Social Networking Teenagers
Pew: For teenagers having a presence on a social network is almost synonymous with being online; http://eicker.at/SocialTeens
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Credits for Websites
Facebook Credits expand further: outreach to every website, going beyond Facebook Apps; http://eicker.at/FacebookCreditsWeb
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Facebook Credits for websites – We have begun working with a few developers to test the ability to offer Facebook Credits on websites, with the goal of helping them offer a more unified app experience to users beyond apps on Facebook. One early example is Collapse! Blast on Gamehouse.com. – At this time, we are focused on gathering early developer feedback. We will keep you posted as our tests continue. If you are interested in Facebook Credits for websites should we broaden the test, please sign up here.”
GigaOM: “Facebook isn’t a true PayPal competitor, but it’s taking some steps toward becoming an online payments provider outside of its Facebook properties. The social networking giant has begun testing the use of Facebook Credits on two games, Uno Boost and Collapse! Blast, both available on gaming portal GameHouse. … This could be a big springboard for Facebook to become a major payments player if it aggressively takes its Facebook Credits to other properties on the web. … I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is eyeing this market. Mobile payments is booming now and expected to become a $670 billion market by 2015. But it starts with small tests like the one with GameHouse. … Hulett said he believes though its early Facebook Credits could be a big driver of revenue for Facebook, similar to how PayPal has become the main engine of growth for eBay. That will still be ways off, but if Facebook plays its cards right and learns important lessons along the way, it might not be a stretch.”
IF: “Facebook’s virtual currency is currently the mandatory payment method for all Facebook games on the web, a payment option for Facebook apps, and became available as a payment option to mobile app developers last week. … If the test does indicate a demand for Credits as a payment option outside of Facebook.com, its unclear whether Facebook would require developers to use its virtual currency exclusively. It could simply make them an additional payment option, the way Credits currently work for Facebook.com apps as well as mobile apps and games. … More users maintaining a balance of Credits also makes Facebook a more lucrative platform for developers. … Facebook Credits for Websites could become a significant revenue source and powerful way to attract developers.”
ATD: “Facebook is now allowing its virtual currency to be used off of its social network, a feature that some game companies are finding valuable as they seek new ways to monetize their own sites. … GameHouse is one of the first to try using Credits off of the network, but there will likely be others following. – Earlier this month, Zynga announced Project Z, its own gaming platform, which will provide a seamless game experience between Facebook and its own Web site. Despite creating a separate game network, as we wrote at the time of the announcement, Facebook’s influence will be everywhere.”
ZDNet: “Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of all revenue earned through Facebook Credits, leaving developers with the remaining 70 percent. It’s not clear how much revenue the company makes from the virtual currency, but it appears to be a growing percentage of its overall revenue. It could be massive if Facebook Credits for websites takes off.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: Read, Watch, Listen
Will Facebook F8 fully embrace multimedia? Read. Watch. Listen. Coming soon; http://eicker.at/FacebookReadWatchListen
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Gerrit Eicker
ATD: “Facebook will unveil its next massive initiative to socialize the Web at its f8 developer conferenceon Thursday. A key focus of this year’s annual event has been well reported: Content. – And that’s the way the social networking giant will play it at the confab, using the basic phrasing, ‘Read. Watch. Listen.‘ … Many of the implicit and explicit content sharing tools at f8 will have a precedent in those Facebook has built for gaming, according to sources familiar with Facebook’s plans. For instance, look for a live-updating sidebar of friends’ content consumption activity, just as the site offers for games, and separate from the news feed wall.”
TC: “The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launchsomething big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the ‘Like’ concept. We’re told these new buttons are ‘Read,’ ‘Listened,’ ‘Watched.’ The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like ‘Want‘ following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.”
RWW: “According to reports, Facebook’s f8 developer conference this coming Thursday will have the motto ‘Read. Watch. Listen.‘ Other than reminding me of a certain tech blog’s name, this motto excites me because of the promise it holds that Facebook will fully embrace multimedia. But that has some major implications, which will affect many in the Web ecosystem. In this post we highlight 3 of the biggest potential implications. … Given my recent posts about the battle between Facebook and Google Plus, the ‘Read, Watch, Listen’ services look set to one-up Google Plus. Although who better to implement their own ‘Watch’ button than the owners of YouTube? Also Google has its own services that cover reading and listening – Google Books, Google Reader, Google Music and others – so they have a great opportunity to integrate all of those into Google Plus.”
