Technology

OnLive and Communication in the Age of Social Media

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20120818 084119 OnLive and Communication in the Age of Social Media

What can OnLive teach us about communication in the age of Social Media?

Last night the gaming Twitterverse went into riot mode (well polite murmurings), as a single tweet from Brian Fargo announced that OnLive was no more effective that day. This was based on an anonymous email he had received that said

“I wanted to send a note that by the end of the day today, OnLive as an entity will no longer exist”

From that rumours started to roll. OnLive was filing for bankruptcy. All employees were being laid off that day. IDG reporter Martyn Williams was even stood outside tweeting that he was seeing people leaving carrying boxes. Read More ...

What the Klout just happened?

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Klout. My friend my enemy and subject of some of my earliest posts. In October last year I wrote a blog called Treating the Klout. In it I discussed the big change they had just made to their algorithm that had given rise to many complaints from the community. Some had dropped massively in score, others jumped up. Well, they’ve done it again.

Yesterday saw then roll out their latest calculation. Now they include many more data points to decide if you are influential or not. In my case they have now decided that I’m not really all that influential compared to my peers after all. In other cases they have given people very large upwards jumps indeed. Hell they even downgraded Justin Beiber. Read More ...

The Original Gamified Social Networks – History Teaches us about Gamificaiton

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1215912 73521777 The Original Gamified Social Networks 8211 History Teaches us about Gamificaiton

Seeing the news that Badgeville was to gamify social networks got me thinking about the old days. Social networks are nothing new. Back in “the day”, we all used to use forums (and bulletin boards before that) and chat rooms to be social online. Forums tended to focus on specific topics, with chat rooms just a real time free for all. What got me thinking though was realising that a lot of these used to include elements of Gamification, forums especially.

There was this stuff called kudos or Kama. When you said something of interest or that was helpful, users could reward you with these – a bit like when someone likes you on Facebook or +1 ‘s you on Google+. Kama and time served would also very often go towards some sort of rank on the forum. Higher rank and Kama signified a user you could trust and who was useful or interesting on the forums. Read More ...

Adding badgers would be more gamification than badges.

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Badger Adding badgers would be more gamification than badges

I had a great little article set up for today about forums, chat rooms and gamified social networks. However, with GsummitX London happening today and considering some of the things I am reading of late, I wanted to rant instead. Buckle in 🙂

Badges and points systems. You know them, and loads of you seems to love them. Now, precisely to sound like a broken record, in isolation they don’t work. You can’t make a task more fun, interesting, engaging – whatever noun you wish to use – by JUST adding badges (or badgers as I wrote. Now that would be fun. Mmm give a person a badger everytime they do something right and a honey badger when they get it wrong…). That isn’t gamification. It is like me adding a picture of Mario to a spreadsheet and saying I have created a game. Read More ...

Interview with Andrew Grill CEO of Kred

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Kred logo Interview with Andrew Grill CEO of Kred

When I started this Blog, my actual aim was to talk about social media and influence. My focus shifted, but every now and then an opportunity to talk about it again raises its head. So, I am very excited and pleased to present a Q & A session with Kred CEO Andrew Grill.

To get us started, how about a brief intro to what exactly Kred is 🙂

Kred, created by social analytics leader PeopleBrowsr, measures influence in online communities connected by interests. Kred is the first social scoring system to provide a comprehensive score for Influence and Outreach by valuing engagement and interaction over follower count. It is the only influence measurement based on over 1,000 days of social data and to offer completely transparent score calculation. Read More ...