Kongregate is a very interesting site, kind of like YouTube for flash based video games. According to TechCrunch, Jim Greer the CEO likens it to xbox live for flash games. It’s got some very innovative features like live chat with other players on the same game page, points for contributing games and giving quality feedback, and they even share ad revenue with developers that upload games to the site.
Over the years flash games have been often been little viral phenomena similar to video so the potential for a site that encourages the aggregation of these games could be huge. All they would need is to get a couple of games like linerider or penguin baseball and they will gain a lot of attention.
One thing that comes to mind as i look at a site like congregate is it’s less social media and more about “social production” or “social enterprise”, essentially they are giving their community the opportunity to be pseudo employees with opportunities for different levels of “value creation” activities. Everyone from a member that plays a game and rates it, to a developer that uploads a full blown game, everyone has a roll and more importantly ways to measure their success.
Of all the various social networking, citizen media, digg like things going on, dotherightthing.com appeals to me a great deal. Essentially it is a site that allows people to share stories about companies and how their policies are effecting the world, and people can vote on the “importantness” of the stories. Refreshingly it is not just a muckraking site that collects negative stories, but provides a way to talk about the positive impact companies have as well. Looks like early days for this site, but I do think they have a good foundation in place, good design, clear mission, motivated members - they just need critical mass.
On Dotherightthing, you can:
Share information that you discover about companies’ impacts on people and the world
Learn about the activities of companies directly from people and rate the impact of the important ones
Track the “social performance” of companies in real time
I would be interested to understand what their business model could be, there is no advertising on the site, maybe they could become a crowdsourced consultancy helping, or a clearing house for company ratings kind of like a credit reporting agency.
I’m a huge fan of 37Signals and have followed them ever since they were a usability company through their transformation into a product company. Anyway about a year ago I heard they were working on a CRM product called Sunrise, which they have apparently agonized over, scrapped, and reworked. I think we can safely assume that Highrise is the next instantiation of that product.
This is a pretty amazing product demo of a VOIP product for your mobile phone called Fring (I’m going to assume is being done by people at Fring). I had never heard of them before until i saw a post from Techpuddle.com on Megite.com - anyway, fring looks like sort of Skype on steroids for your mobile (in this case a symbian device with wifi access, in this demo he’s using a Nokia N80). It provides VOIP/IM and presence to skype, gtalk, MSN, over gprs, 3g and wifi.
I just noticed as I was browsing through my google reader that it now has an integrated podcast player, simple little feature but really neat.
It immediately made me think this would be very cool on my mobile so I browsed over to google reader on my new Nokia N95, but unfortunately the google reader works very poorly in a mobile browser, basically the multiple scrolling windows of the google reader is a bit of an interactive nightmare. I would love to see a google reader mobile app just like google mail and google maps. Seriously, that would be a massive mobile trifecta, maps, mail and rss (including the podcast player). (Mark, who writes The Nokia Blog, points out there is a very good mobile version of the google reader here: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/ but alas there is no embedded podcast player)
On a side note Nick in his podcast points to a very good article by Danah Boyd on Future Lab that basically rants about the lack of net neutrality of mobile carriers and how they are killing innovation in what should be the next wave of innovation for the web:
Unfortunately, the same is not true for the mobile network. There’s never been neutrality and it’s the last thing that the carriers want. They want to control every byte and every application that can be put on the handsets that they adopt (and control through locking). In short, they want to control *everything*. It’s near impossible to develop networked social applications for mobiles.
Just heard about Conway’s Law this weekend and even though it was coined in 1968 it seems incredibly relevant. Essentially the law states that systems (especially software) will reflect the organizational structure that created them. Going beyond the obvious aspect of organization of features, information architecture etc. it goes on to state that the software/system will reflect the disfunction of the organization that created it.
It is a consequence of the fact that two software modules A and B cannot interface correctly with each other unless the designer and implementer of A communicates with the designer and implementer of B. Thus the interface structure of a software system necessarily will show a congruence with the social structure of the organization that produced it.
Think about this next time your trying to implement something with a large, extended team.
Also what does this say about the organization between such companies as flickr, google, 37signals etc.
Also, does it imply that if we organize our teams with the software/sytems/products/services we want to create in mind will we create a better software/sytem/product/service?
If we want to create web2.0ish tools that are “simple tools, loosely coupled” should we have “simple teams, loosely coupled”?
SXSW (South By South West) Interactive is a long running interactive festival held annually in Austin Texas, where geeks get together and share their best work, and geek out. One aspect of geeking out is obviously wearing geek T-shirts and it seems they have outdone themselves this year, and thanks to Smith Magazinesflickr photo set of the T-shirts we have a great collection to peruse online. There are a lot of them so i’ll pick a few of my favs.
I’m not sure if Obama’s apparent dominance in the social mediasphere is down to his popularity or his social media savvyness. I had read a story today on Zdnet that talked about Barak’s leadership over Clinton in the myspace polls and it led me to think about how to create an app that could scrape a select number of myspace profile “friend” counts and put them all on one web page, well luckily Techpresident.com already thought of that. I do wish they would create an embeddable version so folks could put it on their blogs and myspace pages.
Now, apart from Barack leading the dems the incredibly poor showing of the republicans is quite extraordinary, are the young digerati and myspace generation really that skewed toward the dems?
With so much time to go before the election how many friends do you think Obama will end up with? Just for fun I’ll give a yet to be named prize to the closest number guessed in the comments or trackbacks for the number of friends Obama has at 11pm on election day.
I wish I could find the slides for this talk from Kathy Sierra at SXSW. It’s actually possible to peace this together if you listen to this is an audio file of the talk, read this write up with some pictures, and read this post from Kathy that describes the canyon of pain/suck.
This is a critically important concept to think about when you are dealing with a complicated product that users get more value from it as they get better at using it. Best take away for me was FAQ’s should be called WTF’s
Not a long post as i’m sitting in an airport waiting to get on a plane but as I see all this talk about twitter (btw i’m dying to start a service called Twatter now), reminds me of the experience i’ve had with other social media tools which I can only term as Ambient Friends. Maybe it’s the RSS of relationships but I can tell you of at least one occasion that I discovered that a friend had just given birth because they were in my contacts on flickr. Maybe that just makes me a bad friend, or a lazy relationship builder, but I enjoyed finding out and immediately left a comment. Maybe the technical term for various web based technology “loosely coupled” is now defining how many relationships are maintained? In some ways probably bad for me as I think I need more tightly coupled relationships with other humans
I’m not sure if Obama’s apparent dominance in the social mediasphere is down to his popularity or his social media savvyness. I had read a 
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