This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

After writing my recent article on Growth Hackers, I’ve been asked by quite a few folks on how to learn the discipline. The best answer is, learn from someone who’s already good at it – if you’re technical and creative, it’s well worth the time.

I would encourage everyone to also read Andy Johns’s Quora answers on What is Facebook’s User Growth team responsible for and what have they launched? and
What are some decisions taken by the “Growth team” at Facebook that helped Facebook reach 500 million users?- it lays out a lot of the key activities used in a well-run growth team.

The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a "frictionless" social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you've probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.
If you decide to click on a link it doesn't take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post's reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it's also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They're annoyed, and they're quitting in droves

I was reading today’s NYT article on Google+’s new redesign and found myself continually puzzled by the key metric Google continues to report as the success of their new social product: Registered Users.

Creating an NFC tag that allows customers, friends, or even yourself to quickly check in to a venue on Foursquare is easy.
To begin, you will need an NFC-capable device, some blank NFC tags, and an app to write to the tags. In a previous post, I went over where to find the tags and what app to use if you are on Android.
Today, I will be using the same app, NFC Task Launcher, on the Galaxy Nexus to program the tag for a Foursquare check-in.

Recent talk in New Orleans for the Adobe Solutions Partners event that covers engagement, social media, marketing and customer service by Scott Stratten, President of www.UnMarketing.com

Cat cafés are huge in Japan right now. As the name suggests, these are coffee shops where cat lovers go to sip overpriced lattes and hang out with an adorable smoosh pile of kitties. In the past five years, exactly 79 such cafés have popped up all over Japan. What’s weird is that the café cats aren’t expensive pedigreed felines like Persians or those other ones with the funny bendy ears, they’re just the everyday mixed breeds you might find in the back lot of your local supermarket, cats who, in the immortal words of Brian Setzer, “slink down the alley, looking for a fight/Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night.” Likewise, in the past few years, there’s been an explosion of photo books and DVDs featuring average-joe cats. If people are so fascinated by what are essentially domesticated alley cats, why don’t they just swoop one up from the legions of strays all over Japan and take them home? I’ll tell you why: because landlords in Japan are dicks.

Pinterest is an online pinboard.
Organize and share things you love.

See if this sounds familiar to you:

To play the game, you put currency into the machine. You then pull the knob and wait for the result. When the result is presented, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, and some form of currency. Often times, this winning helps you progress towards a larger goal. You also have the opportunity with each play to win a rare prize of significantly higher value than the value of the currency you contributed to play the game.

That’s a slot machine, right? Wrong. It’s the basic action loop of FarmVille.

Needing the permission from 10 of your friends to keep playing is infuriating. But what if those friends not only had to come online and click on a link? What if to advance you'd need your friends to be online at the same time as you, doing the same activity in the same game as you for a continuous block of several hours? Then you'd be raiding in a MMORPG.

Macht plötzlich alles keinen Sinn mehr? Hat sich die Geschäftsführung die Reportings der Marketeers mal genauer angesehen und ist explodiert? Frustration aller Orten. Völlig zu Recht. Denn, da hat Mirko etwas Kluges geschrieben:

“Erfolg hängt im Social Web heute ganz stark am Engagement Einzelner. Das skaliert aber nicht. Und wer es versucht, es zu skalieren, verbrennt sich…”

Da ist es wieder, das Bild vom Social Ikarus, der sich zu nah an die Sonne wagt. Der Absturz lässt sich jedoch vermeiden, wenn die richtige Flugroute gewählt wird.

Dating, oh dating. You are such a strange phenomenon, so amazing & simultaneously horrifying. Who knows where the night will begin or where it could all lead? But here’s the kicker — dinner & a movie is totally played out. You’re interesting, they’re interesting — surely that’s not the best you can come up with! So here, for your romantic pleasure, are a list of 50 unusual, interesting, fun ideas to try!

The free-to-play online game service Gameforge now has 300 million registered users.

Wooga CEO Jens Begeman has revealed the percentage revenue split of his company's social game income, with the unexpected revelation that his audience is far more interested in saving time than buying customisation and decoration.

Recent events have shown how inadequate the standard web 2.0 vocabulary can be. See a few examples below, from liking someone’s death, to liking the Oslo bombing, to Amy Winehouse passing away being “most popular”.