RWW: “Facebook’s recent release strategy provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook’s new features have been to counter Google’s push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week. … The ‘Read‘ portion of Facebook’s announcement is perhaps the most mysterious. Yet, it has themost precedent in what Facebook has rolled out in previous years and may be tied closely with the platform’s social graph. … Facebook is already one of the top destinations for video on the Web. Most of that is shared content from the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and local news. This is going to be rolled out even further and it will likely to two-pronged – content sharing from outside of Facebook and consumption from within. … While we do not know the specific details of the ‘Listen’ products, we have clues. The primary indicators are MOG, Rdio and Spotify, all of which have been tied to Facebook over the summer. ‘Facebook Music‘ will likely be a conglomeration with MOG, Rdio and Spotify that will allow users to use Facebook as an iTunes-like streaming platform. … What does this all point to? Well, a major profile redesign could possibly be in the works to feature all of this new content. Mashable is reporting that Facebook will announce a redesign at f8 and the idea is to become ‘stickier.'”
Mashable: “Facebook plans to roll out a major redesign of user profiles at its f8 developer conference this week, Mashable has learned. – Details about the redesign are sparse, but two sources familiar with Facebook’s plans (who have asked to remain anonymous) have told us that the redesign is ‘major’ and will make Facebook profiles nexuses for consuming content.
IF: “Strengthening Broad Category Interest targeting could produce big revenue gains for Facebook. As we discussed earlier today, the Facebook Ads marketplace is inaccessible to many small businesses because they don’t have the know-how to effectively use the self-serve tool, or big enough budgets to use many of the tools and services built on the Ads API. As Broad Category Interest targeting is far easier to use than Specific Interest targeting, an improvement of the feature thanks to the ‘Read’, ‘Listened’ and ‘Watched’ buttons could help Facebook recruit this long-tail of advertisers.”
TNW: “Read: Facebook is assumed to be partnering with large online publishers like Yahoo, CNN, the Washington Post andThe Daily. – Watch: The platform will be merging with several online video hosting sites, Ooyala rumored to be one of several. – Listen: Facebook Music is coming with companies like Spotify AB and Rdio Inc. publish user activity on Facebook pages. … The Google+ vs Facebook war seems more heated than ever with Facebook putting up a good fight to maintain its lead in the world of social networking. It remains to be seen how Google+ will keep up with the seemingly impressive features Facebook has up its sleeve, and we can only watch and wait to see how it all turns out.”
Gerrit Eicker
Education Gamification
Donahoo: Gamification in education; http://eicker.at/2l vs. Bogost: Gamification is bullshit; http://eicker.at/2m
Gerrit Eicker
Software
Andreessen: Software is eating the world – virtually and in the physical world; http://eicker.at/Software
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Gerrit Eicker
Andreessen: “This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I’ve observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market. – In short, software is eating the world. … Why is this happening now? … Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day. … Software is also eating much of the value chain of industries that are widely viewed as primarily existing in the physical world. … Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming. This includes even industries that are software-based today. … Instead of constantly questioning their valuations, let’s seek to understand how the new generation of technology companies are doing what they do, what the broader consequences are for businesses and the economy and what we can collectively do to expand the number of innovative new software companies created in the U.S. and around the world.”
Gerrit Eicker
Cell Phones
Pew: Mobile phones have become a near-ubiquitous tool for information seeking and communicating; http://eicker.at/CellPhones
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Gerrit Eicker
Pew: “Mobile phones have become a near-ubiquitous tool for information-seeking and communicating: 83% of American adults own some kind of cell phone. These devices have an impact on many aspects of their owners’ daily lives. In a telephone survey conducted from April 26 to May 22, 2011 among a nationally-representative sample of Americans, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that, during the 30 days preceding the interview: Cell phones are useful for quick information retrieval (so much so that their absence can cause problems)… Text messaging and picture taking continue to top the list of ways that Americans use their mobile phones – three quarters of all cell owners (73%) use their phones for each of these purposes. Other relatively common activities include sending photos or videos to others (54% of cell owners do this) as well as accessing the internet (44%). – One third of American adults (35%) own a smartphone of some kind, and these users take advantage of a wide range of their phones’ capabilities. … Many activities – such as downloading apps, watching videos, accessing social networking sites or posting multimedia content online – are almost entirely confined to the smartphone population.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Games Launched
Google: Today we’re adding games to Google+. The stream will remain focused on conversations; http://eicker.at/PlusGames
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Gerrit Eicker
Learnings: Games have a higher priority than business (profiles) and have definitely been on the agenda before G+’s launch. They even have a higher priority than usability fixes to the +Stream, +Notifications, +Circles. Well…
Google: “Today we’re adding games to Google+. With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life. – [G]iving you control over when you see games, how you play them and with whom you share your experiences. Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you don’t. … If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.”
