Whenever I see my News Feed on Facebook I see a lot of people playing Farmville, Frontierville and now Cityville. With various requests like “Friend is out of energy!”, “Friend has stopped by your homestead with a hand drill” and “Friend has wood to share!”

Over the years I have had numerous requests to join and play these social games and I have always refused. “Why?” Mainly because I cannot see the point and see it as a total waste of time. That leads me to the question “So why are they so popular?”

So I asked my friends who play these games and they said “It is great for chilling out.” And “I like seeing how my friends are doing.” and “I like helping my friends out.”

So by creating virtual villages, cities with avatars and being asked to carry out tasks for rewards and helping friends out is being very sociable. There seems to be various reasons why people play these games but everybody I spoke to was passionate about how they could grow their homestead or city and expand!!!!

A study by NPD that revealed that 20% of Americans spent time playing social network games like FrontierVille. The games are produced by a company called Zynga which makes online social games. Zynga which has 235 million monthly active users. Produce the games FarmVille, FrontierVille and now CityVille. Impressive statistics!

Why produce the games for free?

Each of the games use a 3D matrix model for playing the game. Mark Pincus co founder of Zynga Game Inc. The games are found on Facebook. In addition to making their own games, Zynga has created a network which allows third party developers to become part of the Zynga network.

According to analysis carried out by Steven Carpenter. It is estimated that Zynga generates $180 million per annum in profit. He also estimates that Zynga single handedly makes up over 45% of the market for social gaming.

Carpenter credits Zynga with being the first company to achieve large scale financial success on the virtual goods model, which allows Zynga to make millions out of the %1 to 2% of its users that are willing to buy items.

So here is the answer: Zynga create the games for free they make them very socially interactive, offering incentives to players to post to their Facebook wall and most importantly offer users the ability to purchase virtual goods. This generates over $15 million per month for the company from the small percentage of millions of users who purchase virtual goods.

The games are addictive and have a very large captive audience. With a small percentage willing to spend money on virtual goods for their virtual world in turn making Zenga the largest and most profitable social gaming company on the planet.

Every year Google release Zeitgeist which highlights the most popular searches carried out over the year. This year Google have split the data into different categories like Fastest Rising, Entertainment, Sports, People, Health and the Fastest falling...

The results are a like a snapshot of the year 2010. With the fastest falling being Swine Flu, The fastest rising iPad and chatroulette. In entertainment it is a young Justin Bieber a name I had not even heard about this time last year!

It is interesting but not surprising to see the social networks Twitter and Facebook appearing in the top 10 fastest rising. Yes, people really do go to Google and search for Facebook! I am never surprised that people do perform the strangest Google Search!

Finally in the news it was Haiti and Chile dominated the search queries for news this year. You can find more about Zeitgeist at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2010/

Google has seen massive changes itself in the latter half of this year with “Instant Search” – Predicting our query as we type and “Instant Preview” showing a snapshot of the webpage before we click.

In the last 24 hours Google have introduced Google Instant Previews to the Google interface and user experience which allows you to preview the website prior to clicking on the actually link. It is a very nice AJAX effect and perhaps useful to a searcher who can tell from the preview the type of page they are about to click.

My thoughts on this are-

·         The page quality and design can be seen prior to visiting the site and this will hopefully improve the design of websites so they can look good in the preview.

·         It can be slow to load, This is quite a big factor considering how quickly results are delivered  with Google Instant Search and Google’s passion for delivering results quickly.

·         Longer pages may have an increased click through rate as the preview displayed is bigger and more eye catching to the user.

The main down side is paid search. All the ads that appear in the right hand column are obscured by the preview. The paid adverts are Google’s main source of income and I find it hard to believe that Google is happy blocking a paid ad with a natural search results page.

I am sure that Google have carried out thorough research into this but it appears they have favoured the “searcher” over the “advertiser” and this may become something Google regrets if it sees a drop in advertising revenue. If so I am sure Google will be quick to drop the preview.

The only upside for Google is advertisers will need to spend more money to see their advert is displayed in the top 3 spots that are not obscured by the preview pane.

Watching this year’s Challenge has been different to previous years, OK I will re-phrase that! “radically different!” It used to be called The Thirty Day Challenge. It is no longer called that and is simply called The Challenge. Ed Dale who presents the opening video for each module this year he has recorded all his videos outside.

Now previously Ed has said that one of the most important factors of video is “Audio” and he is right! Would you sit back and watch a video with poor audio? Previously all his videos were recorded at his desk, great audio but it got a bit mono tone on day 30 seeing the same man in the same position in front of his Apple Mac.

So why record the video outside? Where there is background noise, 101 different things that can go wrong! So I asked him the question on Twitter.

You said that audio is the most important factor in video. Why film all this year’s challenge videos outside with background noise?

His reply was simply atmosphere.

I thought about it and again the self confessed “Tubby Nerd” is right!!!

It is not just audio, visual and content it is about creating the correct atmosphere. For example Lauren Luke recorded video of herself putting on make-up, to help her eBay customers and placed them on Youtube. The video was her, in her bedroom and sometimes with her little dog in the background!

