Do Dreams Make Good Video Games?
Idle browsing led me to discover this:
Just realized either Apture or Flash Player 10 won’t allow me to view fullscreen for embedded content (see comments). Here’s the original vid link if you’re not having any joy: http://bit.ly/4ESqN1
Yes yes, it’s been a while. But with finishing off work on an eLearning game, getting it trialed & tested on the unsuspecting minds of UHL’s Medical students, poster presentations & starting new work running a busy A&E department in the city centre - I’ve slipped.
But then I think this is what is always destined to happen. I spend ages wanting to write about things but get side-tracked with something new and glitsy I just have to try out. One such thing is the addition of Apture to my site.
This is a cool script you add to your site and allows you to enter an awful lot of rich media straight to the web page. I see it as a great reference linking tool that you can edit to include many differing resources like Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr a browser can click scan over without needing to leave the site. Not that you’re a prisoner here of course ;¬)
Try it out yourself. It’s damn useful and makes the sensible evolution of conventional off-linking to content.
If I’m not swamped again, you’ll soon be hearing of my plans for a pervasive computing solution to many time-critical systems (i.e. running a busy A&E). The project is largely influenced by many real-time social networking tools available *cough*twitter*cough*
Why is it I can think of a great business model for Twitter, but they can’t? Have they ever thought of taking their API and creating an enterprise version? I’ll just leave it hanging there…
My reply to Mashable’s artcile on Identi.ca and Twitter death:
I’m a massive fan of both Twitter and FriendFeed. They’ve managed to knit together social networking with websearch to create much more personal and (most importantly) trusted results. People on the web are becoming a lot more savvy, by which I mean they’re becoming more skeptical about the information Google suggests.
While it only takes a click to check if the information is pertinent to you, it’s still a fairly redundant path to take which will only be amplified the less you know about what you’re searching. But as more people become savvy online, they’re getting smarter too.
They (like me) are beginning to understand Google is a great place to go for facts & figures. Many people half the time using Google only end up searching to confirm something they already knew. But when it comes to opinion, Google really won’t help. It may suggest popular bloggers/reviewers on the subject of interest, but is that meaningful to you?
It’s becoming easier online to get to the top of a search engine. I for example have managed to claim most of the top slots on a Google search of ‘jake fudge’ by simply being a member of a few linked social networking sites. This is useful if I wanted to sell something, but does my topspot on Google make my opinion more important that anyone else’s? Short answer, no.
So what are we getting at here? Trust. We are looking for people online who we trust by tapping the power of social networking. Wouldn’t you listen to a friend or a friend-of-a-friend’s review of the latest game over some worldly popular games reviewer who gets a million hits? More often than not, yes. And isn’t that ridiculous? 1 friend’s recommendation versus 1,000,000 others, and you side with your friend. Surely this is redundancy gone mad?! Well, there are several factors we need to consider for this info to be trusted - such as recommending a game you’ve bought as opposed to hearsay from the popular sites we are dubious to trust; or trusting a friend’s knowledge in a certain field that you know nothing, but they know plenty. I for instance know nothing about cars or insurance or politics, but I know others who do because they partake in those communities and I trust their views to the point I might vote for the same Party or invest in their insurance company almost blindly! True enough their opinion might have come from looking at the no.1 hits on Google, but what I get out of it is a distilled result which is worth 1000’s of man-hours on behalf of my friend. If you can’t decide on something after that, then there’s probably no helping you ;¬)
So it’s clear that their are levels of trust for the types of search you want to carry out. Now I wanted to briefly talk about some services I currently use that are utilising the power of people - Summize & FriendFeed. I won’t say more about either than to say Summize empowers Twitter with search, and FriendFeed aggregates your online activity which can be shared/searched by friends or friends-of-friends.
Both services have incredible marketing potential, whether you’re analysing trends, shopping round for customers or indeed shopping round for friends with similar interests. Thanks in part to fairly open API’s offered to 3rd party developers, it’s now possible to harness the previously discussed ‘distilled knowledge/experiences’ of friends & trusted individuals immediately.
For this the ‘advanced search’ option is your friend, which I have taken the liberty of comparing Google alongside Summize & FriendFeed.
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First off we look at old faithful, Google. The problem here is that Google lacks the human touch. While they do pick up people’s Twitter accounts and certain blog posts, they by-and-large don’t pick up on much useful content. Google Advanced Search has some very nifty features like finding specific filetypes (yes, search for .mp3’s at your risk!), but I find Google these days to be only useful when I know almost exactly what I want or where to get it but feel too lazy.
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Next up we have Summize. Just looking over their advanced search options, there is much to choose from:
…using several search fields combined together you can get some very specific/useful results and opinions from people literally down the road!
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Next is FriendFeed. Great aggregation of all my likes and comments I make throughout the web. Truly Stalker-ware in the making ;¬) (j/k)
And considering FriendFeed includes Twitter feeds, this must be the best choice - right? Well, not really. Just take a look at their advanced options:
I think that really speaks for itself. Slim Pickin’s. Okay, you can probably get quite a good few results from these options, and you’re scope is slightly larger than that of Summize as you can search by more sites users aggregate. But that’s pretty much it. I tried today to search for news about a game today that a friend apparently managed to get a day earlier than usual UK release. I wanted to see if this had been mentioned anywhere online, but restricted by the lack of options on FriendFeed I had to wade through a lot of content not directly associated with my search. And because this game has already been released in the US, my search was ‘tainted’ with more popular results from when they got the game, not us. Having no region or time/date options to search against I was forced to give up and try elsewhere.
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So to sum up, Trust will become a large part of Web2.0 and what I’m sure is already coined Marketing2.0. Many developers realise this and are well on their way to unlocking the potential of the ‘trusted user’ base.
And to FriendFeed - supe-up your search! I really love using your service, and I understand you are still in the start-up phase, but don’t leave it up to the 3rd party Greasemonkey scripters to do all the work. You have the know-how & resources to make it happen :¬D
[NB: I wanted to give a brief shout-out to Mahalo who are trying to take on Google, but instead use real people to verify the most important info.]