GigaOM: “The first titles include Angry Birds from Rovio, Bejeweled Blitz from PopCap and most notably Zynga Poker from longtime Facebook game developer Zynga, which is preparing to go public. … The move ratchets up the competition with Facebook and gives Facebook game developers a new opportunity. Some have felt that Facebook has played favorites with Zynga, which is by far the largest developer on Facebook. Now this will give them more leverage in dealing with Facebook and another place to make some money. Google+ won’t have top Zynga titles like Cityville and Farmville because they’re exclusive to Facebook but it does show that Zynga is further branching out apart from Facebook. … I don’t know how big a deal that is, since Facebook has clamped down on some of the game notifications you see. But it’s one way that Google is trying to stand out.”
RWW: “Games are an important feature for a social network that wants to compete with Facebook for users’ attention, not to mention its gaming business. … The battle for game developer attention is likely to be heated. Tricia Duryee reported late last month at All Things D that multiple sources told her Google would try to undercut Facebook by charging developers a lower fee for things like in-app sales. – Mike Swift, a writer at the San Jose Mercury News (Silicon Valley’s paper of record), says that Facebook has already issued a call for a press conference on the topic of gaming tomorrow.”
VB: “Zynga has built its business on social games on Facebook, and it currently has more than 250 million monthly active users, according to AppData. The company has been so successful that it recently filed to go public and raise up to $1 billion, and it made $90 million in income last year. Part of Zynga’s success comes from its ability to promote games virally through notifications – something Google appears to be shying away from.“
Gerrit Eicker
Accenture Gamification
Case study: Accenture‘s social adoption driven by gamification; http://eicker.at/AccentureGamification (via @tailorable)
Gerrit Eicker
Virtual Worlds Census
KZero: The virtual worlds sector has 1.4 billion cumulative registered accounts in Q2/2011; http://eicker.at/VWcensus
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Games
SlashGear: Help pages for Google Plus have officially confirmed the upcoming Games Stream; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusGames
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Gerrit Eicker
SlashGear: “Google’s help pages for Google Plus have officially confirmed the upcoming Games Stream, a place where results from what will presumably be social-style gaming on the new network will be pulled together. ‘If you’re looking for updates shared from games, check out your Games stream’ the help article suggests, though currently the link it mentions leads to a 404 page. … Such an inclusion would be another strike against Facebook, which has made significant strides in monopolizing the social or ‘casual’ gaming market with titles such as Farmville. Google is believed to have covertly invested between $100m and $200m in Farmville developer Zynga back in mid-2010.”
VB: “The Games Stream is apparently a social-style news stream that contains messages related to games that you play on Google’s social network. Google Plus has gained more than 10 million users and 20 million visitors in the last three weeks. However, games are not currently part of the network. … The topic also came up because Zynga revealed in a filing this week that Google was an investor in the company. Zynga makes the most popular games on Facebook. Google Plus might also be used to bring Android game results into a user’s PC-based game stream.”
TNW: “Google Plus Games could be the search giant’s take on Facebook Games and Apple’s Game Center, two of the biggest social gaming portals. – The interesting thing to note is that Google has taken feedback from Facebook users and used it to its advantage, separating notifications for games so that it does not pollute the stream, Many users of the world’s most popular social network have often complained about the lack of filters on games on their Home Feed.”
RWW: “There’s no official word from Google on a launch of a Games feature for Google Plus, but many signs are pointing to a feature that would be quite different from that of Facebook’s. The balancing act for Google Plus will be to have the Games help make the site a destination for people to return regularly while not chasing away those users who find the absence of casual gaming a welcome relief.”
Gerrit Eicker 08:34 on 12. November 2011 Permalink |
Pew: “Social media use has become so pervasive in the lives of American teens that having a presence on a social network site is almost synonymous with being online. Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites. Many log on daily to their social network pages and these have become spaces where much of the social activity of teen life is echoed and amplified – in both good and bad ways.”