The video was watched by millions. Why???

Because she had created  the right atmosphere that appealed to her target audience. Now roll forward a couple of years she launched a proprietary signature cosmetics line called By Lauren Luke, she launched the line in 135 stores across the USA and Canada. Not bad for a young girl from South Shields in England with an interest in make-up.

So to summarise, Video is all about creating the right atmosphere!

The mystery around Google Doodle deepens. Today we are faced with a blank grey silhouette of its famous colourful logo.

However once a user starts typing in to the search box, the logo letters return to their full colour one by one.

Again this technique uses JavaScript. Today's doodle follows yesterdays interactive doodle, which had a collection of coloured balls bounce around the screen in a Particle Motion Simulation. The changes has sparked debate across the internet as to what the homepage takeovers signify, with some suggesting it is in anticipation of Google rolling out a live search feature. Yesterday was Google’s 12^th birthday and it appears to coincide with the timing of the release. This also follows Googles Tweet on Twitter “'Our doodle is dressing up in its brightest colors for something exciting coming very soon...'”

Whatever the answer to the mystery, all looks likely to be revealed an announcement Google is planning at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art later today relating to its search products - suggesting that they might well be unveiling a new 'search as you type' feature, in which the results page you see change as you type your search term.

Hopefully we will soon see Google’s new live search features in action and it will be interesting to see what impact it has on how we search the internet. No doubt Google have got this “spot on” and searching will be more interactive and intuitive delivering the latest and best results it can find.

People woke up to see an unusual Google home page. This time it was animated! Animated bouncing colourful balls, depending on mouse movement. We usually see this effect carried out using Adobe Flash however this effect is carried out using JavaScript. (Yes JavaScript! ) Most people only associate this language for validating forms not for animations.

Most of the news websites have not understood why Google have done this. The Daily Mail reported “Google doodle: Mystery of new interactive balloon design for web giant's homepage” and The Daily Mirror said “Google Doodle: Search engine logo gets mystery bouncing ball takeover”

Well the truth is in the date: 7^th September – It is Google’s birthday. Google’s 12^th Birthday.

Not quite a teenager yet but still the market leader for search!

A lot has happened in 12 years!

Happy Birthday Google.

Apple have introduced a social element to the latest version of iTunes called Ping, now the idea sounds fine see what your friends are downloading or listening to all in one place but that has upset a few people at Facebook.

After introducing Ping on Wednesday 1^st September 2010. Apple’s CEO  Steven P. Jobs was asked why Apple built its own social network? Apple admitted to reporters that and they held discussions with Facebook, but that the social networking company’s terms were “onerous.”

Yet Apple started using Facebook’s API to allow users to find their Facebook friends on Ping. But that stopped working on Thursday. Remember the 6 hour outage I reported in the previous post? Ironically that was on Thursday too. Facebook blocked Apple because Ping had the potential to send so much traffic to Facebook which could  cause site instability.

According to the NYT: Facebook said: “We’re working with Apple to resolve this issue. We’ve worked together successfully in the past, and we look forward to doing so in the future.” Facebook did not specify what the “issue” was. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

We can only guess why Facebook have stopped allowing Apple Ping access to their site. I personally hope they realize their common ground one is great a creating computers and phones the other is great at social. Working together would end up with a win-win situation.

In the coming weeks, Twitter will start to see the rollout of our Twitters new link wrapping service t.co which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and Twitter will then forward you on to the destination URL if everything looks good. All of that should happen in an instant.

You will start seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service; Twitter expect to roll this out to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.

What does this mean for you?

• A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. (Which has better scope for usability and SEO)
• You will start seeing links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened links and lets you know where each link will take you.
• When you click on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click. There hope is to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to users over time.

So no more bit.ly or strange hidden URL’s that can take you off to a site that is unknown and worst of all unchecked!
Thanks to Twitter for implanting this and utilizing the new .co TLD extension in a way that works well for everyone.

In the last couple of hours, Facebook has been unstable, for many users including myself. I only noticed this when viewing an Activity Feed on a blog and noticed a blank box, so I tried to login to Facebook and got the Sorry page could not be found.

While downtime happens far more rarely. It is the world’s largest social network has occasionally had stability issues. It’s a big deal: with 500 million active users, complaints about downtime mount up pretty quickly.

I did a quick search on Twitter to see if it was just the United Kingdom but it is global with Tweets coming in from Singapore and America.

Unfortunately this is the screen greeting most people today on Facebook

In the last couple of hours, Facebook has been unstable, for many users including myself. I only noticed this when viewing an Activity Feed on a blog and noticed a blank box, so I tried to login to Facebook and got the Sorry page could not be found.

While downtime happens far more rarely. It is the world’s largest social network has occasionally had stability issues. It’s a big deal: with 500 million active users, complaints about downtime mount up pretty quickly.

I did a quick search on Twitter to see if it was just the United Kingdom but it is global with Tweets coming in from Singapore and America.