Tech IT Easy » Facebook

Overpopulation in Facebook

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:44:02 +0000

To fill my quota of social media posts for the year, here’s a post about Facebook’s user base and real-world statistics.

I was inspired by a post in a Finnish blog on social media about how the Facebook’s penetration rate in certain Finnish age groups is way over 100%. From its comments, I found that similar analysis was already done for UK and US with same results and with some explanation for the reasons. However, with the amazing Eurostat and Socialbakers‘ Facebook data, we can do this stuff for many other countries with interesting results! (To save time, I used Socialbakers data which is grouped by age and so doesn’t give as accurate results as going manually through Facebook’s advertisement tool would.)

The interesting bit is that there are big differences between the European countries. The Nordics are similar to UK and US, but that’s about it.

Facebook penetration rates by age group in Europe (click to enlarge)

(You can download the Excel sheet from here)

To solve the problem of above 100% coverage in age groups, there are two explanations that first come to mind and were explored in the both previous blog posts. The first one is Facebook’s age limit, which does not allow people below 13 to join Facebook. The obvious workaround is to round your age up to get in. The other explanation are the people hitting mid-life crisis and rounding their age down. I’m quite the combination of these two explains most of the bulge in the 18-24 age group.

At a glance, it would seem that the 18-24 bulge depends on the overall penetration rate. It seems that once the penetration goes high enough (say, 30%), it basically means that your older siblings’ got their Facebook profiles as well as pretty much everyone else in your real-life social network who’s above 13, and naturally you want it too. Doesn’t take long before someone figures out that the age check is easy to bypass, and like everything that’s age-restricted at that age (like 18+ movies and games) it becomes cool and once it gathers some critical mass, the social norm becomes to fake your age so that you can be on Facebook with your classmates and so on. However, why isn’t this phenomenon more global but just restricted to countries with high penetration rate? There are advertisements in pretty much all media telling how this and that is on Facebook and almost every new electronic device can access Facebook … and yet you, at 12, are forbidden from where everyone else apparently is.

As for other reasons for these age groups going over 100%, there are many. One cause is plain and simple fake profiles (for fun or spam), but I would have assumed young people are equally dorks all around Europe. One of the bigger reasons is business accounts. Then there are the duplicate profiles some people have for the multiple identities they have and want to keep separate. Also, as a pet owner I know some people made profiles for their pets but this can’t really explain the discrepancy at all. The need for sepearate accounts is now alleviated by the (not so) new Pages, which are much more suitable for some of the use cases which previously “required” a duplicate account (against Facebook’s terms of service). However, none of these can explain the tens of thousands of mis-aged accounts, but explain why Facebook has been pushing for people to use Pages instead (and why your interactions with a Page are almost at par with an another Account).

However, it would much interesting to know what explains the differences between the countries. My hypothesis is that the bulge at 18-24 correlates with high overall penetration rate (ie. <13 year olds feel the social pressure to join, faking their age) and high mobile usage in teen age groups. This overcoverage seems to happen when the overall penetration rate is over 30%. One explanation might be that in countries where broadband / mobile phones / social networks are more of a norm, people have started to have fun with Facebook whereas in places where internet usage is scarce, people take it more seriously.

I would have expected the Dutch to be similar to the Nordics, because they do share many other demographical features. Like many other countries, there’s a national Facebook equivalent in the Netherlands, Hyves. I’ve beent old it was very popular in the past, but a lot of Dutch people are migrating to Facebook, the one true social network. This happened in Finland as well, where IRC-galleria has been declining in the recent past due to the “old” generation of teen users “upgrading” to Facebook and the “new” potential teen population jumping directly to Facebook. Another question mark to me is Estonia, where I would have imagined to see similar results as in the Nordics.

On the other hand, both the German- and Russian-speaking world seem to have quite strong “local” social networks. The idea that the language is the biggest barrier between social networks is quite interesting, but I don’t have any evidence for it. The guys at Xiha probably know better. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future Facebook borrows ideas from Xiha in their quest to world domination; today Facebook is still very much a product of American culture.

Of course, comparing Facebook’s data against population demographics does not give you any indication what the actual penetration rate is. A much better approach, which was used in the Finnish study was to compare the Facebook penetration rates toh a national survey on social media use by age groups (in Finnish, but here’s a summary in English). The results of this number-crunching was that there can be as many as 200 to 300 thousand accounts with a “wrong” age. Or put another way, that’s more than 10% of Finnish Facebook users.

