The Power of Nightmares

Why Facebook Could Control Google’s Future

Original Article http://www.webguild.org/2009/03/why-facebook-could-control-googles-future.php

RBC analyst Ross Sandler predicts in a new report that Facebook could surpass Google in terms of unique worldwide visitors to their websites by late 2011 or early 2012  – I buy that, but here is what really got me.

Facebook now accounts for 19% of Google ’s search traffic and it is “growing at 188% annually”. That means Google’s marketshare gains over the other search engines eg. Yahoo and MSN have been blostered by Facebook traffic and not necessarily by Google taking away traffic from the other search engines or more users visiting Google directly.

This is serious stuff – the largest search engine is dependent on an unprofitable social networking site for 19% of its traffic? Wow! and that is free traffic. What if Facebook decides it wants to get paid for the traffic. What would that be worth to Google?

In fact Google is paying Myspace US$1 billion over three years for low quality traffic and I would guess Myspace contributes less that 5 percent of Google’s traffic. Google also purchased a 5 percent stake in AOL for US$1 billion in a traffic and ad distribution deal. I would guess AOL is contributing about 14% of Google’s traffic and getting a fat cut of the Adsense money.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer must be scratching his head in confusion – his company poured money into Facebook to counter Google and in turn Facebook is blostering Google.

I believe the downside for Google is very high on all levels as well as for users and investors. If Google ends up paying Facebook for traffic (which could be hefty) the stock (GOOG) will be hammered. On the other hand Google could taking more control over its future by exploring new revenue streams such as selling the vast amounts of data that it has on users to credit agencies, government and state agencies, law enforcement and such entities that use such data for their business.

The Trap

The Century Of The Self

Lexicon and the Potential of Facebook Search

Original Article http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/03/23/lexicon-and-the-potential-of-facebook-search

The whole real-time search discussion has been heavily focused on Twitter, and that is certainly a huge part of it, but while it has certainly been touched upon, Facebook has not received as much attention in this area.

Facebook is a huge part of the equation. It’s much larger than Twitter (at least at this point in time), and the social network’s recent shift to Twitter-like real time updates only highlights the subject even more.

Have you looked at the newest version of Facebook’s Lexicon? Lexicon is a tool to understand what Facebook’s users are talking about on their Walls. You can use the tabs at the top to explore different trends in the topics listed in the drop-down menu. This will be expanded upon in the future, potentially opening up doors to a lot of useful data that marketers would love to get their hands on. You can look at the number of posters, percentage of posters, and number of posts regarding specific topics:

You can look at posters by Gender, Age, country, or by percentages of any of those:

One very interesting feature allows you to look at a topic by word association. For example, under the “dancing” topic, you can look at the graph for associations like moves, pole, salsa, shoes, singing, etc:

lexicon

With “Sentiment” you can look at the percentage of posts that are positive vs. those that are negative regarding the topic in question. This information could be very useful:

The “Pulse” feature lets you look at keywords that are frequently mentioned in the profiles of users who mention the topic in question:

The “maps” feature obviously shows you the geographic data pertaining to the topic:

“I think Facebook has shown through this Lexicon that they have the potential to be much more useful than Twitter in terms of search and data mining potential,” says Jess Stay at Stay N’ Alive.  “Because Facebook has more detailed profile data, and a significantly larger user base to read from, the potentials for useful data are so much greater, and are already proving so via this Lexicon.  If Facebook starts to provide APIs around this search data, along with the publicly available user status updates and profile data, they will be a very serious force to reckon with, that I think, regardless of the mass funding Twitter has, will be extremely tough to compete with.”

Twitturly V.2

Twitturly have updated their service with a few key features. With the most important, in my opinion, being search functionality.

Twitturly is a simply great tool for seeing potential reach of a particular tweeted url.

http://twitturly.com/

Search (yes!)

So we finally have search. You can search using keywords, usernames, domains, or URLs.