Ticketmaster estimates that every time one of their customers posts on Facebook that they’ve bought a ticket, their friends spend an additional $5.30 with the site.

This was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.
I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.
I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats

A timely paper out of Google at the recent ICML 2011 conference, "Suggesting (More) Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph" (PDF), not only describes the technology behind GMail's fun "Don't forget Bob!" and "Got the right Bob?" features, but also may be part of the friend suggestions in Google+ Circles

We (PopCap Games), in partnership with Information Solutions Group, published a report on social game users earlier this year.

The research covered 5,000 social game players in the US and UK, and found that the average social gamer is a 43-year old woman. But the reality is much more multi-faceted... here are the key findings:

Among the nearly 5,000 consumers who responded to the survey, more than 1,200 play games on social networking sites and platforms at least once a week, qualifying them as "social gamers" for the purposes of the survey. Two-thirds of all qualified survey respondents are U.S.-based. 55% of all social gamers are female and 45% are male — with the disparity being even larger among UK consumers (58% vs. 42%). The average age of social gamers is 43, with U.S.-based social gamers averaging 48 years of age compared to 38 for those based in the UK. Further, 46% of American social gamers are 50 or older, compared to just 23% in the UK. Only 6% of all social gamers are age 21 or younger.

Kein Gebiet ist vor der Wissenschaft sicher und natürlich macht sie auch vor der menschlichen Verhaltensweisen nicht halt. Nur ist dieses Gebiet über die Jahre immer besser erforscht worden und neue Forschungsfelder sind schwer zu finden. Professor Joseph Santamaria von der Pennsylvania State University gelang es aber eine Lücke zu finden.

“To the best of our knowledge, this everyday behavior has not been systematically studied before…”

Das besagte Verhalten ist “die Tür für jemand anderen aufzuhalten“.

Mittels einer Videokamera untersuchten sie das Verhalten von fast 150 Menschen an einer Tür der Universität: Wer hielt sie auf und für wie lange?

In July of 2010, I wrote a brief answer stating that then-Googler Paul Adams' internal presentation about social (see: http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/0...) indicated that the state-of-the-art in thinking about social inside Google was much further behind than previously thought (see: Yishan Wong's answer to Should Facebook be worried about Google Me?). Rebekah Cox concurred with me in the comments and a few other people asked us to elaborate. We declined to at the time, because it's complicated.

However, this week, Google's early release of Google+ demonstrates why.

GDC Vault – Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design] is a link that takes you to the GDC Vault where you can watch a full video of the presentation, with the slides side by side, for free.
Of course, you didn’t need that, right? Because you already paid to get access to the utterly awesome GDC Vault.
There are a couple more free talks released today as well, including the AI rant and an inside look at the Humble Indie Bundle. You can check out all the free talks here.

At the recent LOGIN conference, I was on a panel entitled "Wannabe Farmers replacing Pretend Mass-Murderers: Are Social Games a Fad?" To make the panel more interesting the panelists took extreme positions, and I was the solid "social (network) games are a fad" guy. Not that I believe that entirely, but it made for an entertaining panel discussion. (I'll post a link when the talk is posted online.)

But, I mentioned something that I think is very true: business works in cycles. And, by looking at previous cycles we can use them to divine the future of the current cycle. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result.

OK. It’s Friday night and I admit I’ve had a drink or possibly two already, which means that I’m in a mood for talking and sharing, possibly more than I normally would. But sharing is a bit of the point of blogging, isn't it?

There won't be any pretence or cover-up. This is the truth, the reality the way it is, including cracks and less-than-perfect. But even if this post starts in misery, I assure you it will get much better towards the end. Don’t worry. Just have a seat and a pint and relax while I'm sharing my story, OK? And don't forget I love my guild.

Now let's get started, shall we? (Larísa fills a pint to the brim and heads for her favorite armchair, takes a sip and clears her throat before speaking up.)

Laralyn McWilliams and I gave a talk today at GDC. These are the slides for those who are interested: Intuition vs. Metrics: How Social Game Design Has Evolved.

As promised in the talk itself, here are the slides for the talk I just gave on “Social Mechanics for Social Games” — an updated version of the talk I gave back at GDC Austin.

Das Echo scheint sich langsam durch das Internet auszubreiten, treffender als die Kollegen vom SMO-Handbuch hätte ich die Geschichte nicht betiteln können: TelDaFax versucht sich an Social Media

A quick romp through some of the categories and companies that the Godfather of technology blogging sees as being particularly hot, disruptive, interesting, useful and trend setting today.

