Many libraries are providing video games for hire to draw teenagers and young adults through their doors. Yep, they’ll come into the libraries in droves, but is that a good idea?
Our vision of the library as a place for contemplation and studying, with the occasional homeless person, does not include a hangout for gamers. Although a large percentage of public libraries allow video games on their computers.. For the majority of teenagers this is the perfect place to go on to Facebook or MySpace social networking sites and talk to friends or listen to music Yes, I know libraries nowadays often have more DVDs than Blockbuster and more computers than the local IT training centre. But…..
CDs, audio books and graphic novels can be checked out along with books. Children’s story time, reading groups, knitting groups and lectures. Some libraries have youth groups, local history meetings, computer training (for ALL ages)… but still. Video games? Whatever next!
Libraries are no longer just about books and reading, more a recreational and social centre. A place to meet new friends and where locals share their knowledge and of course have a good gossip!
If you’re worried about video games promoting violent or addictive behaviours, rest assured that library staff are concerned too. But there is very strong evidence that online games aid concentration, enhance problem-solving skills and relieve stress.
And did I say that they get kids into the library? Maybe they may even take out a book!
Should libraries stock video games — or ban them?
Following the recent worm outbreak on Facebook and MySpace, security experts and the social networking sites are working to prevent future attacks.
It was reported that less than .002 percent of Facebook users were affected by the worm. Everyone who was infected were notified. The culprit was a piece of web code that looked like innocent user-generated content but it multiplied across the network.
Facebook and Myspace have worked hard to solve the problem.
“They seem to be proactive at dealing with the situation and have shut it down fairly quickly. They have their own anti-spam service within the system, and that’s what helped it from spreading far and wide.”
“The issues we saw on PCs 10 or 15 years ago, we’re now seeing on social network platforms. Unless social networks are careful, they will be facing the same spam-type issues that we see in email spam. The big challenge for the sites is to accept user generated content that won’t do anything malicious to the website.”
Scrabulous - an unofficial, online version of Scrabble – launched in 2007 on the social networking site Facebook had over 1,000,000 monthly users. The owners with the rights to the game in the U.S. and Canada, Hasbro, filed suit in federal court in New York City against Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, the Calcutta-based brothers who created Scrabulous. Mattel, which owns the Scrabble rights in the rest of the world, had earlier issued cease-and-desist letters to the Agarwalla brothers, but they ignored them. Facebook has now taken the application off of Facebook in North America
A new application has been started on Facebook – Save Scrabulous! Reportably with more than 10,000 signatures. The Agarwalla brothers have fought back and introduced a new word game called ‘Wordscraper’ in January, which is already gaining popularity from Facebook users.
The question is was this a sensible business decision from Hasbro? Missing the opportunity to capitalize on Scrabulous’s success in the Social Networking world, which all businesses want to embrace, and allienating Scrabulous fans.
What do you think?
Will you miss Scrabulous?
The Phoenix Generation: Insights into Chinese Consumers is a comprehensive lifestyle study focused on Chinese consumers ages 16 to 30. Pearl Research’s study covers Internet and technology product adoption and trends; lifestyle trends such as the growth of hip-hop, street basketball and the NBA. The study also provides exclusive consumer segmentation and an analysis of the Chinese middle-class.
The Phoenix Generation study is based on 200 in-depth one-on-one interviews across both first- and second-tier cities in China and more than 450 survey respondents.
Key findings of “The Phoenix Generation: Insights into Chinese Consumers” include:
Popular Trends – Street basketball, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and hip-hop have grown in popularity as Chinese consumers embrace new cultural experiences. Pearl Research takes a deep dive into these segments with ethnographic research and how marketers have leveraged these trends to connect with Chinese consumers. Brands such as Nike, Adidas and Li Ning have benefited from this as Chinese youth aspire to look like their favorite sports stars.
Internet and Online Games Trends – China has more than 210 million internet users making it the largest Internet population worldwide. However, Internet usage in China tends to differ as 100 million of these users are under the age of 25, thus are more likely to seek out entertainment content. Based on Pearl Research’s online survey, online gaming (60%) and chatting (65%) were cited as top reasons to go online. Approximately 51% of the study sample enjoyed playing multiplayer online games (MMORPGs) while casual games were also popular at 44%. This survey includes data about monthly entertainment spend; mobile phone, MP3 and PC penetration; PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii hardware adoption and Internet café usage trends.
Consumer Segmentation – Pearl Research has devised detailed consumer segmentation to understand the wide range of Chinese consumers. Urban incomes have reached $5,000 in first-tier cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. Allison Luong, Managing Director of Pearl Research, “As incomes rise in China, “Chuppies” or Chinese Yuppies are an increasingly common sight. Many place their savings into purchasing homes, cars, and investing in stocks and bonds. They are at the forefront of China’s burgeoning middle class and spending boom.”
Unique Websites – Pearl Research has compiled a list of unique websites in China. These sites were selected based on their popularity and growth potential. Pearl Research has included Xiaonei.com, Blogchina.com, Sky-fire.com and Dangdang.com as some of the sites to watch.
Some Conclusions - On basketball in China, Chinese Hip-Hop, popular websites, Internet café usage, that PC’s are major gaming platforms, online games and downloads are top online activities and that a significant portion of the Chinese youth are dual gamers. Plus many other fascinating statistics.
It has been forecast that more people will watch the Beijing Games online than any other Olympics Whether it is with the proliferation of social networking sites such as FaceBook or MySpace, sharing links across Twitter or on YouTube, spectators will be catching up with the Olympics, live or catchup, time and time again.
Thousands of blogs have sprung up with many individuals wanting to share personal Olympic event videos online This is a one off opportunity for media researchers to log, not only how long viewers watch the Olympic Games, but also the platforms they use – online, cell phone, TV…
The 2008 Games will also serve as a test of the ability of the Internet to reliably and securely distribute massive amounts of live and delayed digital video coverage from any given event.
We hear loads of negative stories about everyone spending too much time on the World Wide Web and not getting on with their lives. Let’s have some positives for a change!
The time we can all save with online banking instead of travelling to our nearest bank, using our precious fuel, only to find we’ve left that cheque we wanted to pay in at home on the kitchen table!
Catching up with friends on Facebook, Beebo, LinkedIn, MySpace, Tagged, or whatever social networking site you favour. I am having a great time revisiting the good ole days. Keeping in touch with family and exchanging photos. Making new friends, having discussions on all sorts of subjects, sending gifts and pokes, entering some very strange quizzes and joining groups I would never have encountered in the ‘real’ world. Very entertaining and revitalizing.
Don’t get annoyed when your inbox is full of forwarded email. Those jokes and piccies make us smile and you’re on their ‘friends’ list which gives you the feel good factor. Don’t forget to pass them on!
Now I hear that blogging is good for your health. It’s like writing your innermost thoughts in a diary. Many people do not want to share the intimate part of their lives with friends and family but are comfortable sharing their work problems and personal relationships with faceless strangers. Chat rooms are also great stress busters, just seeing someone you enjoy talking to is ‘online’ makes you feel good.
Online skill games reduce your stress levels and boost self esteem. I cannot go to bed without a last minute game of Fruit Frenzy! Online games are a great way to exercise your brain and they are having a massive impact on creativity, energy and overall productivity in the workplace.
A large majority of online social networkers have a Facebook account and the numbers are growing. Although MySpace still remains king in the U.S., Facebook is quickly closing that gap, having grown 40% over the last year. Worldwide, Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in April 2008 in terms of monthly worldwide visitors - around 115 million per site per month (source: Comscore).
Facebook Connect is just one example of a new trend. It is already proving more popular than both Google’s Friend Connect and MySpace’s implementation of OpenID. Facebook Connect allows you to login to third-party web sites using your Facebook ID and export your friend graph from Facebook with you.
Through the Facebook Connect integration, sites can access your Facebook account details and friend graph and move that data back and forth between their site and Facebook. For example, people commenting on a blog using the Moveable Type platform will be able to login via Facebook Connect. Their comment will link to their Facebook profile and the commenting activity itself will make its way back into your activity feed. On Digg, another site adopting Facebook Connect, you can login with your Facebook ID and your digging activity is returned to Facebook, too. This will drive your social graph out to places which are unaccessible today, like corporate web sites.