For further study, Eurostat does offer figures on many internet-related demographics, including “Individuals using the Internet for uploading self-created content to any website to be shared” and “Individuals regularly using the Internet” but these seemed not to be grouped by age, but could be used to better assess the situation. But so what? As baekdal put it in his analysis, age is just a number and “if a person who is really 34 is indicating that she is only 24, you must threat her as a 24 your old person. That’s how old she feels, and that is the only thing you need to know.”

Naturally, the empricial evidence of his users’ behavior goes a bit against Zuckerberg’s idea of your Facebook identity being your only one. As the old saying goes, on the internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.

What’s social, anyway?

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:19:04 +0000

The social networks are the latest Flash intro animations, the new tag clouds. They are everywhere. However, what is actually social about all these services? It’s a really valid question, because apparently everything is social these days.

One aspect to this is to consider the available social objects in the service and what interactions are available. As a simple rule, a social object is something that usually has an URL and is often serialized as an entry in an RSS feed. Also, often the actor who created these social objects is also a social object.

I just love this picture.

Let’s take Twitter, for example. It’s as “social network” as they come if you asked anyone. But once you start to think about it, it offers very few social objects and even fewer interactions with them. Basically there’s just two, the social objects are the tweets themselves or an off-linked thing in them. On Twitter itself you couldn’t really interact with the latter directly until recently with the new user interface that let’s you see some of the linked content on twitter.com, but that’s still hardly interacting with them. At least with the tweets you have two interactions: reply (discuss) or retweet (like).

In contrast, Facebook offers way more social objects and allows users to push many more into Facebook. However, the available interactions are often limited to textual interactions (discussing) and liking. Of course, the web is mostly a textual medium so it’s not a surprise that our interaction through it is mostly textual. However, the services and the technology and design in them really limit our interactions with social objects. You’re bound to fail if you just try to replicate Facebook and not think how people have traditionally acted in social contexts.

I would not count services where the only social objects are the users themselves as social networks. Because what you then have is essentially a contact list and e-mail and IM have been already done. In this way, I really liked Google Wave as it made the whatever the people were working on the main social object. It just wasn’t really good at it. Some of the “social” games qualify, only because they add a high score next to names in that contact list.

Another aspect is to consider the value to the user. It really isn’t enough just to depend on critical mass and then let Metcalfe’s Law do the rest, because Facebook already did it. This is probably the only reason LinkedIn is still alive – their value proposition is that being part of the network increases your chances with your career. Another example is last.fm, which promises better music recommendations. Ideally, the social network should allow the user to accomplish something regarding the social objects in a better way.

This aspect is also the one that is easy to get backwards. Adding a “social network” to a service doesn’t automatically add value to the service. It depends on the social objects and if the social network adds any value to them and the users. (As a sidenote, isn’t it a misnomer to say to “add” a social network, isn’t the social aspect always there, but you just “utilize” it?) Many of the various Twitter and Facebook integrations haven’t really increased a services value to me. For example, Spotify’s Facebook integration just lets me see somewhat useless information about what they listen to (unlike, say, last.fm). Also that the major Finnish newspaper shows on its front page what articles my friends have “liked” via Facebook has been less than useful for me so far (it just distracts). On the other hand, adding social features to a service like Nike+ sounds like it could improve a user’s motivation for running – there’s nothing like pure social pressure.

The third, and these days the most prevalent aspect is the value to the network’s owner. Of course, in the ideal world the network would be owned by the users, but we do live in a capitalistic system. The most blatant example of this has to be Apple’s Ping, which is essentially a social network to sell more songs on iTunes. The social objects are the songs, albums and artists on iTunes, which the users can interact to make them visible to their friends. And they can follow products (the artists). It’s just as sociopathic as you would expect from Mr. Jobs. One could argue that Ping is the “naked” social network, cutting all the happy-happy-joy-joy bullshit.

In addition to encouraging your users to pimp your stuff in hope of new business (like Ping and Zynga), the other value in the network is the value you get from an exit. Thanks to Metcalfe’s Law, your company is more valuable the more users you have – but you can also try to do something the others haven’t been able. No doubt many founders of the new, smaller social networks hope to have a feature that makes them the next YouTube, Friendfeed or Groupon. The danger here is of course fragmentation and the current players developing the features in-house (see Foursquare, Brightkite and others whose only magic component was location).

