Players of Farmville: It’s up to you whether you play, but at least knowingly understand how your social capital is being taken advantage of. Social ties, like health scares and baby care, are easy heart-strings for businesses to pull at and abuse. Beware.
Zynga has recently used Farmville to raise almost one million dollars to support earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. Social capital can allow organizations to do great and noble things, and to do so quickly and efficiently. Zynga actually began its charitable efforts with Haiti last fall, around the time my family began playing Farmville. Also at this time, Zynga was engaged in numerous “lead gen scams,” or advertisements that trick customers into making purchases or subscribing to services. As of November, one third of Zynga’s revenue (roughly eighty million dollars) came from third-party commercial offers, such as Netflix subscriptions that came with Farmville bonuses, or surveys that involved hidden contractual obligations. One user reportedly was charged almost two hundred dollars one month, as a result of cell-phone services for which she had unknowingly signed up, while following Farmville ads in search of bonuses. So many users were scammed, in fact, that Zynga and Facebook are now involved in a related, multi-million-dollar class action lawsuit.
The question I think Apple asked themselves during the development of the iPad is this, “how can we make a larger, more general purpose computing device as easy to use as the iPhone?”. From this, there’s a grain of truth for those dismissing the iPad as just a big iPhone. I think a lot of people would like “a big iPhone”. No fuss and none of your typical computer maintenance, just apps to get things done.
From a Daring Fireball reader, I love this quote on how outdated the “floppy disk” metaphor used in pretty much every application for Save My Data is.
I help out in an elementary school, sometimes in the computer lab, and always get a laugh out of how there is absolutely no way to convey to a bunch of 8 year old kids which button they should click to save without physically pointing it out or describing the one next to it.
80 Photographies de Tokyo en HDR
A really beautiful collection of HDR photographs of Tokyo, one of my favourite cities. The vibrancy and life of the city really struck me while I was there; completely different in tone and texture to a European city. The HDR technique really seems to capture some of that feeling with it’s saturated colours and surreal look.
If you don’t want to look through all eighty, I made a gallery of my favourites.
TOC 2010: Arianna Huffington, ‘Publishing Is Dead; Long Live Publishing!’
Self-expression is the new entertainment. So, you know, we used to never question the fact that people could be sitting on a couch for seven hours watching bad TV. Right, and nobody said, “why are they doing that without anybody paying them?”
Clay Shirky also speaks about how passive consumption need not be the primary means of entertainment in Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, one of my favourite of his talks.