GetGlue, a social network sometimes described as "like FourSquare, but for entertainment," says it has added a number of major TV networks to its list of entertainment partners, including MSNBC, AMC, Disney, HGTV and Discovery. These new partners join existing partners including HBO, Showtime, Fox, and Universal Studios. Launched in November by New York's Adaptive Blue as a browser-based recommendation engine, GetGlue allows users to check in and rate TV programs and other entertainment (including movies, games, and music), unlocking "stickers" similar to Foursquare's badges. The stickers can then be posted to their Facebook or Twitter accounts. According to the company, 600,000 members generated 8 million ratings and check-ins in August, up 60% from the previous month's total of 5 million. The site features obligatory mobile access via apps for the iPhone and Android. For MSNBC, GetGlue is introducing new stickers for "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Rachel Maddow Show," "Countdown With Keith Olbermann," "Hardball With Chris Matthews" and "The Ed Show." Viewers can also earn program-specific stickers for AMC's "Mad Men," mostly centering on the life of protagonist Don Draper. They include a cocktail sticker reflecting his well-lubricated approach to creative work. Members can earn additional stickers for watching trailers for new series and upcoming movie releases. A growing number of TV networks and film studios have turned to GetGlue to promote new and returning shows, with special promotions for Fox's "Glee" and "Raising Hope," "Boardwalk Empire" and the new season of "TrueBlood" on HBO, and two Disney movies, "Tron: Legacy" and "Tangled." GetGlue has estimated that for every 1,000 user mentions via GetGlue's site and app, around a half-million people are subsequently reached on Twitter and another 250,000 on Facebook.
Earlier this month, Microsoft hosted several press events to introduce its Kinect motion control product to fashion and lifestyle press and bloggers, aiming squarely at the casual set to sell its $200 competitor to Nintendo's profitable domination of the casual console market. The message Microsoft wanted to send was that Kinect was for the cool kids, and decidedly not its core gamer audience. AtomicPC was at the event, and reported that Microsoft's director of entertainment and devices, David McLean, quipped to his audience "Gaming's not just for sweaty thirty year olds in Metallica t-shirts," among other digs at "basement-dwelling nerds" and "impenetrable control schemes." The core gamer community's reaction has been extremely negative. Atomic PC's writer on the scene said "It's a doubly galling revelation. For one, it takes the scales from one's eyes in regards to how Microsoft regards the gaming audience, and secondly it seems to give a flying middle finger to our community's ongoing effort to improve game ratings and censorship. There's a huge movement desperately trying to educate government and society at large that gamers are, in a very real sense, everyone; while Microsoft at least gets the age thing right, reducing gamers to the image of barely socialised troglodytes doesn't do anyone any favours." Another, separate row blew up this week over an exposé of casual game giant Zynga in the SF Weekly, going into the usual sordid business about copying gameplay features, unethical business practices, stifling innovation, and other grim charges. It's nothing about Zynga that hasn't been said before, but this time, Gamasutra's Nicholas Lovell laid into the exposé's author, accusing him of elitism. "You know what I think. I think that making incredibly expensive, hard-to-play games that require proprietary hardware and prior experience to enjoy is a dumb way of providing gaming entertainment to a global audience," he wrote. "Zynga (and Playfish and Playdom and 6Waves and Crowdstar) have found ways to make games that appeal to a broader cross-section of society than traditional approaches have ever done." He concluded by noting "They have made gaming something for everyone. Isn't it time we applauded that?" More recently, game developer and researcher Charles J Pratt added this sentiment via Twitter: "Maybe social games are feared and hated because they make it obvious that the console/PC culture has lost control of the word 'game.'" There certainly are elements of "elitism," as Lovell says, in criticisms of social games like "Farmville" -- core gamers are invested in their identities as gamers, and whenever a cult phenomenon enters the mainstream, you get people who liked it before it was cool, and denigrate the new, more mainstream versions of their beloved hobby. And although you have to respect Zynga's success at bringing gaming to a much, much broader audience, the fact remains -- as a game, "Farmville" is somewhat lacking. The fundamental gameplay process in "Farmville" -- and indeed in most social games out there -- is the "grind," which is familiar for anyone who's ever played an MMO. You need to get from point A to point B, and to get there, you need to do the same thing 50 times. Every time you do it, there's a small random chance something great might happen. The slow, regular progression towards a distant goal combined with the chance of a random payoff tickles the right spots in your brain, and you happily do the same thing 50 times. Once you're at point B, you need to go to point C, and to get there you need to do a slightly different thing 100 times. Enjoy. Plenty of smart folks have made this point. Ian Bogost created "Cow Clicker" last month, which distills the current state of Facebook games down to their essence. Jakob Skjerning did the same with "Progress Wars," which you can play if you feel like taking a break from your other social games. So while these games are wildly successful in getting people hooked, they're not great as games. And when you really think about it, they're not especially social, either -- the generally available form of interaction in most social games is to ask your friends to help you out by clicking on something, or by pitting your character against another player's character in a battle resolved by random number generators. There's very little of the collaboration, teamwork, or real competition you find in core games. The bottom line is this: while it's impossible to deny that social game developers have gotten a lot of things right in the eyes of the consumers, it's clear they're working with an audience unaware of the wider world of gaming, and the conventions that social games have borrowed and ignored thus far. As gaming moves further into the mainstream, those consumers will undoubtedly demand better gaming experiences. There's even evidence this may already be happening, as Zynga's premiere title, "Farmville," hemorrhages users. So although there may be some "elitism" at play in this month's criticism of social games, there's a strong foundation behind it. We can't mistake financially successful games for good ones, and unless today's social games can adapt some of the successful traits of core games, any financial success will be short-term.