Pew: “We focused our attention in this research on social network sites because we wanted to understand the types of experiences teens are having there and how they are addressing negative behavior when they see it or experience it. As they navigate challenging social interactions online, who is influencing their sense of what it means to be a good or bad ‘digital citizen’? How often do they intervene to stand up for others? How often do they join in the mean behavior?”
Pew: “This study aims to understand the social and emotional climate that teens experience in spaces where they can interact with others online. There has been considerable concern among parents, teachers, policy makers, and advocates about the nature and intensity of online social encounters among teens. In this research, we pay particular attention to teens’ experiences on social network sites, including Twitter… Do teens find these relatively new online social spaces friendly or hostile or somewhere in between?”
Pew – Teens and Social Networks: “Internet use is nearly universal among American teens; 95% of those ages 12-17 are internet users, up slightly from November 2004 (when 87% of teens went online). Internet usage is higher among teens than among adults as a whole (as of August 2011, 78% of all adults go online), although internet adoption rates among adults ages 18-29 are identical to those found among teens. … Eight in ten online teens (80%) now use social network sites such as Facebook or MySpace, up from just over half of online teens (55%) the first time we measured social network site usage among teenagers in late 2006. … Overall, Facebook is the dominant social media site among teens, as 93% of teen social media users have a Facebook account. MySpace ranks a distant second in overall usage, with 24% of teen social media users having an account on this site. (Twitter 12%, Yahoo 7%, YouTube 6%) … Teens engage in a wide range of activities on social network sites, with chatting and instant messaging, commenting on their friends’ posts, and posting their own status updates leading the way – just under nine in ten teen social media users do each of these activities. On the other end of the scale, gaming is the least common activity we measured in our survey, as half of teen social media users play games within the context of these sites.”
Pew – Social Media and Digital Citizenship: “The majority of social media-using teens say their experience is that their peers are mostly kind to one another on social network sites, but their views are less positive when compared with similar assessments from online adults. … While teens across all demographic groups generally have positive experiences watching how their peers treat each other on social network sites, younger teenage girls (ages 12-13) stand out as considerably more likely to say their experience is that people are mostly unkind. One in three (33%) younger teen girls who uses social media says that people her age are mostly unkind to one another on social network sites, compared with 9% of social media-using boys 12-13 and 18% of boys 14-17. … Nearly two-thirds (65%) of social media-using teens say they personally have had an experience on a social network site that made them feel good about themselves and 58% say they felt closer to another person because of an experience on a social network site. In total, 78% of teens say they have had at least one of the two positive experiences we asked about in our survey.”
Pew – Privacy and safety issues: “[C]lose to half of online teens (44%) admit to lying about their age at one time or another so they could access a website or sign up for an online account. When we asked a similar question in 2000, two years after COPPA’s enactment, just 15% of online teens admitted to lying about their age to gain access to a website… Websites are not currently required to verify a user’s age, and there is an ongoing debate… about whether or not such verification is technically and practically possible. … Roughly one in three online teens (30%) reports sharing one of their passwords with a friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend. … Password sharing is especially common among users of social network sites; 33% of all teen social network site users say they have shared a password with a friend or significant other, compared with 19% of teen internet users who don’t use social network sites. … Close to two-thirds (62%) of teens who have a social media profile say the profile they use most often is set to be private so that only their friends can see the content they post.”
Pew – The role of parents: “Parents in the United States are still the primary gatekeepers and managers of their teens’ internet experience. … The vast majority of parents of online teenagers have had serious conversations with their kids about the do’s and don’ts of online behavior. … Beyond simply talking with teens about online safety and civility, parents and other adult caregivers have other actions and technical tools at their disposal to help maintain their awareness of their child’s online activities. – Overall, parents are more likely to favor less technical steps for monitoring their child’s online behavior. More than three-quarters (77%) of parents say that they have checked to see what websites their child has visited. Two-thirds of parents of online teens have checked to see what information was available online about their child. … More than half of parents say they use parental controls to manage teens’ internet access; another third use parental controls on teens’ mobile phones.”
Pew – Parents and online social spaces: “Parents see the internet and cell phones’ role as a mixed blessing for their teenagers: Tech helps their kids to be connected and it can bring distressing things into their lives. … 13% of parents of online teens say they know their child has been bothered by something that happened or something they saw online. … The parents of teenagers are steeped in technology and are increasingly involved with their kids’ lives in online environments.“