• When you search for keywords, we hunt for your search term in all the recent tweets on Twitter that have links in them. Then we group them, if applicable, and give you the results with the links, title and description.
• You can go straight to a user’s Twitturly profile by searching for @twitter_username.  If you forget to include the @ symbol, we’ll do a regular search, as described above. We’ll still try to help you find the user’s Twitter Linking History.
• You can search for all URLs at any domain name by entering the domain name. Note that a search for “domain.com” will not return results that were at “subdomain.domain.com.”
• If you enter a URL, shortened or full length, we’ll take you straight to that URL’s information page, showing the comments, number of tweets and other details.

Streaming games service launched

Original post http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7962180.stm

After seven years in stealth mode, a Silicon Valley start-up has launched a “revolutionary” video game service that offers new competition to consoles.

OnLive, which launched at the Game Developer Conference, promises to deliver on demand video games via the cloud to the PC, Mac or TV.

The company said it can provide high quality gaming on low end machines.

“We think this moment, this day will be remembered as the beginning of a new era,” said OnLive boss Steve Perlman.

“This is huge. This is transparent cloud computing. This is really really important for the industry.

“This will open up creativity, allow for new experiences and new kinds of expression that have never been available before,” Mr Perlman told an audience of analysts, industry types and journalists at a ritzy unveiling of the product at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art.

The innovation behind OnLive rests in its video compression technology which instantly streams video via the internet so that it appears “effectively instantaneously.”

“Perpetually, it appears the game is playing locally.”

The reality is that all the heavy lifting is done by remote data centres that can be up to a thousand miles away while players use a simple PC or TV hooked up to a broadband connection.

This removes the need for paying hundreds of dollars for traditional disc-based consoles made by the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

“We’re giving access to people who don’t have access. We’ve moved hardware out of the equation,” said Mr Perlman.

“Digital strategy”

For around an hour Mr Perlman and his chief operating officer Mike McGarvey put OnLIve through some of its paces.

Too various “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience, the two men played games ranging from Crysis Wars to Lego Batman from a cheap laptop and from a Mac notebook.

With the data being sent from servers just fifty miles away, the men boasted of being able to play with one-millisecond of lag.

Community tools like leaderboards and avatars along with the ability to share ‘brag clips’ which are short videos of your game highlights, are also part of the service. Users can also have multiplayer matches and watch other gamers play.

Users will need a high-speed broadband connection of at least 1.5 megabits per second for standard definition results or 5 megabits per second for high definition.

Players who want to use their television will have to purchase a small OnLive MicroConsole that connects the TV to the internet and is about the size of a pack of cards.

So far ten publishers have signed up to provide titles for OnLive. They include familiar names like Atari Interactive, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive Software and Warner Bros.

“OnLive fits our digital strategy, which is to bring content to as many distribution points as possible,” Scott Guthrie, vice president of software publishers THQ told the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Amazing”

In the run up to the Game Developer Conference, or GDC, the company has been giving demos of the service.

Sarju Shah of GameSpot has had a test run and said “It seems pretty amazing. From this closed test it works really well . You can actually stream gameplay like Crysis, which is a struggle for most high end computers to do but in this scenario all you need is a little tiny box and an internet connection.

“If they can pull this off in the wild, given everyone’s internet connection in the home, they will truly wreck stuff for everyone. This is the tip of the iceberg. If they can stream gameplay to anybody then basic stuff like streaming video, a joke. Music? A joke,” stated Mr Shah.

Mr Perlman said he understood why some people might be wary of what they are selling but that he wants people to question what OnLive can do.

“What we have is something that is absolutely incredible. You should be sceptical. My first thinking was this shouldn’t work, but it does.”

Analysts believe the success of OnLive could go one of two ways depending on pricing models.

“Depending on what business model these guys adopt, they could be wildly successful or a footnote in history,” said Michael Pachter an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities.

