You know Facebook right? Good. Ever heard about Farmville? No? Well it is what 80 million people do on Facebook. Growing their virtual farms in Farmville, earning virtual money and helping Zynga – the company that developed Farmville – earn around 100 million USD in 2009. What’s going on here?
Facebook is a becoming huge and with 400 millions users it is currently the second most visited site in the US behind Google. Yet the biggest share in the “body of knowledge” about Facebook is about Facebook as a tool for social media, social networking and business – most of if superficial and not worth the effort to read. But from time to time some smart people analyze the underlying patterns and contribute towards an explanation into a social motivation and behavior that makes Facebook such a success.
Robin Hunicke did a great speech at lift08 about Facebook as a game that makes you feel loved. A new perspective that helps to understand the dynamics and motivation to join and use Facebook. But there is still the question why are 80 million people growing virtual foods on a virtual farm?
The answer to this is given in the talk “Design Outside the Box” by Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Schell who explains the Farmville phenomenon, how you can make millions of dollars with virtual money and lays out a vision of the future in which our lives will become one big role-playing game. The talk is 28 minutes long, it is worth every minute and after that you can skip reading mainstream articles about Facebook for the next year.
I have embedded the talk below, if you can’t see it watch it online.
Marketers concern themselves with acquiring and retaining customers, who are the lifeblood of an organization. They attract customers by learning about potential needs, helping to develop products that customers want, creating awareness, and communicating benefits; they retain them by ensuring that they get good value, appropriate service, and a stream of future products. The marketing function not only communicates to the customer, but also communicates the needs of the customer to the company. In addition, it arranges and monitors the distribution of products and/or services from company to customer.
trendwatching.com, the Amsterdam-based trendwatching agency, has published a new Trendreport titled “Free Love” which is all about the ongoing rise of ‘free stuff’, and the brands already making the most it.
FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that’s available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.
FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers’ ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.
Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business.
I have an account on Facebook for quite a while now but I actually don’t use it a lot. The main reason for this was that I didn’t get it – I just didn’t understand why I should poke or superpoke someone.
On the other hand I could see the benefit of a huge number of friends (like Robert Scoble, who frequently complained about the limit of 5000 friends) because by “friending” you, they give permission to receive updates from you which can be used as a new communication channels. Nevertheless this reasoning didn’t explain why millions users spend time on Facebook when you are not trying to sell something or spread ideas.
And then I heard the speech from Robin Hunicke at lift08, a researcher at Electronic Arts and suddenly it made sense. When you play computer games like World of Warcraft your fantasy is to be a “warrior who wants to fight in a land of war”. Facebook also helps its users realize a fantasy – the fantasy is “I am a person living a fun life……and I am loved”. And just like in other computer games where you can collect points and stars for for certain activities, in Facebook your score is determined by the number of friends, graffiti, gifts, hugs, laughter, wins and photographs on your Facebook profile. The most important aspect is that everyone of your friends can see whether you are “living a fun life and are being loved”.
How many other applications do you know that make you feel loved?
BusinessWeek Magazine writes about the story behind Lenovo’s new superslim Thinkpad X300 notebook that also fits into one of those interoffice mail envelopes you have seen at the last MacWorld when Steve Jobs presented the MacBook Air.
"Phyllis! Get me one of those interoffice mail envelopes!"
It was just after lunchtime on Jan. 15, and Peter Hortensius was storming through the cubicles at Lenovo Group’s offices in Morrisville, N.C., shouting for his secretary. Hortensius, senior vice-president in charge of laptops, had just heard that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had unveiled the supersvelte, aluminum-clad MacBook Air by declaring it the "world’s thinnest notebook" and dramatically pulling it out of an interoffice envelope. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300 notebook was due out in February, after a year and a half in development, and Hortensius was alarmed that it could be upstaged before it even made its debut.
His secretary, Phyllis Arrington-McGee, ransacked filing cabinets until she found one of the envelopes. She handed it to Hortensius, who gingerly slipped the X300 inside. "It fits! It fits!" he shouted.
Why do I blog this? Another good examples that great products might get killed by steering committees and review boards. To bring a great product to market it takes an individual who will pursue his vision no matter what a steering committee decides.
You know Facebook right? Good. Ever heard about Farmville? No? Well it is what 80 million people do on Facebook. Growing their virtual farms in Farmville, earning virtual money and helping Zynga – the company that developed Farmville – earn around 100 million USD in 2009. What’s going on here?
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