When Should I Visit? finds the least busy time to visit the museums, galleries and theatres of London. It states the quietest day and provides a glanceable graph to judge the relative popularity of different days. The site is intended to show the data in the simplest possible way with no unnecessary detail.

Last night I returned home to see a post by Jeremiah Owyang about online community best practices. Included in the post was the following image of the life cycle of a successful online community:

If you take a look at this graph you may think, wow this is definitely how I’d like my community to end up. My immediate response was “is this possible?” Thanks to “continual improvements” these online communities appear to have continued growth even past the standard maturation phase of the business. If you’ve read “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore you will immediately realize that this chart makes no logical sense.

We have previously discussed how online communities are often characterized by vast participation inequality. The so-called 1% Rule states that 90% of a community’s membership will not participate; 9% will contribute only occasionally; and the eponymous 1% will participate frequently, contributing the vast majority of material.

This model of participation inequality holds true for many online communities, and especially for bulletin-board modes of interaction (such as forums, blogs, etc). What it doesn’t provide, however, is a more detailed look at just how these participants become involved in communities or how they transition between groups. Rationally it must hold true that the 1% shifts as the online community grows, its members age, and so on.

Aktuell bin ich mit den Vorbereitungen für die neuen Kurse an der Social Media Akademie beschäftigt, speziell mit dem neuen Lehrgang “Community Manager SMA“. In diesem Zusammenhang habe ich einige namhafte Community Manager Deutschlands zur Rolle des Community Managers befragt.

Our recently launch Map of the Decade triptych comprised three parts: the Map of the Decade, details on the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist for 2011. I think may have been a mistake to put the Map of the Decade and Zeitgeist themes in the one document, as many only see the front page and don't get to the Zeitgeist themes, and they come from quite different perspectives (1 year as against 10 years). As such, I've taken out the Zeitgeist themes here, with the image and full text below. Click on the image to download the complete pdf - go to page 3 for descriptions of the Zeitgeist themes.

It’s really, really easy to exceed customer expectations by doing one simple thing: Have the customer’s back. Customers want to feel like someone is on their side, and being on the customer’s side is the job of the community team.

Werewolf is a simple game for a large group of people (seven or more.) It requires no equipment besides some bits of paper; you can play it just sitting in a circle. I'd call it a party game, except that it's a game of accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, assassination, and mob hysteria.
I really like it. But then I go to some strange parties.

Facebook’s communication channels are central to social game distribution, retention, and engagement, but there’s rarely an opportunity to see what happens to a game when all of its communication channel access is cut off.

It has now been about a week since Facebook suspended all viral communication channels for most LOLapps games. Although changes will take a while to cycle into a monthly active user graph, an AppData graph of LOLapps’s Critter Island game’s daily active users shows why a communication channel suspension is almost as bad as an outright removal of an app

How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.

By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.

I got married yesterday, but only in virtual life, and not to somebody else: I married my main character and my second character in A Tale in the Desert. ATitD probably has the most extreme implementation of marriage in any MMORPG: If you are married to somebody, you have complete access to all of his possessions, and you can even log on as him. That is great for mule characters, but requires a big amount of trust when marrying another person. Worst case scenario is a bad divorce where your angry spouse first takes all your belongings and destroys your house before hitting the divorce button.

If you're anything like me, you usually think of your pics in terms of content: Here's me smiling. Here's me looking tough. Here's me in Hawaii with that wacky turtle. And so on. Today, however, we'll analyze photography from a numerical angle—we'll discuss flash, focus, and aperture instead. We feel like people don't really think about these things when they choose a profile photo, and yet, as we shall see, their misuse can seriously mess you up.

I waded into the debate on game achievements with my lecture at the 2010 Game Developers Conference entitled Achievements Considered Harmful?, with a strong emphasis on the "?". Since the game industry seems to be careening head first into a future of larding points and medals and cute titles on players for just starting up a video game, I wanted to raise awareness of the large body of research studying the impact on motivation from various types of rewards. Trying to be "fair and balanced", I delved into what the data show and what they don't show.