If you aren't in journalism, you may have no idea how big this is: but it's huge, absolutely huge that The New York Times' economics reporter Peter Goodman is joining the Huffington Post, in a shift that was announced yesterday. Trust me, in the macro-sense of the word, this is much more important than the news that Howard Fineman just left the decimated Newsweek for the HuffPo. That's merely a story of a guy who saw his ship sinking and was very aware that, in boating terms, Newsweek is a dingie; the HuffPo -- which now compares favorably to nytimes.com in terms of traffic -- is a luxury yacht. The Goodman shift is the more important move of the two because of why Goodman says he's leaving. And it gets to the heart of how social media has changed the news business. He told The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz: ""For me it's a chance to write with a point of view. It's sort of the age of the columnist. With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what's going on. This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting." He notes that, as a Times journalist, he had to struggle to keep his point of view out of it, even when it was valid -- that is, based on facts and figures rather than gut reactions and biases. To appear objective, he went through "almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader." Boy, have I been there, and boy, does it sometimes feel like a waste of time -- which is to say nothing negative about think tanks or -- or, in my case, online industry experts. They are the people who help form the knowledge base that's necessary to have an opinion worth reading. It's just that in the expansive world of social media -- particularly, of course, on blogs -- there is more room for more intelligent people to say what they really think. Let the official parties regurgitate the news as they need to, and let the people and institutions involved make their official, canned statements to the media -- but what most people really want to know is what people in-the-know think it means. And that's where people covering beats throughout the country, from sports to digital media, add value to the information glut. As social media has gained momentum, notions of what journalism is, and isn't, have led to an imbalance that news like the Goodman shift are helping rectify. Years ago, bloggers sitting in the basement in their pajamas were empowered by technology to publish their opinions. Meanwhile, many of the people with the most access to the movers and shakers behind stories were prohibited from saying what they really thought by old definitions of what journalism is. Nothing against pajama bloggers -- I've been one -- but in the hierarchy of people the rest of us could benefit from reading, I'd usually choose the journalist with access to both insiders and WordPress over someone who isn't as able to get close to the details. While the simple headline of the HuffPo's hire this week is "Print Reporters Go Online," to me it's more a matter of mindset. Goodman hasn't so much gone from print to the Web as he has from an older notion of what journalism is to a newer one.
GetGlue, a social network sometimes described as "like FourSquare, but for entertainment," says it has added a number of major TV networks to its list of entertainment partners, including MSNBC, AMC, Disney, HGTV and Discovery. These new partners join existing partners including HBO, Showtime, Fox, and Universal Studios. Launched in November by New York's Adaptive Blue as a browser-based recommendation engine, GetGlue allows users to check in and rate TV programs and other entertainment (including movies, games, and music), unlocking "stickers" similar to Foursquare's badges. The stickers can then be posted to their Facebook or Twitter accounts. According to the company, 600,000 members generated 8 million ratings and check-ins in August, up 60% from the previous month's total of 5 million. The site features obligatory mobile access via apps for the iPhone and Android. For MSNBC, GetGlue is introducing new stickers for "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Rachel Maddow Show," "Countdown With Keith Olbermann," "Hardball With Chris Matthews" and "The Ed Show." Viewers can also earn program-specific stickers for AMC's "Mad Men," mostly centering on the life of protagonist Don Draper. They include a cocktail sticker reflecting his well-lubricated approach to creative work. Members can earn additional stickers for watching trailers for new series and upcoming movie releases. A growing number of TV networks and film studios have turned to GetGlue to promote new and returning shows, with special promotions for Fox's "Glee" and "Raising Hope," "Boardwalk Empire" and the new season of "TrueBlood" on HBO, and two Disney movies, "Tron: Legacy" and "Tangled." GetGlue has estimated that for every 1,000 user mentions via GetGlue's site and app, around a half-million people are subsequently reached on Twitter and another 250,000 on Facebook.