The most curious thing is that most “social” networks are forums where you limit the interaction of the social objects to a list of “friends”. The only way iTunes’ Ping really differs from Amazon’s venerable Listmania is that the latter is visible to all. Is it really social to narrow your world-view to just what your friends or companies who manufacture your favorite products share with you? Also, doesn’t it really bother you that these services are designed to let us socialize using their objects (products)?

Consider this blog post, for example. If this was a Facebook note, or a Buzz write-up, it would be mostly visible to just to people that I consider friends by each network’s definition of a friend. Even worse, the only people able to comment on this would be the aforementioned friends. It’s a brave new world.

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:21:16 +0000

I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas and links and bot posts. Then again, that what the web is: links to other places. However, how we use it and what we link to seems to have changed.

Yo dawg, I heard you like news aggregation so I put a news aggregator in your news aggregator so you can read social media while you read social media.

People are using services that make Twitter a duct-taped-together activity stream. I prefer to hear people’s ideas instead of being carpet bombed with bot notifications from the social media service du jour. But this isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Facebook took this further with web-wide likes and Facebook Connect. Your activity on the web is a feature on Facebook and they encourage you to dump everything there. Fortunately I can’t control what other people do, but a little bit of the Web dies every time someone publishes that stuff. That’s how I feel, but that’s the beauty of the Web: It’s a playground for experimentation. Too bad it feels like there’s not that much experimentation going on except on the business case side of the Web.

I rarely cross-post what I share/do on the various services. I don’t assume you’re stupid, if you want to know what links I find interesting, don’t expect them on my Twitter feed but on my Google Reader. If you want to know about my runs, I’m on Nike+. If you’re interested in what I read, or something else – well, there’s an app that isn’t Twitter for that. Sure, that’s more work for you if you want to know about everything I do but I don’t expect you to be. I don’t have to promote myself on the web – I have a nice day job and as a Finn I’m quite introverted anyway.

Also, if you guys haven’t yet figured it out – Google’s social network is the Web. And it will fail on your usual Web 2.0 metrics, because people don’t want platforms – they want applications. This is what happened with Google Buzz.

I ran a mile! Then I spent two hours promoting it on the web.

As I alluded previosuly, people use Twitter and Facebook as a make-shift Activity Streams because they just work well enough. Google Buzz was an early attempt to the next gen, but it failed miserably. It was complex, it was a platform and no one got the point. It offered advantages over Facebook and Twitter only on infrastructure level, not for the user. I’m quite certain that Google continues on this path, because there’s no reason to make a yet another Orkut when it seems that the future of Facebook and Twitter are activity updates. Better to control those updates than the services where they are published. Also, most of that stuff is just noise. In the future, the real business is filtering and exploiting those little snippets of information, not just dumbly showing them.

This hopefully could also mark the end of the dark age of “social media”, where we ignored the complexities of human social behavior and assuming that before “social media” everything was asocial. When someone can go and say that the end of social gaming is near because all gaming will be social – are you fucking kidding me? At what point in time were games missing a social aspect? Or did these guys only play Solitaire and Minesweeper? The Internet is after all a tool. It’s a delusion to believe we have required social enlightenment through Facebook when a compelling case can be made be against it. Repeat after me: you are not how many friends you have on Facebook, you’re not your LinkedIn profile, you’re not your fucking tweets, …

For example, Facebook gives us just one identity. This is by design and Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the right way to go forward. He and Facebook prefers that identity is our most low common denominator identity, probably so that they can sell more eyeballs to “targeted” ads. That might be reason why Facebook is boring, everyone is just showing their most bland identity they are willing to show to strangers.

On the web, people don’t always want to be “themselves” – or even social. Play some multiplayer games, preferably a FPS on a console – like Call of Duty: MW on PS3 – and you’ll quickly see the dark side of human psyche, also known as Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Blizzard tried to solve the problem as an engineering problem and attempted to force people to use their real names, this was very quickly shot down by users. On the internet, some of us want to be DeathSpank, the Orc slayer.

URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)

Kari Silvennoinen — Sun, 30 May 2010 07:13:13 +0000

A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

Facebook’s power grab of the social web

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:55:27 +0000

Seems like Facebook is teh new evil. The new Microsoft of the nerd epic. The biblical mark of the beast, the Windows-logo, has been replaced by Facebook’s like-button on a website.

But seriously. Facebook’s grab of their users is getting quite out of hand. Exposing more and more of stuff that could be argued to be personal information, pimping that stuff to other sites and companies… it’s not cool and it’s pretty dark in the grey area of abusing their users’ respect. The “evolution” of Facebook’s concept of privacy was best illustrated by Matt McKeon’s neat infographic.

You know these pics as lolcats, but majority of Facebookers just think they are cute.

If you look at the new things Facebook is developing it’s easy to start thinking what are the real benefits to users? It’s all just exploitation. But that’s just the business model for web 2.0 social. Companies are willing to pay a lot to know what their target demographics like and how they behave and lots of other metrics that supposedly make their marketing more effective. They also want to have “presence” on the “social”. I have no experience with marketing industry so I’ve no idea how well this works.

Many internet pioneers were against any first legislation involving Internet, because the Internet was somehow “different”. They felt that these laws would restrict the “freedom” of the whole Internet. Yet, it’s clear that at least our consumer protection and privacy laws are not good enough. The German Federal Minister of Consumer Protection sent a letter to Facebook where her threat was that she’d get out of Facebook if Zuckerberg and his company don’t start to respect users’ privacy more. Seriously, is this how toothless even European consumer protection agencies are against Facebook’s rampant power grab?

One of the weaknesses of Facebook is that they’re centralized. This is why Google, Yahoo et al are working hard on social web that’s distributed. The problem is that this is not a competition where the best technology wins. So what if “web industry leaders” are quitting Facebook? Most of the Facebook’s userbase don’t know who they are and don’t care.

The strength of Facebook at this point is that it’s what pretty much everyone and their parents know how to use on the web. Even otherwise computer illiterate people feel at home with Facebook, like the ReadWriteWeb’s article on Facebook that people ended up when they searched for “facebook login” on Google demonstrated. Whatever the pioneers, early adopters, or any other web power users do to create “anti-Facebooks” does not matter, especially on the short term.

The internet has always been a scary place for newbies and it’s a shame how easily scammers can use Facebook as an attack vector. All the groups and pages that advertise free Farmville cash or an iPad for just doing these simple steps that compromise the whole computer… The problem is that it is difficult to distinguish these from the marketing agencies’ competitions on who can create the most “liked” “viral” astroturfed page and also by the simple fact that people tend to trust their friends’ judgment so these scams can get easily spread through the “social”.

From the web power users’ viewpoint the future is either a more interactive web, or the wet dream of every SEO and internet marketing expert – a web that stinks and where its users are just a crop for marketing analytics. We are idealistic and tend to believe in the power of technology, but the web is a commercial venture. Google isn’t exactly our friend (not even using the web 2.0 definition of the word), but it looks it is in their best interest to push for the same cause – a more open web.

It’s not that Google and others are doing this out of kindness for web users. It just makes business sense for them, Google makes money when more people use the web. And it’s not like Facebook is inherently evil – the exploitation of their userbase is a natural progression for any social network business, especially because their users are not willing to pay for the service in any direct fashion.

We can’t bluff Facebook about quitting our accounts, because we are not going to hurt ourselves here and they know it. For its users, Facebook does add value. But, there are limits on how much they can exploit this fact. What Google and others are trying to do is make Facebook redundant, unnecessary – but they’re still far from this goal.

This is why I would expect more from the people we have appointed to take care of our personal information in the society, the different national and international data protection agencies. Not just empty threats like Mrs. Aigner’s.

Social web for the long-term

Kari Silvennoinen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:53:31 +0000

Now that the biggest waves of Buzz hype are hopefully behind us, it’s a good time concentrate what Google Buzz actually is and what it isn’t. I have followed Buzz with great interest and I’ve previously talked about Jaiku, feeds and discussions on the web on general here. I even pushed Plaxo at one point, but they are pretty much dead in the water right now. I was couple of years off and a technology wrong with my prediction of sort-of real-time web in 2008.

