Jeff Cook, founder of MyYearBook, showcased MyYearBook as an up and coming social network and a place to meet new people. Founded 5 yrs ago, the social platform has grown to 80 employees and generating roughly $20 million revenue a year. Standing in stark contrast to Facebook where users are bound by their real social graph, MyYearBook will focus on content discovery, user compatibility, dynamic stream interactions and opening its doors for social games. Will it prevail?
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At the Inside Social Apps conference today in San Francisco, a number of leading social game executives participated in a discussion about the “Future of Facebook as a social gaming platform”. While there were a number of takeaways, the most significant statistic that many attendees found to be interesting was that two-thirds of Facebook’s page views are within games. This was an approximate estimate put forth by one of the panelists, to which Peter Relan, the CEO of Crowstar jokingly responded that those page views are evenly split between Zynga’s FarmVille and Cafe World.
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Last night MySpace unveiled a new events page, integrating close to 1 million concert listings and links to purchase tickets, providing the company with another potential revenue stream. It’s a great product roll out, however the odds are against the social networking behemoth who has seen traffic consistently slide over the past year.
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Eight student teams from around the world will gather at the United Nations tomorrow for the inaugural SPIRIT conference, a one-day event that aims to let young adults “micro-contribute” to international peacemaking.
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What do Zach Galifianakis, Lisa Kudrow, David Wain and Felicia Day have in common? They’re all nominees in the 2010 Streamy Awards, an annual awards ceremony dedicated to honoring excellence and originality in web television. The second annual Streamy Awards will take place in LA this Sunday, April 11, and will also stream live on the Streamy Awards’ website.
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“Its a myth that Twitter links are nofollow”search guru Danny Sullivan told me at his conference, SMX West. Danny warns readers not to be fooled because links in tweets are marked “nofollow” on Twitter.com – Twitter should be part of your SEO strategy. I later confirmed Twitter’s SEO value with Google’s findability guru Maile Ohye and other SEO experts. This means you should give people an option to “Tweet This!” on your pages. And remember, tweets now appear directly in Google’s social search and real time search results!
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With Flash Gaming Summit (FGS) and Game Developers Conference 2010 (GDC) now over, we’d like to take the opportunity to reflect on some of the key takeaways. One of the most discussed areas was career opportunities in the gaming industry, particularly in the area of social gaming. Here’s a few of the opportunities gleaned from various sessions, panels and interviews last week.
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If you are looking for a job in social games, you better be ready to be guided by metrics and not just your creative genius. That’s what Scott Jennings told a small groups of gaming enthusiasts and curious minds during a conversation led by him and James Au (of ohai) at SXSW 2010. It was in response posed to him by Social Times about what specific skills social game developers need that traditional game developers don’t have.
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At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2010 this year, Amitt Mahajan, a lead developer of Farmville, revealed that the entire development of Farmville took five weeks, that Zynga has a clear understanding of their userbase, and that they are integrating developers into the design process. These achievements are not common practice to the console gaming industry and gaming world at large, and it seems as if console game makers should start applying some of these lessons to their own games and development.
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According to four panelists at the FGS 2010 Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco, if you’re designing and developing a social game, there are a few critical elements to be considered if you want it to be a success. The panel, entitled “4 Keys to Successful Social Games that All Game Developers Should Know,” was moderated by Sana Choudary of Traffichoney.
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