PoxNora is a game newly launched by Sony in Facebook.
Inside Social Games - PoxNora
http://apps.facebook.com/poxnora/
Requires IQ over 100 for sure. How far do you think this game can go in facebook? Given that it is quite popular outside facebook alr?
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
MouseHunt - why is it different?
Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=10337532241
Its name suggest that MouseHunt is the game that you will have to hunt mouse. How? Setting your trap, your bait and check the trap every 15 minutes. Plus excellent design and drawings, it gets around 500K MAU and 40% DAU/ MAU (meaning the returning players rate is quite high). The game is super addictive, but I guess the market for it is smaller compared to Farmville and other games.
500K MAU? grain of sand compared to 70K of Farmville. So why talking about MouseHunt? I think it is very successful in connecting users with users and users with developers. I did a research on other popular games but what I found was only disappointment. What are they doing?
- Every Friday they have Feedback Friday session, in which users and developers chat with each other (via broadcasting): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mousehunt-live! In this session, the developers will listen to users feedbacks, comments, talk about improvement or upcoming updates, and sometimes chit-chat with users. I think this is the most distinguishing feature they have.
- They have a newspaper for themselves. Here is the external version: http://mousehuntnews.blogspot.com/. The newspaper summarizes interesting stories happens in the community, updates users of new content in the games, interview players, etc. I found it quite informative and interesting. Must check everyday!
- The forum. Very well participated by users. They had a sub-forum called Suggestions, where users can put their suggestions of new adversaries or tools. The suggestions are actually used by the developers some times, like the famous hydra mouse. Sometimes they made changes to the games mechanic based on users feedback. That's why users participate in that section very actively.
- The community. Users have formed various groups to help support new users, develop the system of mentors and mentees by themselves. etc. Many users are very active in the community.
Take a look at Farmville forum, http://forums.zynga.com/forumdisplay.php?f=91 and Mafia wars, http://forums.zynga.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36. The forum and community of Mousehunt is much more effective and developed. Mousehunt is doing much better work in connecting with users, which is an advantage of social network. We should learn from them when developing games/apps on a social network like Facebook!
People ARE like you!!!
While (Mr.) Chewy and Prof are implanting this thought into our unconscious mind that 'people are not like you', I am now trying a different approach.
I was musing for days how to put this the best way, as everything I am to write is all common sense, even more universally accepted than the idea of people being different. It is sooo normal, natural and common sense that it seems very trivial (as you will see) and people (normally) might not even pay attention to it. Because of that, I couldn't come up with any good idea to introduce this topic. However, considering I have learned it a hard way, I decided to give it a shot.
So well? We are well persuaded that we think differently, and greatly different from other people out there. But do you realize also that we are similar in many ways? We think differently but we all think. We feel differently but we all have feelings. We all have dreams, ambitions, happy moment, sad time, up and down.
What can this help?
- Respect. Seeing that every single one around me is filled up with dreams and ambitions, having talents in this way or another way, understanding that they are trying and facing difficulties to advance in life, I come to respect them and never look down to anyone.
- Understanding. I start to think about reasons and feelings of others before blaming them for anything. Is it their nature to behave like that? Or they are not in a good mood? Are they getting some difficulty that affect the work? Then you will naturally start to think about solution: How you can understand his real thinking and feeling, How you can solve or support him.
- Understanding 2: While you are doing something to others, be well prepared that they might be thinking or doing the same thing to you. I'm not totally clear about this point myself. Explain more later.
An interesting example, you are constantly inspecting and judging the ones around you. Not only so, you use your qualities to measure theirs. Say, while I think Tomithy is aiming to too many things, he'd say I should be more daring. While I think Laurence is not serious about a project, and aiming for too simple things, he'd say I'm aiming too high at the same time.
From here you can easily see that we are different on how we think and feel.
- Reflection: It's surprisingly easy to spot others weaknesses and bad points, while you can equally easily neglect your own problems.Think, you can also make these mistakes. So whenever you see something wrong, you can reflect it into yourself, to see if you have done it well or not.
- Confidence. Extremely useful when you doubt your own ability or have to struggle difficulties. You see all these figures leaders of the world? Thinking about them at young age. I'm sure at some points they were full of doubt, their abilities weren't appreciated. And at many points, they had to face great difficulties. So? They could overcome difficulties, why cant you? Understanding that, you can be more confidence and have more strength to keep going on.
“I wasn’t getting very far. Most of the time I was struggling to keep my job. I’d see other people my age, such as Simon Donaldson (1986 Fields Medallist), being considerably more successful, and I thought I’m obviously not all that good. There were times when I thought of dropping out.”
http://www.simonsingh.net/Fields_Medallist.html
I was musing for days how to put this the best way, as everything I am to write is all common sense, even more universally accepted than the idea of people being different. It is sooo normal, natural and common sense that it seems very trivial (as you will see) and people (normally) might not even pay attention to it. Because of that, I couldn't come up with any good idea to introduce this topic. However, considering I have learned it a hard way, I decided to give it a shot.
So well? We are well persuaded that we think differently, and greatly different from other people out there. But do you realize also that we are similar in many ways? We think differently but we all think. We feel differently but we all have feelings. We all have dreams, ambitions, happy moment, sad time, up and down.
What can this help?
- Respect. Seeing that every single one around me is filled up with dreams and ambitions, having talents in this way or another way, understanding that they are trying and facing difficulties to advance in life, I come to respect them and never look down to anyone.
- Understanding. I start to think about reasons and feelings of others before blaming them for anything. Is it their nature to behave like that? Or they are not in a good mood? Are they getting some difficulty that affect the work? Then you will naturally start to think about solution: How you can understand his real thinking and feeling, How you can solve or support him.
- Understanding 2: While you are doing something to others, be well prepared that they might be thinking or doing the same thing to you. I'm not totally clear about this point myself. Explain more later.
An interesting example, you are constantly inspecting and judging the ones around you. Not only so, you use your qualities to measure theirs. Say, while I think Tomithy is aiming to too many things, he'd say I should be more daring. While I think Laurence is not serious about a project, and aiming for too simple things, he'd say I'm aiming too high at the same time.
From here you can easily see that we are different on how we think and feel.
- Reflection: It's surprisingly easy to spot others weaknesses and bad points, while you can equally easily neglect your own problems.Think, you can also make these mistakes. So whenever you see something wrong, you can reflect it into yourself, to see if you have done it well or not.
- Reminder: Great minds think alike. Always be alert that many people are aiming for the same thing as you, so don't ever neglect your work and always work hard. If you are joining a competition and working hard for it, be well prepared that many others are aiming to it and doing the same level, if not more rigorous, training as you are. If you are having a great ideas, there well be many others have the same ones, so do it fast and hard.
- Confidence. Extremely useful when you doubt your own ability or have to struggle difficulties. You see all these figures leaders of the world? Thinking about them at young age. I'm sure at some points they were full of doubt, their abilities weren't appreciated. And at many points, they had to face great difficulties. So? They could overcome difficulties, why cant you? Understanding that, you can be more confidence and have more strength to keep going on.
“I wasn’t getting very far. Most of the time I was struggling to keep my job. I’d see other people my age, such as Simon Donaldson (1986 Fields Medallist), being considerably more successful, and I thought I’m obviously not all that good. There were times when I thought of dropping out.”
http://www.simonsingh.net/Fields_Medallist.html
Saturday, March 6, 2010
From Win Vista to iPad: is it a strategy?
I just had an interesting conversation with my friends.
- Maybe iPad is also published to test the market?
- No way, Apple is famous for the quality of their product! No way it will sacrifice its reputation.
- True. Compared to Microsoft and its products, ha ha.
- Now people expects a lot of any product from Apple. Even a standard product will be considered a failure.
(ranting about expectation and real value of products)
.....
- Hey, what if iPad is really a Dev Product? Steve Jobs knows that he will die soon so he published it!
- Why? it will destroy (deteriorate/decrease) his reputation?
- So that the next ones to succeed him can provide a perfect product that will gain him some reputation! Steve knows that customers think Apple depends on him greatly, so by playing fail customers will lower their expectation of Apple's product. When the real thing come out, it will succeed and customers will trust the ability of the successors!
- Wow. Interesting. Maybe? Maybe!
- What do you think will happen to Apple if Steve Jobs dies?
- Yeah. Apple depends on Steve Jobs too heavily.
- After Bill Gates leaves the heading position, Microsoft still runs well. That Ozzie guy and another person were quite famous priorly right? And Win 7's success showed some good work from them.
- Ha ha, maybe Bill Gates knew that Win Vista will failed so he ran away beforehand.
- Hey, btw, I read somewhere that people suspected that Win Vista might be a dev product Microsoft published for people to test it for them? Win 7 is very similar to vista, and it's even lighter.- Maybe iPad is also published to test the market?
- No way, Apple is famous for the quality of their product! No way it will sacrifice its reputation.
- True. Compared to Microsoft and its products, ha ha.
- Now people expects a lot of any product from Apple. Even a standard product will be considered a failure.
(ranting about expectation and real value of products)
.....
- Hey, what if iPad is really a Dev Product? Steve Jobs knows that he will die soon so he published it!
- Why? it will destroy (deteriorate/decrease) his reputation?
- So that the next ones to succeed him can provide a perfect product that will gain him some reputation! Steve knows that customers think Apple depends on him greatly, so by playing fail customers will lower their expectation of Apple's product. When the real thing come out, it will succeed and customers will trust the ability of the successors!
- Wow. Interesting. Maybe? Maybe!
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Help! Need help!
... about get help! lol
Well, time to do assignment.
Let's go through each of the screenshoot
Well, time to do assignment.
Let's go through each of the screenshoot
Good thing first, the upper menu looks quite nice in term of aesthetics.
But why are you in profile? And the homepage is loaded with too many options: privacy (all friends, white-list some specific ones, black-list some), method to send the help (RSS, Twitter, SMS), and more detailed help!
- Privacy options are too verbose, it can be done better by some icons to demonstrate the meaning. When the user hover over the icon, he can read the detailed description of these options
- Twitter and sms are very unnecessary and extra options, shouldn't be shown to user directly like this.
- Detailed request should be put as an optional link (like google calendar) in the main, short request bar above.
So most of the parts of the home page are not very functional.
The homepage is the page users see whenever visiting the app, and most likely the only page users see, so we want to be sure it loads with the most important information, the information that define the app. Here it is help requests: your own requests (of course you want to know the response / progress the most right?) and friends' request (if it's pump into your face that your friends need help, you will pay more attention!). So these requests should be shown in the home page!
That's the overview page! They should've combined the two pages. (That's what facebook does: show you your friends' newest feed in the homepage, yet allow you to write new status in the same page)
Quick comment on two other pages. Will come back with more detailed comments.
This page look the best so far. The wall / chat room is nice. The 3 icons (refer friends, help and wish luck) looks attractive. Thats good.
I dont understand the bar on the right though. 1 is helpers: 9 souls have offered their hand. Soul? it doesn't sound fun! kind of revered thing? and why are the icons repeated (lol)
Probables is kind of complicated words, should choose a simpler one. Hmm, chances doesn't seem right. But the upper one called helpers, why doesn't this one called referees? friends referred?
Statistics page looks good, but it should show something more encouraging to the users first, like his own statistic and achievement, badges, etc.
Late than not! External pitching session!
No matter how many times Kah Hong asked me if I have blogged about this session, I had been trying to defer it. Honestly I didn't find much interesting points (to me) to blog about. Let's go through what happened that night!
The first pitch was about World Cities Summit. Basically that they want to make a simulation game in Facebook that is similar to SimCity, address some real issues and difficulties that the planners might face when managing a real city. Not only so, they want to raise the awareness of public about condition / requirement of a livable city/ a good city to live (well, you have to take a good care of your city so you should know what's good and bad for your own, real city!) I think it's promising to be popular in facebook! Where any kind of simulation game is popular =.= No one in the class showed any interest though. Someone said it was a government project so..
The second pitch is from a guy from Microsoft talking about data servicing. It was like a mess; only until he finished his talk I had some idea of what he wanted to say. Well, maybe it was because of all the troubles he faced during his talk (network connection, etc.) I think he went off topic quite a lot: began the talk by talking about data and how data could be processed, etc, while what he wanted to say is that he got some good data that can sell to us. Well, I had a little idea about what his data can be used for. How do you guys think?
The similar idea with that (in term that they provide us some service), but in different presentation way, is the pitch from iSyndica. Their talk was much more open and direct than the one I mentioned above. They had a platform to store, share, distribute media products like photos, videos in various (social) network like picasa, flickr, youtube(?), facebook, .. They had created the API to their platform already and now ready to give it away for us to use. And everything is free! The first thing I thought about was Treehouse project by Cedric, Andy & Adhiraj,. (as they wanted to pursue it to final project) So far I didn't see any prominent different of their app with other better communication way. If they could make use of iSyndica to provide more video features (like offline video message) it might be cool!
Next I will talk shortly about Module Review. The talk focused totally on module review, and nothing related to us! What did the speaker want from us? He didn't say a word of it. To speak of module review, I think it's kind of a wiki page for modules in NUS right? Why dont we create a wiki page called NUSWiki or so, so that people can update all information about NUS?
