Archive for July, 2007

Perspectives on Twitter

Published by admin July 26th, 2007 in Social Media, Mobile, NetX and Advertising. 0 Comments

Twitterholics

I took the opportunity to conduct a series of interviews at the first Sydney Twitter Undergound Brigade meetup last night. What makes users Twitter (or ‘tweet’ in proper vernacular), how does it intertwine with the Twitterati’s other modes of communication, and is it inherently a new (ambient) quality of getting to know someone? Or, as Carrie Bradshaw might ponder: “Are we just a tweet away from falling in love?”

Not surprisingly, all interviewees were passionate about sending their 140-character-sized messages and painted a bright future for private as well as commercial uses of Twitter: Marketers and brands simply have to learn how to tap into their consumers’ constant streams of state.

Dave King of our own St Edmonds Lab hypothesizes in our cab ride to Darling Harbour that Twitter circles have a strong propensity to overlap with existing social circles, those that have mostly grown out of vicinity and physical locality (oh - and listen for the near car crash at 1:07!).
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Nick Hack of Shifted Pixels imagines casual group gatherings that are instigated and organized through Twitter bursts.
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Cathy Edwards of the Telstra Chief Technology Office points to the corporate dimension of Twitter: Maintaining and deepening business relationships via en-passant exchanges of messages.
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Ian Grant of Sound Alliance sees worldwide fan circles spontaneously forming around live gigs, bands and music minutiae.
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David Whittle of Mark finally wraps it up by evaluating the true data amassed through Twitter. He envisions that the constant messages about state will allow marketing to become more of a service to people.
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Thank you to all participants for voicing their opinions freely and eloquently and apologies to Nick Hodge of Microsoft whose most interesting contribution at the end of the evening failed to record due to my iPod running out of juice.

Tim Buesing of NetX/St Edmonds Lab

(sidenote: Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures has just announced it’s investing in Twitter. Interesting quote from his post: “As we stated when we made our investment in Delicious, The question everyone asks is “What is the business model?” To be completely and totally honest, we don’t yet know.“)

Megaphone

Published by davidk July 26th, 2007 in Mobile, Gaming, Advertising, Experiential and Consumer Generated. 1 Comment

Allowing consumers to mess with your ad using their mobile phone is a playful way to get them involved. Megaphone brings people into the action without requiring them to dowload an app to their device (always a difficult hurdle to overcome). Megaphone not only allows interaction using the keypad but, as the name suggests, the volume into the phone’s microphone can also influence the shared game state. An ad controller (no, not skipper) in every passerby’s pocket - nice one.

Read more at http://playmegaphone.com/.

Emotion Mapping

Published by davidk July 23rd, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

 

Online infographics using dynamic data feeds are increasingly letting us visualise situations in interesting ways (see marumushi.com for some nifty examples). With WiFi and 3G networks becoming more pervasive (in some areas of the world), there are greater opportunities to use these visualisations with urban, location-based parameters. On the weekend I read about the Bio Mapping project which attempts to map people’s location and corresponding emotion using Galvanic Skin Response sensors. In doing this, the project organisers can look at whether patterns emerge between places and feelings. This is an another amazing example of the real and digital worlds being fused.

See more: biomapping.net

Is Nielsen Measuring Up?

Published by davidk July 11th, 2007 in Advertising. 3 Comments

As reported by Fairfax, Nielson have announced that they’re going to begin to rank web sites by session duration, rather than page view. They’ll still keep measuring page impressions and other metrics but their official rankings will now be based on how long people are spending on a site. On the surface, the logic seems sound - ” with the influx of Ajax and streaming” the number of pages impressions a site gets is just not as meanginful anymore. Ajax messes with page impressions measurment by dynamically loading data into a page without requiring a new page or a refresh. And comparing sites that have video streaming with those that don’t, can be difficult if you base it on page impressions.

Nielsen and other measurement companies should be constantly looking at the the way they measure how people are interacting with online experiences (this whole web 2.0 thing has defeinately made their job harder! eg. Is a “digg” a page impression? Or is it better than a user being at a site for 5 minutes?). And clearly measuring the quantity of time people are spending is a lot easier than getting to their actual degree of engagement (what advertisers should be really interested in).

Some sites should be applauded for having a low average session duration. If Google or WhitePages users spend lots of short, sharp sessions at the sites, you might assume that people are quickly finding what they want and moving on - that’s good, right?.

And email, chat, streaming radio and to a lesser extent, social networking sites, might all run in the background for much of the day. Many users of the micro-bloggging startup Twitter, would have near-constant access to it either via the web, mobile or widget, but not actually be looking at the site.

For now I guess it makes sense to think about a site’s objectives, then figure out which combination of metrics should measure it’s success. Don’t be too reliant on any one ranking.

Nintendo Tests Interactive Fan Network

Published by davidk July 10th, 2007 in Gaming, Experiential and Consumer Generated. 0 Comments

Here’s a good example of complimentary interactive applications to enhance the experience at sports events (this time baseball, but could be anything):

“ The innovative program is called the Nintendo Fan Network. For a fee, the network uploads a program onto the user’s DS Lite and allows fans to order food and drinks, watch the live television feed of the game, access stats and scores and play trivia, all from the comfort of their seat - whether it’s a premium seat behind home plate or in the top row of the stadium.”

Of course this should be a moble java application (eventually) for near-total audience compliance but it would be a fun use of your DS at a game. If the trivia is a peer-to-peer competition, it could really harness the respective fanbases in the crowd. Maybe Betfair and similar companies will eventually look at this for small time speculators.

Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news103126310.html

Distraction: Magnetosphere

Published by davidk July 10th, 2007 in Experiential. 0 Comments

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The Barbarian Group call this “the last iTunes visualizer you will ever want for”. They’re wrong. But it really is very very cool. If you  use iTunes on a big screen or have a party coming up, go mod your visuals (remember to tweak modes with the ‘m’ key):

 http://software.barbariangroup.com/magnetosphere/

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