Lee Sheldon is an accomplished screenwriter and game writer, having worked on TV shows like ST:TNG and Charlie's Angels as well as the Agatha Christie series of games from The Adventure Company. He now teaches game design courses for Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications. Instead of assigning his students a grade at the end of the course, he instead starts every student at 0 xp and they earn points through completing quests like solo projects and quizzes in addition to grouping up for guild projects and pick up groups. How many points they have at the end of the course determines their actual "grade."

Matthew Wiggins of mobile developer Wonderland, creator of the chart-topping Godfinger, has claimed that charging any price for an iPhone game is a mistake.

Following the Canada-only release in March, Godfinger went to no 1 in the charts in 36 hours with no promotion. It also topped the charts come its worldwide release in June.

Community management isn’t what it used to be.
Once upon a time, managing a community meant hanging out in an online location – be it a forum or a chat room – and moderating chat. Approving comments. Handling some support issues. Dealing with trolls, helping people with questions. That kind of thing.
But community management, at least the way we approach it, isn’t just online issues management and discussion moderation anymore. It’s a far more fundamental business role, one that ties together responsibilities from a number of different places, both online and off.

We're sort of a weird group in community and social media management. Our newly-minted "profession" is still being defined. Most people have no clue what we do for a living. We have few if any professional guilds (I did find the excellent Community Roundtable). The language and jargon defining our activity is still in flux. It's not like the US Department of Labor even recognizes the term "community manager" - unless referring to the guy who manages an apartment building (which is what most people think I do when I reveal my job title). We're definitely a breed apart.

Over the past 2 years, the relatively close knit blog universe has exploded in a massive confluence of social expression and corporate reaction. A cottage industry of owner-operators, trawling social media on behalf of themselves and others, has cropped up in lofts, dorms, agencies and iPhones.

These are the new social media Community Managers and corporate is clearly looking. This post offers a granular look at crucial skills, essential duties and a job description for the CM role.

I am supposed to talk about the relationship of aesthetics and metrics in social game design next week (at Games Convention Online in Leipzig, Germany), so I'm trying to figure out what 'aesthetics' could mean in the context of social games, especially Facebook ones. I've gone through a number of takes on aesthetics in both game design and game studies literature, and now I am in the process of trying to distill something sensible and practical out of it. By practical I mean something that could give function as high-level design drivers or principles in actual social game projects. 

Your brand is not my friend

In the realm of marketing, Gatorade is probably best known for splashy commercials featuring some of the world’s most famous athletes. However, a new effort behind the scenes of the PepsiCo-owned sports drink maker is putting social media quite literally at the center of the way Gatorade approaches marketing.

The Breakdown: A lot’s been going on in the Content Strategy community. Rachel takes a moment from her packed schedule to talk about some of them, including April’s Content Strategy Forum in Paris.

This post will share the first of what we expect to be a dozen or more papers on virtual world behaviors. As the first, it's the broadest, but I suspect will be of interest and use to the wider virtual world community. You can find the full text of this first paper here, at the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, with no access restrictions.

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since its start in May 1996, First Monday has published 960 papers in 151 issues; these papers were written by 1,207 different authors. In addition, eight special issues have appeared. The most recent special issue was entitled A Web site with a view — The Third World on First Monday and it was edited by Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla. First Monday is indexed in Communication Abstracts, Computer & Communications Security Abstracts, DoIS, eGranary Digital Library, INSPEC, Information Science & Technology Abstracts, LISA, PAIS, and other services.

The above presentation helps to visualize how social technologies change business, ecommerce, and corporate websites. When I heard Mark Zuckerberg tell us how Facebook connect would be linked with different websites, I had a feeling of how dramatic this would change the web –and wrote this piece What ‘Facebook Connect’ Means for Corporate Websites.

The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. This project will address these objectives through ethnographic research in both local neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California, and in virtual places and networks such as online games, blogs, messaging, and online interest groups. Our research sites focus on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after-school, and in recreational settings.

Simple. It's a twitter monitor, it lets you "monitter" the twitter world for a set of 3 keywords and watch what people are saying.

berlinblase started out as a little team-based tumblelog, covering live all the things happening in Berlin around BarCamp Berlin2 and Web 2.0 Expo in November 2007. Now, our spontaneous raw’n'uncut style will be continued during forthcoming european web-events.

ASCII is a weblog of computer history, punditry and trivia from Jason Scott, proprietor of the textfiles.com family of websites, and creator of the BBS Documentary.

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another. The project's graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain