Techcrunch this week posted a copy of a social gaming playdeck used by SCVNGR. Social gaming is indeed hot these days. But there’s some confusion around game mechanics and social gaming dynamics. I don’t see any social in the playdeck provided below. So I’ve added my own commentary to each of the deck’s 47 points. My apologies to its author, but the descriptions completely and entirely miss the socio-logical factors that make social gaming what it is. The deck, instead, describes individiual game play and spectacularly misinterprets connections between game play and player behavior. It reads as a Pavlovian exercise in attributing behaviors directly to a small number of game design elements, expanded here unnecessarily into distinctions that are redundant, disorganized (in fact they’re alphabetical), anti-social, illogical, and hopelessly blind. In fact the disclosure of a deck such as this one might cause one to wonder just who the hell de...

I have been meaning to write about Likes and users interests for quite some time. But the matter is complicated. So rather than wait to write the perfect post, I’m going to lay down some cornerstones, sketch a few concepts and maybe develop some key arguments. I’ll begin with a bit of the raison d’etre. Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookmarks — a simple expression of interest in a bit of social data. That is, a selection of one thing among many things, an expression simplified in order to communicate to an audience. Let’s break this down somewhat. For the Like isn’t a clear and direct expression of the user’s interest, or like. The reasons for this are several-fold. (I have written on this in the past, but a brief summary can’t hurt.) One gesture is not capable of capturing differences in degree. Clearly,...

I have been meaning to write about Likes and users interests for quite some time. But the matter is complicated. So rather than wait to write the perfect post, I’m going to lay down some cornerstones, sketch a few concepts and maybe develop some key arguments. I’ll begin with a bit of the raison d’etre. Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookmarks — a simple expression of interest in a bit of social data. That is, a selection of one thing among many things, an expression simplified in order to communicate to an audience. Let’s break this down somewhat. For the Like isn’t a clear and direct expression of the user’s interest, or like. The reasons for this are several-fold. (I have written on this in the past, but a brief summary can’t hurt.) One gesture is not capable of capturing differences in degree. Clearly,...

I’ve been doing an awful lot of talking to potential clients in the past weeks. As a consequence, my social interaction design pitch has tightened up. I’m going to attempt a brief and concise (un-Chan-like) summary of why it is that I believe social media startups and services ought to know their social interaction design requirements. I think that all companies involved in social media should have an interaction and communication model. This applies to those building end user experiences using social media, as well as those using social media for branding, service, sales, or other campaigns. This model captures what users (will) do with the service. It identifies social elements, activities, content, and much more — all of which are provided by user participation. There’s no understating the importance of this: the process and outcome of your interaction model definitions will center your efforts on user-centric requirements, and cement your ...

In the past months I have been systematically scoping out social media businesses, startups, services, agencies, and more. It’s what us “freelancers” do &emdash; especially now that the industry has matured. I have a filemaker database of more than 650 companies worth tracking. Along with notes, and various other sundry details. If I were to rush my way through the database, read company descriptions provided by founders, reviews gleaned from techcrunch, killerstartups.com, etc, I would come away with the impression that these were almost all technology companies. That’s the common narrative arc, the identity by so many efforts in this space. And the professional culture that unites so many of us located in and around the Silicon Valley. And yet so many of these companies are not technology companies. Not from the perspective of what they promise to better and improve. Not from the perspective of the business opportunity they seek to create ...

When talking with organizations about social tools and logical social flows for information from ideas all the way to formal outcomes (white papers, process docs, product enhancement requirement documents, etc.) there have always been stated steps. Some of these steps have different incarnations and labels, depending on how things are done conventionally. But, there is a usual natural progression of how these flow that is rather common and universal across organization types (formal or not). To these progression points there are classes/types of tools or services that map well to these, but very rarely is it one tool/service set crosses these, but whether it is all tools/services under one umbrella application or distinctly different instances, they really should be linked and integrated as seamlessly as possible. The steps in the social progression are as follow: Personal The first step or home base, is more of a state for beginning, is the the personal space and repository. Sadly,...

Bernardo Huberman’s much-tweeted recently published study reveals that what makes people influential on Twitter is decidedly not their follower count. Based on analysis of 22 million tweets, the study looks at what factors correlate most closely with the spread of ideas as represented by links. Some celebrities and institutions with many followers are effective at getting pickup, and others aren’t. And some with not that many followers have influence well beyond the sphere of their own immediate network connections. This disproves one of the basic illusion of social media douchebaggery – that by increasing one’s follower count, one will somehow gain in actual fame and fortune. This illusion justified many irritating techniques to gain followers, and more irritating boastfulness about the number of followers. Savvy and humane social media participants including Tara Hunt and Deanna Zandt have been talking about the truth that follower count doesn’t equal...

As the dominant online social network, Facebook is place where activists and organizers head to help their movements and ideas spread. People are already on Facebook, and can share discussions, events, actions, with their networks of friends. This is great. But there’s a pretty serious problem, it seems to me, in the use of Facebook for organizing. It’s hard to get to know people on Facebook. In the Facebook social model, it’s not very socially acceptable to “friend” someone you don’t actually know. The Facebook model is designed for people who are already “friends”. A “friend” relationship is symmetrical – both need to acknowledge the relationship. Facebook does have a separate built-in asymmetrical type of relationship. Institutions or celebrities can create “pages” that fans can “like”. The model sets up a hard dichotomy between people, who have friends, and celebrities who have fans. It...

I just signed off Tummelvision, a weekly podcast/videocast (in some cases) led by Deb Schultz, Heather Gold, and Kevin Marks, where we had a fascinating conversation about designing for social interactions. I was a lucky guest along with Julie Hamwood from Adaptive Path. The conversation was really stimulating, and wound in and out of perspectives about social interaction design (sxd). At first we were discussing Google Wave’s demise and Google’s inherent lack of social understanding, and then moved onto Facebook missing the mark with Facebook Questions. My take on this is that Facebook already has users asking and answering each other’s questions every day — and effectively at that — but in their status messages. What Questions appears to accomplish with its wide open format is merely to generate data for some presumed search platform later. I’m not convinced the data will be any better than Yahoo! Answers, and, as users, we’re certainly not compelled to ...

Who gets a thrill from the being mayor of their local coffee shop? According to a recent Forrester study the users of location-based services (such as FourSquare, Gowalla, and, Brightkite) are 80% male and 70% are aged 19-35. Usage is concentrated among a relatively small number of very heavy users: “only 1% of those that use them do so more than once per week” – but this tiny minority has accounted for over 100 million checkins to FourSquare, the current leader in the space. Does this narrow appeal mean that location-based services are a fad? In a quote in the Read Write Web article linked above, FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley makes the case that tech-savvy young men are early adopters and leading indicators for a broader market. This often true, but leaves out another potentially important distinction. The addictive feature of FourSquare for those who love it is the competitive game dynamics – the ability to be annointed mayor of the local bar or coffee...