Twitter Local Trends: Local Search is About to Change

I might be in the minority here, but I consider Twitter's launch of Local Trends Twitter's most significant product advancement since... launch? It will no doubt be overshadowed by tomorrow's Apple announcement - but local trends are important for, among numerous others, three primary reasons: 1. It marks the next generation of Twitter: geo-location posts, communities and trends. Tonight is step one (you could argue the Town.me acquisition and some of their key hires were actually the first steps... but you get the point). 2. Twitter's Developer-friendly platform will enable rampant development and innovation in the local and social spaces. Imagine Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, etc all on steroids.

3. Facebook's location play must be coming. With Facebook and Twitter already dominating social discussion and mobile usage, they both have a chance to redefine 'check-ins', location based services...

4. ... and geo-location based advertising. Which could be Twitter's revenue fountain, open up a compelling off-Twitter ad network and/or be the next evolution of mobile advertising. Each of these points are relevant to Facebook as well - should they move aggressively into local.

Sure... I might be speculating too big and too far - but Twitter and Facebook can (and I predict will) revolutionize "local", both disrupting the landscape and enabling development / innovation.

As an aside, take a look at the difference between the national Twitter trends and San Francisco's trends... it is very clear (as if we didn't know), that we are far geekier than most. Our top trends are: "iPad", "McGraw-Hill", "Local Trending", etc:

Farmville + Monopoly = Settlers of Catan

I am late the Settlers of Catan rage, which according to the Wall Street Journal, swept Silicon Valley in December. But I uploaded a photo of Catan to Facebook (shown below) and got a great comment about it: Why does this look like Monopoly and Farmville combined?

Funny how accurate this comment is and how Farmville has become a common way to describe / compare products (I recently did the same with TownMe).

MyTown Social Gaming Strategy

MyTown is best described as Zynga meets Foursquare. Take the best aspects of social gaming (Zynga) and combine them with location based networking (Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp) and you have MyTown: a game that awards points based on live social game mechanics built atop location-based check ins. You can own real properties (akin to being the mayor) and then collect rent (similar to Mafia Wars, Farmville) based on popularity and live activity (again like Foursquare).

MyTown's point structure is particularly clever and powerful because it creates an incentive structure predicated on routine usage and social sharing. Two great examples that were perfected by Zynga:

1. Deprecation. Farmville is the master of this: because rents cap out at a specific amount, users must collect rent regularly (ie hourly) to maximize potential revenues. As a proxy, if you do not return to harvest your crops in Farmville, they actually deprecate. 2. Social Sharing. Check-ins are rewarded with points (ie 150 points). But large bounties are provided for social actions like: connecting the MyTown account to Facebook Connect, broadcasting your location via Facebook and/or Twitter, and adding commentary on the location.

Below is a strategy to MyTown from town billionaire Kirk Nguyen. Fascinating stuff:

Try to maximize your points payload with multipliers. It's a combination of using multiple multipliers, obtaining the multipliers that yield the most return, and holding out until your base check-in worth is substantial enough (think long-run diminishing returns).

Upgrade as soon as you can, but it starts to get costly after level 5 or 6. Once the upgrade cost got to $7+ million, I bought free upgrade power-ups to maintain my cash for purchasing properties padding my towns total worth.

Finally, keep an eye on trending, number of owners, and popularity - ESPECIALLY popularity: it determines the maximum property value and maximum rent cap.

And if you want to stay on top of the leaderboards for your properties (and other non-owned properties), only keep local properties in your stable. I was in SF last night and bought some high-value properties, but then realized that I couldn't buffer my leaderboard weight for them when I got back into San Jose. I'll probably sell them sometime soon. Oh well, see ya Adidas Concept Store!

All in all, I try for check-ins worth between 45k-60k points, single-ownership of long-lasting, high-popularity businesses, and I collect all 20 of my level 11 property rents with one click.

Once you start rollin', you'll see how ingenious Booyah!'s micro-transaction business is. They made it very accessible and compelling.

My town is worth $2.5 billion, but I feel I could be doing better.

Good luck and happy hunting!

2009 Internet Usage by the Numbers

Royal Pingdom has a recap of 2009 web usage by the numbers. There are several nuggets - but here are a few that really stand out:

350 million – People on Facebook. 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day. 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009). 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.

1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day. 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).

247 billion – Average number of email messages per day. 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam. So: ~40b non-spam emails messages per day. YouTube alone serves 1b videos per day... amazing

Facebook Connect Design Best Practices

I have been asked to share some of the presentations from the Dogpatch Labs / Facebook Connect event this week. I will try to make presentations available depending on their public availability (and most importantly, the presenters' permission and comfort!).

Here is Hiten Shah and KISSmetrics' presentation on Facebook Connect Design Best Practices. This was one of the highlights of the evening and really drove home two of the three big takeaways from the evening:

2. Think about your users, not about pageviews or actions. 3. Test. Iterate. Test. Iterate. Test. Iterate.

View more documents from Hiten Shah.

