Tag Archives: social gaming
Social networking and the English riots: don’t shoot the (Blackberry) messenger
August 12, 2011… With no obvious cause for the riots, the British press has been (predictably) quick to blame social networks. One newspaper reported a “Twitter frenzy” by rioters encouraging an “orgy of destruction”. Other commentators criticize the role of Blackberry messenger, referring to the popularity of this “secret” messaging service among young people. (It’s also popular with lawyers and bankers – conspiracy theories anybody?)
The mainstream media has launched non-stop riot …
Tags: crowdsourcing London looting riot social media Twitter
crowdsourcing, London, looting, riot, social media, Twitter | 3 CommentsGaming the system: how rewards affect performance
April 28, 2011… sites and concepts. You take something people are already intrinsically interested in and use gaming to give the service an “engagement boost”. So Nike+ gamifies running by adding challenges and progress bars. Uber-geeky Q&A site Stack Overflow offers badges as rewards for solving programming dilemmas.
Influential technology research company Gartner recently predicted that by 2015, 50% of businesses will use gamification to “obtain and keep customer loyalty”. The …
War Games (or how the US military learned to love the crowd)
April 26, 2011… launched its first crowd-based experiment in 2009 – an open competition to test whether online social networks could be used to gather precise data. DARPA released 10 red weather balloons at secret locations across the U.S. The first team to pinpoint the coordinates of all of them was offered a $40,000 prize. Using Facebook, Twitter, public radio and good old-fashioned bribery, the winning team tracked down every balloon in an impressive 9 hours.
Obviously impressed by the crowd’s …
Crowdsourcing vs privacy: do we know too much?
April 18, 2011… Places, describing the service as “a privacy nightmare”. What if friends (or enemies) start gaming your location: tagging you in places when you aren’t really there? Imagine trying to explain to your fiancé why Facebook says you’ve spent all day at your ex’s apartment?
It’s easy to forget that underneath the innovation and idealism, the web is basically the world’s most sophisticated billboard. The more you feed information into Places, the more Facebook can …
Too cool to play: the gamification backlash
April 11, 2011… both correlation and dependence (for some reason A marks in statistics class failed to improve my social status).
Post-graduation, the world sometimes seems to work in reverse. Take Apple. In 2000, Mac was the hip, underrated indie-kid of computing. Now everyone’s got an iPhone and suddenly Apple is an evil corporate giant out to steal your money, digital rights and free will (if you believe the Guardian ).
People are instinctively suspicious of stuff that gets too big, too fast. Two …
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