SuperPoke

The presentations last night were all of *high quality* . Every group did a very good job at analyzing applications and presenting their ideas. Some presentations were quite amusing, some introduces new ideas, most invoked some thoughts in my mind. After the class, I felt quite refreshing in the mind. Thanks all = )

Now is about the SuperPoke presentation:

All I could remember now is that Instead of focusing on the application's functionality, which is quite simple, Tomithy's group focused more on how to improve it and suggested to use it in Poke 'Causes'. *Tomithy throws you a Haiti earthquake, throw back?* - Jonathan. Haha. Amusing. I wasn't very clear how they wanted to implement it, how it was different from the way people are spreading the message of helping Haiti now in facebook. Besides, they did mention that SuperPoke is kind of superficial, yet they want to use it this way. Moreover, I think the way superpoke and similar application can gain popularity is different from 'Causes', which people spread by the content of the message. Below paragraph is my explanation of superpoke and friends' popularity.

In my opinion, this kind of application can be viral is normally used to gain attention and relieve boredom (see definition below). Bored? Click, click, click. Want to reconnect with some old friends but dont have a good reason or a good message? Click, click, click. That way some simple, (might be) amusing message with YOUR NAME in it will be displayed in YOUR FRIEND's wall. I dont think many people will actually respond to these poke by another poke, but definitely will have to pay a little attention to the person who poked you.

Poke

• An action of tapping and/or softly jabbing another person using a finger, stick, or similar object to gain their attention, relieve boredom or just to be annoying.

Some comments on their presentation:

- Nice slideshow, nice effect.

- Though the way the application works is quite simple or similar to Pillow Fight, they should at least state it at first.

- 1 small note: the sentence "Prof Ben throw assignment to you, throw back?" was a waste that it wasn't "thrown" but "written" there.

- At some moment prof Ben suggest presenters can have someone else moving the slide for them. I comment to Ji Wei that it won't work. We can see it clearly in Tomithy's presentation. It was disrupted several times when Chuan Yeong moves the slides too fast or too slow, and Tomithy had to stop to tell Chuan Yeong to move it as he wanted. That is because it is very hard for the one who control the slides to understand the presenter's idea and need. Discordance can affect the presentation quite a lot. I think the best way is to have a remote control so that you can freely control the slides by yourself. That way you will not having to stick with the computer or explicitly tell another person to control the slides as wished.

About other groups:


- There was a remarkable idea many groups stated, that is redesign the applications GUI, remove ads or move it to a less remarkable position. However, I wonder if they thought it will affect the money earned by the application? For example, Pillow Fight put a lot of ads everywhere, overlap each other is because it wants to attract people most attention to these ads, and sometimes you might accidentally click on ads instead of other buttons. That makes money. Texas Hold'em Poker put the invitation right in the middle of the screen so that people will have to pay attention to it, and either cancel or fill it, but cannot ignore it. Sometimes it fails, sometimes it helps raising new users.

Com'on, they don't care if the application is popular or not, if the users' experience is the best or not, they only care how to make the most money.

So there is a trade off here: you can put more ads, more distracting pop-up to gain more money, but at the same time you have to face the fact that users will find it irritating and quit the application. It is like an upside down parabol: no ads many user yet no money, too much ads no user and thus no money, the extreme is somewhere in between: some ads, some users. So the best way to do here is trial and error: they as developers can put more ads, see how users react (number of user left, etc.) to adjust the number of app. If many people drop by adding 1 ads, they will remove it. If users hardly complain about the ads' appearance, they will keep it. That's it. I suspect these application has done that thousands time (especially application with many games like Zynga) to achieve the optimized scheme for these things.