Celebrity Agent by TheInsider.com is a social game with a rewarding way of comparing your celebrity knowledge against your friends, but ultimately suffers from lack of depth.

Overall Score: 6.0 (Just Above Mediocrity)

Celebrity Agent by TheInsider.com

Pros

• Effective tutorial screens make it easy to get started
• Core gameplay is simple, yet entertaining
• Ties in with TheInsider.com well

Cons

• Limited depth of gameplay beyond badges
• Community of players is small
• Almost impossible to play without friends

Gameplay:

From the get-go, Celebrity Agent presents itself as a very basic game in which users can easily play with minimal time investment.  While this is an effective method of getting users interested, it ultimately becomes their downfall as the game lacks any serious long term replay value.  Despite its lack of depth, the core game is actually pretty fun.  The goal of the game is to collect money and badges (achievements) by selecting a team of 6 celebrities for your roster.  You gain money when your celebrities make news on TheInsider.com, as well as a bonus money when you gain a new badge.  Badges are gained when you have certain combinations of celebrities on your roster.  For example if you have both Barack and Michelle Obama, you receive the “Obama” badge.  In order to get a new celebrity on your roster, you must swap one of yours with a friend.

Gameplay is divided into 2 separate purposes: getting badges and getting money.  Its up to the user to decide which aspect of the game they prefer at first as it is impossible to keep a steady roster while collecting badges.  Personally I found getting badges to be more entertaining, as it is the more active portion of the game.  Finding that rare celebrity to complete your badge that you have been working on for days is highly rewarding.  For me it was finding “Spencer Pratt” for the “Reality Show Villains” badge.  I never thought I would be so happy to see that idiots face.  However, I can also see the appeal of trying to just obtain the best roster and play the game more passively as it is less time intense and you can actually make more money that way.

Social Gameplay:

The game has many of the common social elements that has become be the standard today.  The leaderboard is prominently displayed and other than its standard application of showing your friends scores, you can also click on each friend to access their rosters.  From here you can steal their celebrities.   The social elements are limited, yet effective for the game.  Because the game relies solely on stealing celebrities from your friends in order to change your roster, having friends (more importantly, active friends) who play the game is imperative to its success.  While this model is the breeding ground for social game success, it places too much emphasis on having active friends playing the game to the point where you literally can’t play the game unless you have friends. The game does address this problem by adding 4 computer generated “friends” to your initial leaderboard, but it does come off a bit impersonal once you realize they aren’t real people.

Graphics & Aesthetics:

The pages were well organized, especially by social game standards, and there weren’t too many times where I couldn’t find the function I wanted.  As you can see in the above screenshot, the celebrities’ images themselves were big and recent, as they’re imported from The Insider, and that made the game feel current.  The strongest aesthetic element of the game was the introductory screen, which clearly explains how to play the game in three easy steps.

Monetization:

The game does not monetize in any way.  The game is completely free to users, and we guess that the goal of the site is to bring traffic into theinsider.com.

Community

Seeing as only 1 other person I knew was playing the game, I needed to find more players and went to the official Facebook page.  There are 6 to 7 posts a day from eager players looking to trade celebrities or just discuss some of the latest information.  For example:

Among other values, Celebrity Agent promotes a healthy dose of obsession.

Analysis

The game peaked in mid-September, and has been s lowly losing MAUs from its peak of 45,000 to around 33,000 today.  Seeing as it has no revenue, it would be hard to call this a smashing success.  However, given the probably low cost, and the goal to drive users to use theinsider.com, it may have served its purpose.  Our guess was that this game was developed by a small games team on a contract for TheInsider.com.  The problem with using small third party teams for small limited scope contracts are that the games always go half the way: if they had further developed the game, and incorporated virtual currencies, teams and more, this could have been a fantastic social game.

This also ties into the fact that social games like these ’start’ once they are launched.  The time most critical to success is the first few months post-launch, when the game must be improved and tuned based on the users’ feedback.  Unfortunately, with contract games like this, the game doesn’t evolve as much as it should.  A few new badges won’t cause any viral sensations.

The game itself has a very interesting hook, and takes an admirable shot at combining the market of celebrity fans with facebook fans, but suffers from long term appeal and over-reliance on your friends involvement.  I would have liked to see an alternate method for obtaining celebrities, as well as a use for the money you gain other than just getting new celebrities.

Overall, you’ll probably have a few days of enjoyment with this, especially if you love celebs, but unless your friends are playing, you’ll probably drop it after a week.

Try Celebrity Agent here.

Tags: Applications, Facebook, Social Network by Ryan
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So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, Facebook launched it’s chat application to the masses, maintaining it’s rapid rollout of new features and enhancements that solidify Facebook’s place at the forefront of the social web.

What will be interesting to see, however, is how big an impact this launch will have on the usage of Windows Live Messenger, AIM, and other IM applications. Back in the old days when Instant Messaging was the hot web application, keeping in touch with new acquaintances was done through exchanging IM addresses (around the time when you thought you were cool if you had a 6-digit ICQ number). But as social networks have become the medium of choice for maintaining and creating new connections (ignoring Twitter for now), it remains to be seen whether MSN/AIM can hold on, given that their core functionality is now being built into the Facebook platform. I’d surmise that until Facebook launches a standalone IM client, there will still be a role for traditional IM applications, but their day in the spotlight will soon fade as Facebook IM begins to flourish (for the average consumer, at least).