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

FarmVille is a role playing game

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:52:34 +0000

As I argued in the comments in Vincent’s post about FarmVille, FarmVille is a role playing game (RPG). And pretty bad one at that. Like most RPGs, you don’t actually need any skills or develop any skill playing it yourself as your success is solely dependent on the amount of time you sink into it. You can get pretty good at FreeCell, but no matter how much time you spend in FarmVille, you won’t get “better” in it. But what most RPGs have at least is a story – even if most these days have left the ending pretty open. Contrast this to FarmVille which isn’t trying to tell you any story. In this sense it resembles a simulation, but that genre is usually characterized by depth and strategy which are nowhere to be seen in FarmVille, unlike, say, in SimFarm from 1993.

Free range animal farming at FarmVille

It is way too easy to categorise FarmVille as a “casual” game, but “casual” doesn’t need to mean games where you can’t lose, games which have zero learning curve and games that don’t offer challenge. A good example of “casual” game that always ends in the player “losing” and (hence?) offers a lot of challenge is Bejeweled. If I remember correctly, Bejeweled was the previous title holder to the biggest casual game ever.

The only challenges are achievements – and now collections. But there’s little, if any, social value in achieving them – unless you count boasting about them on your Facebook wall. And, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have level 13 Pig Warlocks.

There’s some irony that the main reason people play FarmVille, boredom, is also a main reason why people quit it. This boredom kicks in at about level 20 or so, where you start to realize that you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The only thing left is the grind.

There are, of course, shortcuts to simple grinding. You can use farm machinery to do your activities faster, but they consume fuel (that, until recently, you could only refill by real money). Also, spending money allows you to get many benefits before non-paying players. And this is a problem, because many people don’t consider this “fair”. Offering players to pay to save time, however, is pretty crucial from business logic. The trap here is that the players who don’t feel comfortable paying start to feel that the only way to progress in the game is to spend real money.

FarmVille follows the RPG formula that the higher you have leveled, the more effort (= experience points) you need to reach next level. Granted, you have access to new things that might increase your “productivity”, but the mean time between levels is increasing. However, and this is the problem, the reward of leveling up remains pretty much the same. At some point, the perceieved benefit/effort ratio falls short. The trick is that at this point, the player has invested so much into the game that they might be more willing to pay real money to make advancing easier… if the rewards of leveling up are worth it.

The business logic of FarmVille dictates that the more you play, the better player you are for Zynga. It’s the curious logic of taxing your good customers, the discrimination for the information age. This is most evident if you look at how the experience points you get from crops depends on their harvest time. The shorter the harvest time (and so, how many times the player “needs” to play FarmVille), the more experience the player can gain in given time. As you can see, the relationship between these two variables follows an exponential distribution with pretty high correlation.

Harvest time is strongly correlated with experience points you can get in FarmVille

There's not much correlation between profits and harvest time, though.

As an interesting side note, the correlation between Harvest time and profit isn’t nearly as high and there’s a lot of variation. This neatly illustrates how the main metric in the game (from game designer’s perspective) is not profit, but experience points which are tightly tied to player retention. This also means that while there’s a wide variety of different kind of crops, there’s only a handful that makes any sense to use as the rest are strongly dominated. Oh, and the trees and the animals don’t make any sense given how scarce the land is and how much more profitable the crops are. The only reason to have either is for achieving ribbons – or self-expression (which you might have already guessed was pretty low on my priority list).

The other thing in FarmVille is that your game progress is also aided somewhat by the amount of friends you have. Whether these friends help you or not, is not necessasry, as only retaining a certain friend amount gives you benefits. The most important of these is access to larger farms. The social aspects of FarmVille can be divided into self-expression (how one designs one’s farm) and a coordination game of sharing gifts and other “loot”. The game design trick of “free gifts” is pretty clear after the player realizes that he or she needs a bigger farm to accommodate all the gifts. Contrast this “social gaming” to the title-holder of “most anti-social game ever”, World of Warcraft, in which (as far as I’ve understood) it is possible to “complete” the game alone, but playing with others is a key element to enjoy the game. In WoW the higher level players can help out lower level players, but in FarmVille the higher level players can gift some items to lower level players that lower player level players can’t gift. So, for some time the reciprocity logic didn’t really work in gifting, but this was recently fixed by introduction of “Mystery gifts” that are pretty much the only thing that makes sense for lower level players to send to higher level players.

So, what you are left in a more competitive sense of “social gaming” is the amount of ribbons you have collected, the level you have achieved and how pimped out your farm is. The element of achievements that you can accomplish as a group is zero.