Google’s Friend Connect is not fully launched yet. Like Microsoft and their “Passport” (now Live ID) initiative, the largest source for collecting user accounts is via their webmail. For those that don’t use Gmail or any of Google’s other customised services requiring a login, there’s no value to Google’s Friend Connect because there’s no friend graph there. You would be creating an account to have the sake of the account.
As for OpenID, which is finally making its way onto huge web sites like MySpace, it will still have to overcome the “user education” issue. A mainstream web user will not know what an OpenID is. “Login with your Facebook ID” - that’s pretty much it.
What do you think about this new social web? Are you concerned about privacy issues? Do you see Facebook Connect as having a chance to be the topdog? Or will it be Google Friend Connect or OpenID? Or perhaps all three can co-exist peacefully?
The number of Internet users in China reached about 253 million last month, overtaking the United States as the world’s largest Internet market. An increase of of more than 50%, about 90 million during the past year. China could soon have more than 300 million people using the Internet for everything from news to online shopping. The potential for growth is phenonemal.
By contrast, the United States is estimated to have about 220 million Internet users, about 70 percent of its population, with similarly high percentages in Japan and South Korea.
Even though Internet sites inside China are heavily censored of political content, and foreign Web sites operating there have strict restrictions, online gaming, blogs and social networking and other entertainment sites are incredibly popular particularly amongst teenagers. 70% of China’s internet users are 30 years old or under.
The investment firm Morgan Stanley says that “Online advertising and paid search market is growing by 60 to 70 percent a year, and forecasts that by the end of this year, online advertising in China could reach $1.7 billion. And only 19 percent of Chinese people have access to the Internet. We are still far from saturation. So the next three to five years, we’re still going to see hyper- growth in this market.”
In the current international land-grab among leading social networks, Facebook is overtaking MySpace as the largest social network in the world. But there’s a big caveat — Asia — where a much-maligned older rival, Friendster continues to lead Facebook and everyone else by at least a two to one margin. The most recent data: This past April, Friendster clocked 36 million users in Asia, versus a distant second Facebook at 18 million.
And unlike social networking in the U.S., the opportunity in the Asian market is growing as more and more of the region’s 3.8 billion residents come online.
Friendster, because of its growth in Asia, has seen its user base nearly double from 23 million monthly active users in April of 2007, to 40 million users this past April, according to comScore. That growth rate seems to be increasing, as the company has added 10 million of those users since December. Friendster also points out that comScore doesn’t account for users who access the site through internet cafes. Internally, it says it sees range much higher in many countries.
Meanwhile, Friendster users are spending an average of 229 minutes on the site per month, the highest of any social network, according to comScore data from March.
This is looking more and more like a happy ending for the San Francisco-based company, which, as many of our long-time readers know, has seen many ups and downs over the years. Nearly from the start, it has been wracked by painful internal issues, including management conflicts, investor conflicts, technical problems, and mixed messages to its users about what was acceptable on the site.
It gradually ceded grounded in the U.S. to MySpace and Facebook, both of which now dominate the market here. But because the site had become popular with many Asian-Americans in the Bay Area during its early days, these users shared the site with family and friends in other parts of the Pacific.
A shot at the mainland China market?
The international friendships between Friendster users appear to be giving it an ongoing boost in Asia, with 23 percent of an average user’s friends located in a different country. This growth is happening across major Asian ethnic groups. With the site’s recent growth across countries, it may become the go-to social network for large portions of Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore
Most especially, it is the site’s popularity with Chinese speakers outside of greater China that may be give it a better chance of reaching users in the country. Among its international competitors, Facebook is contemplating how to introduce its Chinese-version site without inviting government censorship, and MySpace has been pumping money into its China site.
But life for internet companies in China is especially complicated. Domestic social network offerings from established companies like QQ and younger startups like Xiaonei and 51.com appear to have already grown prohibitively large. I say “appear” because there is little reliable data about any social networking traffic in China, so I — and many China observers I’ve spoken with — tend to doubt any internal numbers given by companies in the country.
