of millions of users. The reason I mention MySpace here is that even they appear to be embracing more specific content types, steering continually into the direction of the music and entertainment genre, building label affiliations and content distribution deals under Fox Interactive Media’s guiding hand.

Twitter, on the other hand, focuses is on short, staccato commentary. It may or not be conversational in tone; that really depends on the user whose posts you’re following. The central object in Twitter’s case is the message in its atomic form, and not the poster’s profile. Enforcing a 140-character limit to tweet length really emphasizes the brevity, wittiness, or candour you have to strive for in such a restrictive medium. The existence of the Twitties and Twitter API-based social experiments like Twistori alone are enough to validate my opinion. With this in mind, it’s easy enough to stay on-topic, since every post you make to Twitter is individually viewable and linkable, a history of your activity archived for posterity, much moreso than Facebook status updates. Every tweet is recorded, and can be easily isolated and referred to, which definitely adds some pressure to making them all individually worthwhile, which in turn increases the quality of the content across the board (or at least, one would hope so.)

The difference here is the lack of focus on Facebook — while they’ve incorporated many of the same elements you find in Twitter or other microblogging platforms like Jaiku (which, like Facebook’s status updates, allows for threaded commentary), it’s blended in with wall posts, photos from your friends, and random application-inserted notices. Even with their new bolded style, where status updates show up a little more prominently, they are largely lost in the clutter. Without the necessary focus, the value and quality of these updates deteriorates, which is why I find myself disenchanted with Facebook, rarely updating my status, or even going to the site at all recently.

Different strokes for different folks

While in my original post I primarily discussed the actual usability of the Twitter site itself versus the client applications its API spawned, I think the most interesting thing about Twitter is how the size of the following you have heavily influences the way you use it. Most members of the Twitterati with massive followings such as Leo Laporte or Jason Calacanis use it as a broadcast-only, primarily rhetorical medium for updating their fans as to their whereabouts, recent creations or thoughts. On the other hand, the average user with a drastically smaller follower base may find that they use it much more conversationally, posting commentary and insights that actually evoke discussion amongst their circle of followers. Of course, the Twitter interface doesn’t really help with this as it doesn’t support threaded conversations; you can tell that its users are making do (or it could just be a case of vendor lock-in), since other platforms that do offer the feature aren’t growing at nearly the same rate.

Both Facebook and Twitter are very ego-centric popularity contests in different ways. Twitter moreso depending on how many followers you have, assuming most of them aren’t spammers. Facebook is high school in digital form, and the younger you are, the more uncanny the resemblance. Posting photos of your drunken escapades last weekend is commonplace. On Twitter, listening to the sound of your own voice is definitely a common refrain. In fact, I’d argue that the medium encourages it; no one is going to follow you without a good stream of soundbyte-esque tweets, unless they know you in person.

Disparate communities

I use Twitter and Facebook quite differently. The people I follow on Twitter are mainly folks in my industry, the vast majority of whom I don’t know personally. Those who follow me are typically in the same boat (barring the spammers and so-called ”social media marketers” who have so insidiously worked their way into the system.)

If I were to dissect my Twitter usage into general overarching themes, it would probably look something like this:

• As a marketing and promotional vehicle for my personal brand, including the content I create and the sites I develop and operate
• Keeping in touch with long-distance colleagues or people I’ve met at conferences or other events
• General discussion with people in my industry
• As a general-purpose linklog
• Lifestreaming (which means, basically, just random thoughts and miscellany that I spurt out at odd intervals)
• As an SMS-replacement for friends and acquaintances I know at other local companies, allowing me to banter pointlessly and organize or discover local events
• Socializing with people I don’t know very well (but — in some cases — may want to know better)

On Facebook, my community is, for the most part, my real life friends and acquaintances. I also have a group of people who have added me as a friend based on the work that I do at Protagonize, but I do keep them on a separate list so as not to get everyone mixed up. Either way, the overlap with my Twitter community is minimal; 10-15% at best, I should think. My Facebook connections have no real interest in knowing or hearing about my job or my day-to-day work-related rants and musings, so the stuff I post there tends to be somewhat more personal.

I’ve found that there’s a point at both ends of the Twitter usage cycle, either as a follower or as a poster, where you hit a critical mass and feel like you’re drinking from the firehose, which is not something most people enjoy doing (and it’s the reason I don’t use services like FriendFeed regularly.) That number tends to be distinctly higher on Twitter, because you don’t necessarily care as much about the content, so you may not read as much of what’s coming through, which in turn means that volume/quantity of posts may not bother you quite as much. On Facebook, you likely read more of what’s coming through, and are willing to put up with less garbage. Hence my mass uninstallation of Facebook applications, just due to general spamminess. In that sense, I think both sites play host to separate flavours of the Dunbar Number, where Twitter resembles a mass media following with ~1000s of people (or at least several hundred) as a common prime network size, and Facebook would be a classic social network in where most users are most comfortable at or around ~150 friends.

What does the future hold?

It’ll be curious to see if with mainstream adoption, new Twitter members from other walks of life start driving usage in a different direction. Will these disparate communities start to overlap more as less technology-oriented folks start using both systems? You can already see the tip of the iceberg in the new US Election ‘08 coverage on Twitter and the deluge of discussion about Sarah Palin in the last few weeks (and Obama for the last few months). There’s a striking similarity to how Digg has expanded in the last two years from being a site with major Slashdot overtones and a hugely techie community, to a site trying to appeal to a broader segment of the market with much more political coverage, and achieve similar penetration to Facebook. Strategic partnerships between Facebook and Digg just reinforce this notion.

I’ll have to check back in a year or two and see where things stand, but for the time being there’s still a big gap between the communities, from my perspective. But it’s tightening up. Will there be a revolt amongst old-school Twitter users? Will they leave in droves or open up the floodgates and let their communities merge? Only time will tell, but it should be fun to watch.

I’m generally not in an organizational role where I travel a lot. Sure, I go to the odd conference or work with clients on-site sometimes, but that’s about it. Which made the last few weeks a pretty jarring change from my regular schedule.

Now, after a couple of hectic weeks of travel and a constant tug-of-war between sleep deprivation and jetlag, I’m back in Vancouver this week. This gives me a chance to settle down, and go back and review what’s been going on in the last little while. I’ve already covered my highlights of the Web 2.0 Expo in New York over on the Habanero UE group’s blog, so I’ll use this space to discuss my time attending the inaugural Nokia Open Lab 2008 event in Helsinki, Finland, that ran from September 11th to 13th, 2008.

As I’m definitely a little late in posting this (due to having no time to blog about it for a good two weeks after the event completed, mainly due to being in NYC for the first week), I won’t go into a massive recap of the event, but I’ll try to present it more as an analysis of what worked and what didn’t.

Getting there

To give you a bit of an idea of how the whole thing went down (from my eyes), I was on the same flight out from YVR to Helsinki (via Frankfurt) as Jason Hui of Yanko Design. We chatted for a bit leading up to the flight, and again for a good chunk while sitting in the very metallic Frankfurt Airport for three hours, as we debated the merits of the Nokia E71 trial device we were to use for the duration of the workshop.

Arriving in Helsinki on Thursday evening, we were shuttled to the Klaus K Hotel downtown, a lovely boutique hotel with huge rooms and a fantastic selection of indoor entertainment options (restaurants, cocktail lounges, a night club, conference rooms, etc.) Walking into the lobby of the hotel, we were accosted by the Open Labs folks, who wanted our photographs for badges immediately (couldn’t they have waited for us to get cleaned up first? being awake for 24 straight hours in an economy seat doesn’t lend itself to great photography :), then we had a little time (25 minutes or so) to grab a shower and a shave before heading out to a lounge/club called Blak where the initial Nokia meet-and-greet dinner/reception was being held.

As exhausted as we were, I think Jason and I, as well as fellow Vancouverite Roland Tanglao (whom I met for the first time in the hotel lobby, which is pretty funny to say the least), had an excellent time, barring the terrible American comedian that Nokia brought in to spice up the event. I think they could have done without that guy, to be honest. He got a few strained laughs, but I think his insult/shock-comic style didn’t go over stupendously well with most of us.