Mr McGarvey was coy on the issue but did say it would be subscription based and that pricing “would be worked out in due course.”

Over the next few days at the Game Developer Conference, attendees will get the chance to test out the service. The company is also inviting gamers to sign up for an external beta over the summer.

Mr Perlman ended his presentation with one plea to the audience and the wider gaming community. “This is thinking out of the box, help us make it out of the box.”

“The benefits of what we are doing are just huge so we’ve got to at least see if we can make this thing work. It’s just too cool,” stated Mr Perlman.

Nintendo is Saving Market From Recession

http://www.edge-online.com/news/analyst-nintendo-saving-market-from-recession

Nintendo’s Wii and DS software will account for over 50 percent of all games sold in December across America, saving the game industry from the “full wrath” of the recession.

This was the conclusion made from analyst group Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) in its US December sales preview.

Speaking ahead of the upcoming NPD results for December, Jesse Divnich – the group’s director of Analytical Services – adds that “in terms of pure dollar and unit growth, Nintendo’s systems are expected to lead the way by an unprecedented amount.”

Nintendo’s Wii is expected to have sold 3.2m units in a single month. If NPD confirms, it would be the highest monthly unit turnover for any single console since records began. Divnich believes that, had supply met demand in the US, sales for the Wii would have been north of 4 million. The DS follows closely behind, with EEDAR projecting it will have sold around 3 million units.

That boost in Nintendo hardware sales has helped the industry grow by some 14 percent in 2008, according to the group, foretelling an exceptional rise in the game market in the face of a global recession which has paralysed numerous other business sectors. “We expect software sales for December 2008 to come in at $2.7 billion,” Divnich says.

And though Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is expected to also enjoy a rise in sales (up 19 percent over last year), EEDAR predicts that both of Sony’s systems will experience a drop.

PS3 sales could fall as far as 12 percent from last year, Divnich calculates, leaving the console with 700,000 units sold throughout the lucrative Christmas month; less than half of what the 360 is expected to take. The PSP, meanwhile, should sell some 880,000 units; less than a third of what the DS is thought to have sold.

Divnich reports that it was a very healthy month for a wide number of publishers and developers, with over 145 games expected to have sold over 100,000 units in the US throughout December.

Nintendo is expected to have the highest volume of games in the top 30 software chart for the month, with a presence of eleven titles. EA is expected to come second with six titles, while Activision Blizzard is forecast to place four games in top-thirty chart.

In regards to the top ten, Nintendo’s remote/game bundle Wii Play is thought to have sold the most units at 1.3 million, with either Activision’s World At War or Mario Kart Wii following closely behind in second. Nintendo is also expected to hold fourth with rejuvenated sales of Wii Fit.

Looking ahead into 2009, EEDAR believes that the industry’s tremendous growth over the last two years will not be replicated. That doesn’t suggest the industry will perform at a decline, but rather that the industry will see “single-digit” growth.

YouTube game videos become a big channel for game marketers

Original Article: http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/18/youtube-game-videos-become-a-big-channel-for-game-marketers/

YouTube has provided a great market for posting viral videos related to video games, just as it has been for almost any other kind of video that captures buzz.

But Google’s YouTube division is starting to pull out all the stops to enable game developers to launch video campaigns on the site — and to make money by adding officially sanctioned game videos. You can expect this viral marketing to grow as the economy takes a toll on marketing budgets and more publishers discover how to take advantage of the enthusiasm of YouTube fans.

A prime example is the Tiger Woods “walk on water” video posted by Electronic Arts in response to a user pointing out a bug in the game. Levinator 25 posted a video that showed how Woods could walk on water in the game and hit a ball. EA’s marketing department turned it around, launching a video that specifically addressed Levinator 25. In the video, the real Tiger Woods walks on water into a pond and hits a ball from the top of a lily pad. The video has had more than 2.5 million views, and YouTube shares the ad revenue with EA.