I’m not entirely sure that Facebook is the most fertily grounds for games, as the dominating functionality seems to be “the social” and exploiting one’s userbase. Game mechanics and social dynamics come second. This is why I believe that to experience “true” social gaming, one needs to invest some real money to buy a game. The “free” gaming model seems to denigrate too quickly into nickel-and-diming, see for example what happened with EA’s Battlefield Heroes – where again some of the players didn’t see the real money elements as “fair” after certain point.

The problem with FarmVille, in short, is that the business logic dictates the game design too much. The revenue incentives of Zynga make the game experience worse for the players, who are looking for more than killing time.

How Social Are You? An Insight to Social Technographics

Anand — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:33:15 +0000

Have you ever noticed, the increasing interest of your old Aunts in facebook or other social networking websites? Have you ever noticed, people updating their status messages (provoking conversations and chitchats). I have observed these kind of behavior and sometimes participated in these conversations as well. But where am I heading with all this? Letme ask you a question, How social are you?

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors). The categorization of users is different than Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

: The Segmentation

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

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Thoughts on Farmville, an addictive but flawed Facebook game

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:20:54 +0000

I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

Empty promise of privacy in Facebook

Kari Silvennoinen — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 01:54:03 +0000

The more and more I’ve started to think about it, Facebook’s applications are an exercise in personal information anarchy.

One evening at a bar, we were joking with my friends that it would be quite trivial to make an application to Facebook called “How sexy is your social security number?”, which would compare your SSN, bank account and other personal information in a “fun” way with those entered in to the application by your friends. The strangest thing about this is that this would most likely be in accordance of all Facebook’s privacy terms.

Couple of days ago I was quite surprised to see when my friend showed me how hot, geeky and so on I was ranked by, I suppose, my friends. The problem is that I’ve never used or ever given any permission for this application to use my profile picture or my name.

I’m pretty sure that in any European country, this would be illegal. Conveniently Facebook is located in USA, where privacy is somewhat looser.

I’ve not given my permission to these people or these corporation and their applications to use my picture or my name. Yet, because they discard any business ethics in their pursue of Google Adwords income, they cannot respect any privacy conventions. If people cannot compare all their friends (users or not of that comparison app) they will not use that application. There has to be enough information in the application for people to be interested in using it.

Because I do not use these apps, I cannot set any privacy settings in my profile. In their Privacy Policy, Facebook states that “If you, your friends, or members of your network use any third-party applications developed using the Facebook Platform (“Platform Applications”), those Platform Applications may access and share certain information about you with others in accordance with your privacy settings”. Yet, because I don’t have those applications added, I cannot control that use of my information. Facebook washes its hands by saying that “while we have undertaken contractual and technical steps to restrict possible misuse of such information by such Platform Developers, we of course cannot and do not guarantee that all Platform Developers will abide by such agreements”. This is quite similar to the defence YouTube uses when defending all the material on their site. Thanks to DMCA’s safe harbour sections, they can easily claim that they can’t be held responsible for their users actions. I don’t believe Facebook has the same defense against their third-party application developers pimping out people’s private data without their consent – their friend’s consent doesn’t count. They can use DMCA in their defense when people upload photos of featuring other people (identifiable) without the latters’ permission (which happens, well, all the time) – but even in this case Facebook goes so far as encouraging identifying people with their photo-person-tagging function.

As a citizen of a country with quite strict privacy laws, I find it rather strange that there’s an application on Facebook where people can rank certain aspects of me without me knowing about it. Even though I’m a blogger on Tech IT Easy, the premier tech blog, I have quite a broad rights to privacy (ie. I’m not a public person). In Facebook, I’ve understood that this means that applications that I’ve not given direct permission to use my personal information (like name and profile picture) cannot use them. I think it’s not enough that Facebook tells that they’re not abusing my data, when they can’t make any assurance of their third-party applications.

I’ve not given (or to my knowledge, neither has my profile picture’s photographer) rights for these applications to use my picture, which clearly identifies me. Yes, Some Comparison Application, Inc. might pull that image from Facebook’s database, but they do not have the right to use it in their context, without my explicit permission. The point that this information is only shown to people I’ve flagged as my friends who could anyway see my picture on my profile page does not count. You can take a look at the information any Facebook Platform application can get about you if your friend happens to use that application. As Facebook tells in their privacy terms, they make no guarantees what their thrid-party developers do with your information they got through your friend. (Your friend may have waived his rights to privacy by agreeing to some stupid EULA to get his/her hands on new smileys, but his/her agreement does not extend to you, or me in this case.)

