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.

… so are you a marketer?

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.

Read the full report online or download the report here.

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?

Watch the speech online:

"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.

The eight trends are:

Status spheres
"Here’s something trend watchers, CMOs and other business professionals should be able to agree on: in the end, when dealing with (and selling to) people, everything always comes back to status. In a traditional consumer society, he or she who consumes the most, the best, the coolest, the most expensive, the scarcest or the most popular goods, will typically also gain the most status."

Premiumization
Basically, with more wealth burning holes in (saturated and experienced) consumers’ pockets than ever before, quick status fixes derived from premium products and premium experiences will continue in full force next year.

Snack Culture
SNACK CULTURE thus embodies the phenomenon of products, services and experiences becoming more temporary and transient; products that are being deconstructed in easier to digest, easier to afford bits, making it possible to collect even more experiences, as often as possible, in an even shorter timeframe.

Online Oxygen
Ah, the Online Revolution, the mega-trend that keeps on giving, one that single-handedly dominates the ‘connecting sphere’. While Web 2.0 has already single-handledly created young brands that are now bigger and more valuable (at least on paper) than many an old economy stalwart, Web 3.0 and 4.0 and 5.0 guarantee enough motion for this innovation-orgasm to continue uninterrupted for years to come. Five years ago, we introduced ONLINE OXYGEN as the engine behind all this excitement: control-craving consumers needing online access as much as they need oxygen

Eco-Iconic
Over the past few years, the ECO trend has moved from ECO-UGLY (ugly, over-priced, low performance alternatives to shiny ‘traditional sphere’ products and services) to ECO-CHIC (eco-friendly stuff that actually looks as nice and cool as the less responsible version) to ECO-ICONIC in 2008: "Eco-friendly goods and services sporting bold, iconic design and markers, that help their eco-conscious owners to visibly tout their eco-credentials to peers."

Brand Butlers
Consider this for 2008: if consumers value the authentic, the practical, the exclusive, and they’re also forever looking to make life more convenient, even save some time, then why persist in bombarding them with your mega-million dollar/euro/pound, one-way advertising campaigns? Instead of stalking potential and existing customers (which is not very 2008), why not assist them in smart, relevant ways, making the most of your products and whatever it is your brand stands for? Remember, giving is the new taking

MIY – Make it Yourself
Let’s have a more in-depth look at the ‘participation sphere’. For years, we’ve been going on about GENERATION C, with the C mainly representing ‘content’. In other words, digital creation. Pictures. Movies. Blogs. Music. So what’s next for GENERATION C? With (in particular younger) consumers having come to expect to be able to create anything they want as long as it is digital, and to customize and personalize many physical goods, the next frontier will be digitally designing products from scratch, then having them turned into real physical goods as well. In fact, expect MIY | MAKE IT YOURSELF (and then SIY | SELL IT YOURSELF) ventures to become increasingly sophisticated in the next 12 months.

Crowd Mining
When co-creating, co-funding, co-buying, co-designing, co-managing *anything* with ‘crowds’, the emphasis in 2008 will move from just getting the masses in, to mining those crowds for the rough and polished diamonds. How to do that? Shower them with love, respect and heaps of money, of course. Two examples, from Netflix and Google, setting the standards for CROWD MINING in 2008.

Read the full report online or download the PDF.

So what is lift?

“LIFT is a series of events intended to facilitate and promote discussion about new technologies and their impact on our society. The conference happens in both Geneva (Switzerland) and Seoul (South Korea) every year, with smaller events happening all around the year.”

So I will be in Geneva from Feb 6-8 (maybe already on the 5^th) and I will cover parts of the conference on my blog. If you want to attend the conference you find all the information you need on www.liftconference.com.

“The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art — a place that can get very complicated. Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for simple living and working — but in this talk, he boils it down to one simply delightful way to be.”

I especially like this statement from his talk when he defines what simplicity really means:

“Simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain”

This could be also applied to designing customer experiences since most people think of customer experiences as about “big-bang-fancy-firework” interactions when it is actually about “more enjoyment and less pain” for your customers.

They have produced a video on behalf of MTV Asia with the title: Thirty-six youth facts in one-hundred fifty seconds.

(found via PSFK)

“If you were to ask The Ritz-Carlton Tokyo management what business they are in (and I did) they would say they were not in the hotel business but in the service business. However, I would say that the other hotels also try to be in the service business, and do a pretty good job of it.

The Ritz-Carlton Tokyo, however, is not just in the service business, they are in the experience business. Tom Peters loves to use this quote from The Experience Economy (recommended): “Experiences are as distinct from services as services are from goods.”

The Ritz-Carlton Tokyo, then, is in the experiences business and in the emotions business. You’ve got to have the operations right, but it’s really about emotions, delight, and warm memories. Operations alone can be copied, but “high touch” differentiation is nearly impossible to copy.”

The full post can be found here.