It’s not a ton of money, for sure. But it comes at a time when the costs of marketing on TV and other places is climbing — contributing to the budget headaches at game publishers who now spend $25 million or more on developing and marketing a single game on a regular basis.

The effort to make YouTube more friendly to games sprung up for a couple reasons. Game fans have become obsessed with Machinima videos (films of actual game play) with funny voice overs creating unique narratives. Among the biggest is Red vs. Blue, which starts the Halo Master Chief characters in red or blue body armor. Now the videos on the Machinima channel on YouTube have been viewed more than 14 million times. The most popular one, a [updated] Machinima.com episode entitled Master Chief Sucks at Halo 3, has been viewed more than six million times.

Microsoft tapped into the viral craze when it created a television commercial for the game Gears of War in 2006. The searing video images from the game were set to the haunting Donnie Darko version of the song Mad World. The video aired on YouTube at the same time the commercial launched. To date, the YouTube video has been viewed more than 5 million times.

And YouTube has also built syndication tools that made it easier for game publishers to incorporate YouTube into their actual products, said Nikhil Chandhok, head of video syndication efforts related to gaming at YouTube. In March of this year, YouTube contacted EA to launch a formal program for scripting videos for game fans. By that time, it was a no brainer that channels on YouTube could be great marketing tools.

“They were in tune with this viral growth on the web,” Chandhok said.

In June, EA launched Spore Creature Creator, a $10 version of its Spore game. Then, from within the application, players could share videos of their creations by clicking a button and uploading to YouTube. The idea was to get buzz going about the game before its September launch. To date, more than 158,000 videos of Spore creatures have been uploaded. The most popular of these videos has been viewed 194,000 times. EA ran a contest on YouTube, including a link to buy the game online on the contest site. This way, YouTube helps monetize the videos directly.

Spore itself picked up from EA’s earlier game, The Sims. There are more than 240,000 Sims videos on YouTube created by users. The top 100 Sims YouTube videos have been viewed over 130 million times, and about 35 percent of the top 100 machinima video views are of The Sims. Some of the best videos are highlighted on EA’s own site (www.thesims2.com) and on The Sims channel on YouTube.

YouTube makes the videos with EA’s content available on the EA channel on the site and then shares revenue from ads associated with those videos. Chandhok said there will be a lot more collaborations coming in 2009 between game publishers and YouTube. On top of that, Chandhok anticipates that users will start creating their own games based on videos. They can, for instance, show users a scene from a story and then have the users pick what happens next.

A personalized landing page for every customer

While most direct marketing efforts invite consumers to reply by mail, a full 42 percent of interested recipients prefer to respond online, according to a recent study by the Direct Marketing Association. Rather than send those consumers to a generic landing page—where the likelihood they’ll stay diminishes with every click—new technology from MindFireInc lets companies create a personalized URL and landing page for each and every consumer.

LookWho’sClicking automates the creation and management of direct marketing campaigns using dynamic landing pages, personalized URLs, response tracking and more. Using a company’s campaign mail file, the software first generates and hosts a personalized URL for each recipient—such as JoeSmith.Shoesaver.com, for example—and automates the process of inserting those unique addresses into the mail file for inclusion in each direct mail piece. When Joe Smith visits his personalized URL, he’ll see a personalized VIP Landing Page tailored specifically to him and to the direct mail piece he holds in his hand, with matching design and a welcome message that thanks him by name for visiting. The technology then captures Joe’s activity for additional follow-up and lead generation, all in real time; comprehensive reports display campaign response rates, visitor patterns and detailed lead information. Microsoft, BMW and Nestle are among the 500 companies using the technology, MindFireInc says.

In this era of mass-customization, consumers expect to be addressed in a way that recognizes their individuality, and if it can stroke their gravanity too, then all the better. Something tells us this one will eventually become hygiene!

Website: www.mindfireinc.com/info/personalized_url_marketing.html
Original Article http://springwise.com/marketing_advertising/a_personalized_landing_page_fo/