I can clearly understand why any developer would like to code his Facebook application in this way. It’s far easier to gain the needed critical mass when most of your users are part of your application without knowing it. I find this morally at least questionable. I don’t know about the culture in USA, but at least in Finnish context, I find many of the uses of my personal information outside my control in Facebook quite offensive.

As I see it, a third-party application could only call users.getInfo on me if I had the application added myself (e.g. friends.getAppUsers, users.isAppAdded or users.hasAppPermission). This of course would be a major restriction on the Facebook ecosystem as it is today for the reasons I’ve mentioned above. Right now, this restriction is left on the shoulders of the developer. And, right now, the developers seem to use those functions only to find the users’ friends who dot not have this developer’s application added and to bombard them with invites.

When I last visited my school’s library, I noticed that in the textbook section, the shelves were full of international marketing books, but there were only couple of books titled business ethics. Is it really okay to pimp other people’s private data without their consent?

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Is 2008 the year of instant communication nirvana?

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:23:17 +0000

On the web, 2007 was the year of the social web. Things like Facebook and Twitter have accelerated the way people can interact socially even at a distance. It’s a bit obvious to say that our possibilities to communicate will only get better next year. Internet is a communication network beneath it all.

Innovation isn’t about copying and yet no doubt we’ll see copies of aforementioned services in 2008. This of course depends on how the US economy and therefore VC funds will hold up. As we have seen before, changes are quick and some of the huge web properties might end up irrelevant next year. Will something like OpenSocial really matter? We’ll see.

Below all this Facebook SaaS Web as a cloud ideology, there’s an undercurrent that I find very interesting. As I wrote in October when Google bought Jaiku, XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk is a technology to watch for. Since the acquisition, we haven’t heard much about Google’s plans for Jaiku. As I also wrote, I think it was the technology they were after, not the service itself. Could a social notification system built on RSS feeds, mobile phones and XMPP somehow fit Google’s strategy?

Google has strongly positioned GTalk as the communications platform across its many services. GTalk has been integrated for a while in GMail and to some extent this is similar what you get in Yahoo Mail/Messenger and Microsoft Live Mail/Messenger. You might have read about Google’s recent poorly received integration of GTalk into Google Reader. You may have noticed that Google Docs now offer collaboration through Google Talk. There’s even GTalk integration in Orkut and my sources tell me more is on the way. Even YouTube has availability information of people watching the same video as you (This isn’t probably based on XMPP, but could be?).

Because of their closed nature, MSN/Live Messenger, AIM or Yahoo Messenger cannot leverage their networks outside their own properties. Google Talk users can interact (to some extent) with any XMPP user and other developers can create services for Google Talk users. This is important in a world that is not desktop-bound, but where services and applications are in the web cloud.

For some time XMPP had the problem that it was too ahead of its time and could not compete with the big players. Social web and Google has changed these. Now Live Messenger is playing catch-up with upcoming features like “Multiple points of presence support”, which is something essential to the XMPP-protocol. Microsoft could overthrow other players in the IM market through distributing Messenger with their operating system, like they did with Internet Explorer. The rules of the game have changed on the web and Google has realized they can be the next IM king by integrating their solution everywhere they can. They can introduce Google Talk to anyone with a Gmail account and without any download.

If it isn’t clear enough from above, what I predict to continue in 2008 is integration of IM or instant communication on the web. We won’t see one unified network to rule them all or anything like it. We’ll see advances to a future telecom operators and their ads would want to us believe is today. Yet they’re the ones stonewalling the development of internet on mobile phones. In reality, they are defending their networks against their Internet and web-based rivals. We won’t see iPhone or Android making a big impact on the mobile market, not yet.

What I hope is that devices like Apple’s iPhone & iPod Touch and platforms like Google’s Android will make SMS obsolete preferably through something open and web-friendly like XMPP and not something cooked-up by telecom operators. Microsoft is already offering Live Messenger on mobiles, but these are deals with telecom operators. My hope lies with Google and Nokia in this one. (See for example Nokia’s Gizmo client for S60. Coincidentally, Gizmo uses XMPP for IM.)

And yes, I’m predicting an instant communication nirvana even though my contact list is still mostly empty.

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