Redsport also spent quite an amount of time to talk about what it is doing and only talked about what it wanted from us in the last few minutes of the talk. Quick thought about this I think Kah Hong and his sgBEAT might work well with them in term of providing / updating result in time and easily (via sms). I was in charge of Temasek IHG (Interhall game) website and I also thought about this once. Like the speaker said, what matter the most, what needed the most on sport are results of the games. So this method might be a boost for both parties. Bringing Redsport into facebook, so far I can only think of making comment / discuss in Redsport easier (via facebook connect). Sharing the posts? I think it wouldn't really work. But well, having 1 more button might boost people to click. Another idea is giving feed (of new result, new posts) via facebook (fan page?).
Little to say about 6Wave. It was a kind of detailed lesson on making money from social network game! They were professional and that's the point! What they wanted to say is if you have a good app/ good idea, come to us, we are pro, we can help you promote your app and we can share profit!
Prince of Persia is the most realistic project in the pitching. It's something big! something real! something that is running! Quite a good chance for those who are interested in game development. To talk about that, when I came back, I actually tried ExplosiveBarrel's games, and I must say their game are of high quality! Try Strawhat samurai! Their newest game is kind of messy though: you have to control 3 character of different abilities at the same time! But other stuff like graphic, game design are very professional.
The first pitch was about World Cities Summit. Basically that they want to make a simulation game in Facebook that is similar to SimCity, address some real issues and difficulties that the planners might face when managing a real city. Not only so, they want to raise the awareness of public about condition / requirement of a livable city/ a good city to live (well, you have to take a good care of your city so you should know what's good and bad for your own, real city!) I think it's promising to be popular in facebook! Where any kind of simulation game is popular =.= No one in the class showed any interest though. Someone said it was a government project so..
The second pitch is from a guy from Microsoft talking about data servicing. It was like a mess; only until he finished his talk I had some idea of what he wanted to say. Well, maybe it was because of all the troubles he faced during his talk (network connection, etc.) I think he went off topic quite a lot: began the talk by talking about data and how data could be processed, etc, while what he wanted to say is that he got some good data that can sell to us. Well, I had a little idea about what his data can be used for. How do you guys think?
The similar idea with that (in term that they provide us some service), but in different presentation way, is the pitch from iSyndica. Their talk was much more open and direct than the one I mentioned above. They had a platform to store, share, distribute media products like photos, videos in various (social) network like picasa, flickr, youtube(?), facebook, .. They had created the API to their platform already and now ready to give it away for us to use. And everything is free! The first thing I thought about was Treehouse project by Cedric, Andy & Adhiraj,. (as they wanted to pursue it to final project) So far I didn't see any prominent different of their app with other better communication way. If they could make use of iSyndica to provide more video features (like offline video message) it might be cool!
Next I will talk shortly about Module Review. The talk focused totally on module review, and nothing related to us! What did the speaker want from us? He didn't say a word of it. To speak of module review, I think it's kind of a wiki page for modules in NUS right? Why dont we create a wiki page called NUSWiki or so, so that people can update all information about NUS?
Redsport also spent quite an amount of time to talk about what it is doing and only talked about what it wanted from us in the last few minutes of the talk. Quick thought about this I think Kah Hong and his sgBEAT might work well with them in term of providing / updating result in time and easily (via sms). I was in charge of Temasek IHG (Interhall game) website and I also thought about this once. Like the speaker said, what matter the most, what needed the most on sport are results of the games. So this method might be a boost for both parties. Bringing Redsport into facebook, so far I can only think of making comment / discuss in Redsport easier (via facebook connect). Sharing the posts? I think it wouldn't really work. But well, having 1 more button might boost people to click. Another idea is giving feed (of new result, new posts) via facebook (fan page?).
Little to say about 6Wave. It was a kind of detailed lesson on making money from social network game! They were professional and that's the point! What they wanted to say is if you have a good app/ good idea, come to us, we are pro, we can help you promote your app and we can share profit!
Prince of Persia is the most realistic project in the pitching. It's something big! something real! something that is running! Quite a good chance for those who are interested in game development. To talk about that, when I came back, I actually tried ExplosiveBarrel's games, and I must say their game are of high quality! Try Strawhat samurai! Their newest game is kind of messy though: you have to control 3 character of different abilities at the same time! But other stuff like graphic, game design are very professional.
Monday, February 1, 2010
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.
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