Still, from what I hear, Friendster, like MySpace, is seen by the Chinese government as an entertainment site, not so much a place that foments political dissent. (Meanwhile, I hear Facebook is seen by the Chinese government as being about real-world connections — something I’ve argued — real world connections that could foment dissent.)
The best shot at the rest of Asia?
Regardless of what happens in China, the site has already launched versions in both simplified and traditional Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Today, it introduced a new version in Malay (see screenshot below), and has also recently added Vietnamese. It plans to translate the site into more Asian languages. Note: When I asked Friendster executives about its plans beyond Asia, I got a roundabout answer about Asia’s promise — so I’m guessing Asian users can expect 100 percent of the company’s attention.
The site has been aggressively launching other features, including a “fan page” for musicians and others to promote themselves to Friendster users similar to Facebook’s “Pages.” It has also been building out a developer platform, starting last October. We’ve been hearing positive things about it from some big third-party developers, including Watercooler (which counts Friendster as its second largest platform, with 1.5 million total users), Slide, and others. The platform has been live since December, and while it was developed before the Open Social effort to standardize developer platforms came into being, Friendster was a founding member of that movement. There are more than 350 third-party applications, with thousands of developers working on the platform, the company says.
Friendster’s executives attribute its recent growth to a composite of its demographics and new features like its pages and platform, along with its new mobile version. As we’ve written, large, web-based social networks appear to have a strong advantage over mobile-only social networks, so expect Friendster to continue to do well on this front, too.
There’s another interesting angle to Friendster, and it has to do with making money — but not ads. Many Asian gaming companies and virtual worlds are already basing large portions of their businesses on virtual goods. With an established user base of people who are used to spending money on virtual goods, the company is primed to introduce this sort of feature. Maybe in the form of sending virtual gifts to friends for a small fee, like what Facebook already offers — but with a lot more users who care to do so. I’m not sure exactly what the company is going to introduce, at this point, as it isn’t saying much.
Meanwhile, as the number of internet users in Asia continues to grow — and gain more wealth, expect Friendster to do very well for itself. Indeed, if it maintains its lead in Asia, it may one day be larger than Facebook or MySpace.
Source: www.venturebeat.com
Social media is one of the many results of ability to easily connect with others given by the Internet. Social networks are also an Internet driven evolution (you can see the charts regarding top 10 US networks and blogs at MarketingCharts). But the main activity over the Internet has also been transformed: gaming has evolved from hardcore online gaming limited to teenagers to casual gaming opened to everyone. Generating a vibrant environment for people to speak with each other and stay longer has become a standart with well-known examples: Xbox Live, the to come Playstation Home, the famous (but also dying) Second Life, or Facebook (the platform being the environment and applications the different games). Looking deeper into the gaming market to extract best practices over socialization process (which is an easy going when you’re playing online) is the path brands should walk to improve their brand image and above all make people speak about them and engage deeper with them so that they provide you with interesting insights and ideas.
Creating several consumer clusters through inviting to play games related to separated topics to identify and categorize them is one idea that has been provided by ingame chatrooms and game mods. One other big idea is to create addiction by creating a leveling-up competition between community members. It doesn’t need to be marketed, you just have to put it into your community roadmap, but be sure to leak the word to community power users (that’s an easy move, you got the sign-in stats), they’ll do the rest for you.
The last part is more easily said than done, but would definitly do the difference: leave the community you generated to community members. Finding the right moment to switch, the right people to become voluntary community moderators, and to manage all that within your digital house are the item to watch closely. Doing this free you from the hard and not enhancing work, giving you time to analyse and totally leverage your community. Why? By that act, on one hand you’re telling your consumers they’re part of the company, they’re trusted members and brand ambassadors, and on the other and you’ve created your best sellers team and your viral/ word of mouth network you can activate any time.
Check the examples of MMORPGs to get more information (World of Warcraft, Silk Road, Everquest) as well as hardcore games like Starcraft, Counter Strike, and many others. These community management patterns would eventually be the one you’ll see tomorrow at your (competitor ?) brand community. To get up-to-date and find some good insights from social games, bookmark InsideSocialGames.