Facebook Connect: It's More Than a Sign-On Tool

As Mike Hirshland wrote, "last night was a truly epic evening at Dogpatch Labs". Alongside Facebook, we hosted 150 people at Dogpatch Labs San Francisco to discuss Facebook Connect and demo their implementations and best practices. Over 50 companies were represented and we had teams fought the bad weather to arrive from New York, LA, DC, Montreal, Boston, etc. The event was epic in part because the demos were diverse and terrific - but it was also epic because ten minutes before the first presentation was slated to go - there was a major power outage across SOMA... leaving 150 of us standing in the dark. After maneuvering our way through the obstacles, we arrived at the Four Seasons conference room and dove right in.

Mike has several takeaways on his blog - and we will do our best to distribute attendee feedback as well, but here are my three major takeaways:

1. Facebook Connect is not a login system. It is much more.

The best Facebook Connect implementations go beyond the login. They must give the user a reason to interact and provide value after the login - and with Connect, the content and data go far beyond registration: photos, birthdays, social graph, etc. JibJab and Personera are terrific examples: by logging in through Facebook Connect, you are enabling a better, more social site experience. 2. Think about your users, not about pageviews or actions.

If you think about the value you are trying to deliver through Facebook Connect, you will construct an experience that encourages and fosters virality. If you think of Connect as a way to drive pageviews or feed posts, you can end up missing the most important factor: ongoing engagement.

3. Test. Iterate. Test. Iterate. Test. Iterate.

You would be amazed at how small tweaks in language, style, color, etc create very significant changes. KISSmetrics gave an outstanding presentation here and folks like Hollrr showed the impact of recent design changes.

Art Chang, a Dogpatch Labs resident and phenomenal photographer, has several great photos of the event. Two of which are below:

Facebook's Share "Via" Functionality In the Wild

Facebook's new "via" sharing functionality (think Twitter's retweet button) has been reported for days (InsideFacebook's Eric Eldon writes here) but last night was first time that I had seen it in the wild (after much looking). Three thoughts on the functionality: 1. I like it a lot. I think it is a natural evolution of sharing and always found the lack of 'finder's attribution' slightly strange.

2. I think the UI needs to be improved. Both in the feed and during publishing, the word "via" does not stand out; in fact, it is difficult to distinguish between the bold names of the two friends. I also think that the name following the "via" is too bold annd distracting. I would probably rather see it all within a parentheses or below the post?

3. And I would also like to see who else shared that post. In the screenshots below, notice that two of my friends shared the same posts from the same person. It would powerful and interesting to see the collection of sharers from a single source.

Only Three of Top 20 Grossing iPhone Apps Have In-App Purchases

I am very surprised to see that just three of the top twenty grossing iPhone Apps include in-app purchases:

- The Sims 3 (#5) - Madden NFL 2010 (#8) - Tap Tap Revenge (#13) It wasn't long ago that free iPhone Apps were moving into the top grossing ranks due to in-application micro purchases. But just a couple months later, it appears as though there has been a shift in developer philosophy and/or consumer behavior... the latter of which I find difficult to believe (thanks to Zynga, Facebook and so on). It could very well be that iPhone development and mobile behavior make it difficult to fully capitalize upon in-app purchases. Of course, it could also be that the economics clearly suggest that it is in the developer's best interest to capture the revenue up front. In-app purchases obviously require significant and ongoing engagement - so this could also suggest that the lifecycle of an iPhone game is shorter than anticipated.

Dear John, The Facebook Ad Campaign With Everything

Earlier in the week, I got a lot of flack on Facebook for becoming a fan of the movie Dear John. I noted that it was for a purpose: my usual Facebook advertising and brand research.... and it was. The Dear John campaign is unique because it merges several of the Facebook ad formats in a way I have not yet seen before: Earlier in the week, I wrote that NBC ad campaign showcased the new 'become a fan' unit for users who RSVP'd as attending the Chuck premier. The Dear John ad behaves similarly and includes the "become a fan" and "like" functionality within the video button. Again, this is not new behavior (Chuck did it as well), but it shows significant evolution on the platform - it wasn't long ago that video, RSVP, invitations and "become a fan" ads were all separate formats and actions.

When combined, it creates a rich, comprehensive campaign that satisfies users' various interests or habits.

The ad unit as it appears in the right column

When you click the play button, the HD video plays and includes "like" and "become a fan" functionality"

When attending, you get the chance to invite friends and become a fan

Also interesting, the Dear John video units feature the actors (including Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried) speaking directly to viewers and encouraging them to become Facebook Fans. The video is also posted on the Dear John fan page and has its own public URL - but strangely, the video cannot be embedded (a probably next evolution of public content on Facebook).

The video of Channing Tatum had 2,250 likes and 275 comments: