“Social” was very much the buzzword of 2010 and the eager smattering of the word throughout western media does not look to be ending any time soon.
Companies and their subsequent brands are realising that their audiences are largely located on social networking hubs online and are having to change their marketing tact to reflect the needs of their target markets. It has also been suspected for a while that social is becoming more important to the mysterious algorithm which determines the rankings of web pages in relation to certain search terms in Google. This was seemingly confirmed by the search engine’s recent announcement of Google “+1” (which provides SERPS based on a system similar to Facebook’s “Like” button) which is expected to be rolled out within the next 6 months.
Social elements have even been employed by the videogame industry too but for a different reason; to extend the longevity of interest in games. Well, at least one game anyway…
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (the 16th title in the NFS series) was released in November last year. The game’s trailer opens with the following statement:
“WARNING:
Those in relationships are advised against playing of this videogame.
Connecting to the NEED FOR SPEED AUTOLOG enables extreme competition through exact documentation of records and stats from your friends.
Hard feelings, creative profanity and grudge matches are likely.”
The NFS: HP Autolog comprises a “wall” akin to the type that you would find on social networking website Facebook but it is localised within the game only. When a players console is connected to the internet, Autolog automatically keeps connected friends updated with regards to new records set, career progress and challenges from peers. The feature also provides players with recommendations based on the latest activity of their friends. Players can also leave visual snapshots of in game moments on the wall and as well as comments next to the posts announcing newly achieved records. This makes for a dynamic competitive element and thus; helps longevity of interest in the game for as long as possible after their release date.
Autolog is to be featured in the next Need for Speed title (‘Shift 2: Unleashed’) but I am more interested to see whether other games developers follow suit and integrate this type of social arm into their own titles in the future. You think that they would when you consider the fact that Hot Pursuit won a BAFTA for its multiplayer element and the gaming press couldn’t commend the Autolog enough. NFS: HP is also the most highly critically acclaimed racing game of the decade (receiving an average of 90% in reviews) and it has shifted over 5 million copies to date, indicating that the feature was both embraced and loved.
Guest post by: Kat Cole is keen XBOX 360 gamer and thinks that her skills should not be underestimated simply because she is female! This year she is most excited for the release of the extremely long awaited Duke Nukem Forever which she has already pre-ordered from GameStop – even though it is not released until June!
It seems as though Myspace is trying to get their music product back on track and at the center of this is a new product called Wildfire. Myspace are testing their new Wildfire product, which aims to help bands control all of their social networks.
MySpace Music vice president of Product Roberto Fisher, who shared preliminary details at a meeting held Saturday by the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association (MEIEA) in Los Angeles. ”Are you aware of the people that are most valuable to you in social media marketing, to help amplify what you do?” Fisher posed. ”Wildfire is designed to help you understand the tree of engagement that happens in the time that someone does something. So, we can pinpoint in any tree of distribution the people that gave you the most reach when they heard something and re-amplified it.”
So, it’s “where in the trees you should invest,” instead of burning the whole tree with a blowtorch, according to Fisher, which sounds like a refreshingly targeted idea. But this involves a lot of close observation, on a massive scale. Accordingly, MySpace is essentially ‘wiring every single action’ that happens in the social networking sphere as it relates to artists, and then assigning scores to the most valuable ‘branches of the tree.’ ”You can score it all,” Fisher described. ”I can tell you if user A is more valuable than user B. And when you did X, these are the things that caused Y to happen.”
Pingdom has put together some great numbers which outlines 29 social networks that have over 1 million visitors per day. For traffic data, they used Google Trends for Websites.
Note that these numbers are estimates made by Google from a variety of data sources, so they will not be 100% correct, but should still give us a good idea of how the sites compare.
There has been a great deal of talk about the upcoming social networking product from Google codenamed Google Me. We dont seem to be any closer to have confirmed information about the product, but there are rumours that its scheduled to launch at this years I/O developer conference on the 10th and 11th of May.
While this is not expected to be a direct competitor to Facebook, its supposed to be a social layer over Google’s products. There are already a great deal of personalisation and social layers in Google products, so it will be interesting to see how it can be co-ordinated to improve the useability of their products.
Tonights Saturday Night Live featured a suprise appearance by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, alongside his The Social Network counterpart (host) Jesse Eisenberg and SNL counterpart Andy Samberg!
Adidas Superstars represents one of the most popular models of the German company; and also is one of the most used today as vintage models of shoes. And now, for their 35 anniversary, they are preparing the Facebook and Twitter models.
Honestly I’m not quite convinced about all the “Facebook” included in this model, sounds a bit too much. On the inside they’ve also included the following “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you” and “Making the world open and connected”.
The Twitter model seems a bit better; they’ve included the Twitter bird logo and the original color used by the micro-blogging web app.
Spreadtweet is a great app which provides a unique and original way to use Twitter, disguising it as a common spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. So if you are trying to hide your Twitter activity from co-workers, this is the perfect application for you.
“So, you work at a big corporate, huh? And you’re not allowed to use Twitter… Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a Twitter tool that looked just like Excel?” This is what @elliottkember says to all those Twitter users that are afraid to open a browser or any Twitter application related in their offices.
Spreadtweet, an Adobe AIR app, offers three different types of user interface: Office OSX, Office 2003 and Office 2007.
There was 2003, and a young fellow by the name of Mark Zuckerberg started with a draft idea for a social network; and the name he came up with was FaceMash.com. Now, more than 7 years later, the final social network name Facebook.com has over 500 million users and FaceMash.com is for sale.
This was Zuckerberg first domain for the Harvard social network, which apparently was a college version for “Hot or Not”. The idea of a social network started to grow, and the domain name selected end up with Facebook.com in 2004. By 2007, Mark Zuckerberg did not renew the first domain name and Rahul Jain took it.
FaceMash.com is now for sale in Flippa. The auction started at U$S8000, and the current bid is at U$S19000 with 15 days to go.
If you have an idea for a social network startup, then this is the domain name for you.
You thought that you had enough of icons already? Well, not yet. IconShock, a well-known design company, created a very complete set of 150 social media icons and they are all for free.
This set contains not only the most important social media icons which you can use, but also provides nine different sizes (from 16 up to 512 pixels), four different formats (PNG, PSD, AI and ICO), three different states (normal, enabled and disabled); and a mobile version.
Massive social networks like Twitter demands, for normal users and companies, not only using it but also maintain several accounts, publishing a lot of information and also brand monitoring. For that, SplitTweet is the tool.
SplitTweet is a simple and free web app which will provide you a single place to handle several Twitter accounts with all the necessary information of each: Replies, direct messages, favorites and the most important one brand mentions features, which experts in social media can use it to monitor the behavior and popularity of their brands.
SplitTweet also provides a simple dashboard where you can monitor all the important activity around your accounts. Another important feature of this web app is the possibility to automatically tweet the same in several accounts.
“Social” was very much the buzzword of 2010 and the eager smattering of the word throughout western media does not look to be ending any time soon.