A (brief) summary of the event

Day One of the event on Friday was a lot of fun — between the workshop sessions throughout the day and having a chance to interact with the attendees on a less intoxicated and more professional basis, it was definitely interesting and as tired as we all were, we all found it pretty intellectually liberating to throw a metric ton of ideas on the wall. I’ll discuss the pros/cons of the sessions a little later in this post; it was a pretty chock-full day of discussion, with Glenn Letham, Anne Toole, Chris Moore, and the supremely energetic James Whatley acting as facilitators for the day’s sessions. The workshop topics included social media and community, geolocation, gaming, and collaboration in the workplace.

The evening ended up with everyone at Ahjo, a lounge/club in the basement of the hotel that opened up to the public after dinner, a presentation of the new Nokia Legends ad campaign (which conveniently launched the same day), and an awesome show by Petteri Sariola, who I’d describe as the younger, Finnish version of Dave Matthews, crossed with a little Raul Midon (be sure check out his musical talents over on YouTube.)

Day Two on Saturday was more presentations by folks from Nokia, which you can watch for yourself on the Open Labs Ovi channel, followed by workshops and a closing ceremony. I was, regrettably, massively hungover from the previous night’s festivities, and combined with intense jetlag, missed a good chunk of Friday’s activities. I blame it on the jetlag, and not the booze. :)

(There’s a detailed schedule of the event here, and most of the presentations are up at Share on Ovi, in case you’re interested.)

Anyhow, I ended up coming back to life in the later evening and spent the entire night awake, hanging out with a few of the facilitators (some of whom didn’t seem to sleep for the whole event… what were you guys on? and where  can I get some?) and some of the guys were leaving Sunday morning. We spent a while wandering the (dead) streets of Helsinki at 5am, looking for a place to get a drink, or even breakfast, then unceremoniously crashed back in the hotel lobby until it was time to head out. I shared breakfast and the first leg back with Jason (again) and Glenn, discussing the event in retrospect, and heading our separate ways when we hit Frankfurt, with Jason off to spend a week in Rome, and Glenn heading back home to Denver.

Why a workshop?

The reasoning behind holding the Open Lab event was the subject of much heated debate amongst many of the attendees. A few thought it was Nokia’s play into the social media scene and a way to evangelize their existing, much under-hyped services like Ovi. Others yet considered it more of a multi-faceted brainstorm of potential product (software or hardware) ideas. Finally, a few thought that the whole thing was a huge focus group. I don’t disagree with any of these assessments — from the amount of time and money invested by Nokia, there’s a good chance they were trying to accomplish all three goals simultaneously.

At one of the after-parties, I heard someone throw out the figure $250k+ as how much Nokia must have spent to bring it all together — adding up around ~$5,000 a head for each of the 35 attendees (flights, accomodations, food, transportation, etc.), the cost of setup and hosting of the venue, the large number of support staff from Nokia / Open Labs, as well the half-dozen WOMWorld folks who came and participated in all of the sessions. Even for an organization as large as Nokia, that’s a non-trivial cost for what was effectively a 1.5-day-long workshop, plus the surrounding entertainment and related expenses.

What worked?

Getting 35 hand-picked people of relatively disparate backgrounds — from around the world — who are all still in some way involved in social/mainstream media or online community in some way in a room together was a real coup. There were a lot of great minds sharing ideas in a very condensed timeframe, and it was great to be able to participate and network with people who I probably wouldn’t have had a chance to meet in person otherwise.

The facilitators were all excellent, across the board. I’ve spoken with all of them outside of their sessions, some of them extensively; they’re all on Twitter (though Jaiku seemed to be the more prevalent microblogging platform amongst the attendees), and they’re all great people. To be honest, I think most of the more interesting discussions occurred outside of the workshop sessions, at the dinners and parties that ran late each night. I even ran into James at the Web 2.0 Expo the week after Helsinki, and had a wicked night in NYC courtesy of Nicky Rhodes, another one of the attendees; I hope to keep in touch with the rest of them down the road, too.

The actual hosting of the workshop couldn’t have been any better. The environment was great, conducive to both conversation and brainstorming, and the folks there were all brimming with ideas. The fact that many of us were pretty much dead from travel was probably a bit of a detriment, but that aside, the Open Labs and WOMWorld kids did a great job of getting everyone setup, organized, and talking. By the end of a couple of days in Helsinki, there was definitely a sense of community that had built up amongst the attendees, as everyone was connected via Jaiku, Twitter (etc.), when they couldn’t just walk over and tap you on the shoulder.

Having provided everyone with a method of easy connectivity amongst themselves — the wiki (which is still being updated with new content now), the Nokia trial E71 devices, and Finnish SIM cards for everyone — was a nice touch, too. I’ll be posting a review of the phone separately, but suffice it to say for now that I won’t be switching from my iPhone anytime soon…

What didn’t work?

A number of things could have served the workshop better — I think the first point would have to be a little more consideration for people travelling long distances to attend. There were probably a half dozen of us who flew out from the west coast of the US and Canada, many of whom arrived on Thursday shortly before the initial dinner.

Jetlag was prevalent and the half of the attendees there who were originating from Europe were a lot fresher than anyone who had spent a day flying over from another continent, be it from North America or from Asia. The schedule should really have taken this into account as it seemed that flights weren’t confirmed until barely a week before the event itself, so selection was limited and we barely had any time to see Helsinki, let alone recuperate from long flights before tossing us right into the action.

As far as how the sessions themselves went, the facilitators were all quite solid, but I don’t know if the questions that were thrown up there to answer were as well thought-out as the presenters’ speeches; many of the questions seemed nebulous and were really difficult to answer in a relatively short span of time. More time could have been spent refining the questions, which seemed pre-prepared and even a little unrelated to what the facilitators spoke about during each of their intros.

The layout of the different workshop areas was interesting, but considering we had generally more people than available seating, it could probably have been physically organized a little better. Many of the workshops ended up being monopolized by a handful of people who were either more vocal than the rest, or were sitting right by the designated “team leader” who would then take notes and present the results on camera. My turn to present was during Glenn’s geolocation session, and when I was up to speak on camera for my group, it felt pretty hectic and disorganized. Maybe if we had a little more guidance in what we were supposed to be discussing, and if people had been encouraged to speak up more instead of being talked-over by the louder group members, it would have worked out a little smoother. As it stands, I’m not entirely sure what Nokia was able to glean from our fractured thoughts and frantic scribblings, but I hope it was worthwhile.

Final thoughts

I think the thing I noticed the most at the end of the event was that it was over surprisingly quickly. It could easily have gone an extra day or two — as Micki Krimmel mentioned in her recap of the workshop, it felt like it was over before it began, and the conversations just seemed to have been starting when the whole thing was shut down.

It’s a shame that the workshop couldn’t have been a little longer and allowed for a bit more of an open discussion, where everyone was encouraged to participate. It’s also unfortunate that the agenda and Nokia’s intentions behind the workshop weren’t a little clearer to those who were invited to participate in it, but I’ll chalk that up to it being an inaugural event. Let’s hope that the Nokia folks take heed of the attendees’ thoughts when planning the next Open Lab.

Either way, I had an spectacular time in Finland, and had the opportunity to meet, chat with, and bounce ideas off some amazing people at Open Lab 2008. Helsinki was beautiful, and I really wish I could have spent a little more time to see more of it. Oh, and I also learned that both Finns and Brits can drink me under the table. (Sigh.) I hope they invite me back next year. :)

I’m here attending the Web 2.0 Expo, which is being co-hosted at the gargantuan Javits Center in Manhattan by both O’Reilly Media and TechWeb.

Are you attending the Web 2.0 Expo? If so, I’d be happy to discuss social media, user experience, or community building with anyone else who happens to be around for the event. Interested? Drop me a line or message me on Twitter and we can meet up anytime during the event to chat. I’d love to hear the opinions and feedback of other folks attending the event (or even if you just happen to live in the area.)