Which brings me to my next point – where is Facebook headed next? Well, their Messaging system is pretty laughable right now and as many are saying, is completely due for a major overhaul. By leveraging your social graph, Facebook has the capability to come up with an innovative email platform that will have the potential to completely disrupt Google/Microsoft/Yahoo’s grip on email. Since Facebook knows your social relationships and who you frequently communicate with, it can begin to automatically prioritize messages and enable you to more efficiently manage the increasing amount of emails and other electronic messages that we see on a daily basis. Top this off by then integrating your existing Facebook account and features into the Email application (ie. Event Calendar), and allowing 3rd-party developers to create applications that extend your email functionality even more, and you have an email platform leaps and bounds above the ever-stagnant Hotmail’s of the world.

Tags: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Social Network, messenger by Tim McKillican
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I just ran across one of the most interesting blog posts I’ve read lately speculating on Web 3.0 over at Master of 500 Hats.

Not to steal Dave’s thunder, but there are a couple points I want to highlight.  The Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo is primarily to shore up it’s dominance in the Email/Instant Messaging online sectors.  Sure there are side benefits like buying up Yahoo’s advertising, search and traffic, but the winner of the Internet will be he who controls the user.

But with the battle to own the user comes the battle to own the user’s social graph, currently controlled by Facebook/MySpace/Bebo/hi5/could continue to list ad nauseum.  I keep referring to it, but all future web advertising will be contextually driven by your social graph, where brands are providing social relevance to users.  Ie. “Your friend Katie just saw (insert cookie-cutter Will Ferrell movie) and rated it 5 stars!” (ok I kid, it will be impossible for a Will Ferrell movie to be rated as excellent again… the days of Old School and Anchorman are over).

I think it’s also highly important to note the fact that we as users on the Internet now have hundreds of logins/passwords for every individual site on the net.  This is a problem that needs to be solved, and while attempts have been made (Microsoft Passport or the community driven OpenID), nothing will happen until one company owns enough of the user’s Internet life to make it beneficial for the user (really, what’s the difference in consolidating your logins from 60 to 50?).  Alternatively, if the smaller communities can build enough momentum around the OpenID concept, it could be viable, but whether that is a possibility remains to be seen.

The final piece of the puzzle are the e-commerce/payment conglomerates.  Look for the Microsoft/Google duopoly to put pressure on eBay (and their very valuable PayPal) and Amazon for merger/acquisitions in the next few years.

Where do the small players stand in this heated battle?  Well, I sort of compare it to the open source community who has not only weathered giants like Microsoft’s attempts to push them out, but actually blossomed in the modern Internet era.  If the small guys can provide real value to users, by churning out innovations while being completely flexible to quickly capitalize on new ideas, they will have a direct line to sink their (small) teeth into the necks of Google and Microsoft.  And instead of a one-sided parasitic relationship, Microsoft and Google will leverage these small-time players to come up with new innovations and either partner or swallow them up for big money when it makes sense.  And sometimes these guys will have such momentum that they will swim past these sharks to potentially become a shark themselves (could Facebook be this shark?  That question requires an entirely new post) (and one more side point – I’m not sure whether I should perhaps be calling Microsoft and Google ‘whales’ instead).

The Internet and Web 2.0 is a playground for innovation due to the extremely low barriers to entry and it’s massive channel to instantly reach all users around the globe.  It’s an exciting time to see all the fish in the sea battle (and work symbiotically) to control the Internet.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Google, Marketing, MySpace, Social Network by Tim McKillican
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According to the Newspaper Association of America and referenced over at Editor&Publisher and TechCrunch,  Newspaper revenues fell 9.4% to $42 billion in the past year compared to 2006 in the US.  For reference, online ad revenues grew 19% to $3.2 billion over 2006.  What does this signal?  Well, for starters, the looming US recession has and will continue to have a definite impact on advertising revenues, as one of the first things to be cut during tight times are marketing budgets.  But is there more to it?

It’s no secret that traditional print media like newspapers are falling on hard times.  Marketing executives are being given more options with where to spend their marketing dollars, and while I don’t believe that Internet ad revenues have totally lived up to their potential, innovations in the online space are arriving that will present credible options for said Marketing execs when they determine how to optimally allocate their ad budgets.

First of all, the static ad banner on the side of every web page is starting to be replaced with interactive and engaging multimedia.  Online video ads and flash-based multimedia are becoming more and more common, attracting the user’s attention and creating a much more solid impression over and above the typical static classmates.com banner you traditionally see.

But more importantly, online ads are beginning to take advantage of demographics and eventually will leverage individual user preferences, as I alluded to earlier this month, to provide much more relevant and contextual ads that are targeted to every individual.

Finally, combine these new contextual online ads with a solid metrics and reporting system that can track every user’s interaction with the ad, and you can create an objective sales presentation to the aforementioned Marketing executive, giving him or her direct insight into how each penny spent online translates into brand impressions/interactions, and eventually, sales.  This gives the online ad realm a tremendous advantage over traditional media, because the feedback reporting mechanisms can objectively indicate the success rate of an online marketing campaign .  A complete return-on-investment can be calculated along with with every reportable stat you can imagine, so that the Marketing exec can easily gauge how to optimally allocate their online marketing spending.

Newspaper and traditional media are a one-way street.  You can get indirect feedback based on general sales lift, but nothing near what can be done through online metrics.  This gives online advertising the advantage, and with innovations still to come to provide even more creative as well as socially relevant ads to users, it appears as though online advertising is destined for continued growth.

On another note – Duncan Riley at TechCrunch wrote an interesting post last November about the need for consolidation in the Newspaper industry to improve their chances of survival in the face of increased competition for advertising dollars.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing by Tim McKillican
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Gary Vaynerchuk posted an interesting video blog raising the question of whether Twitter has the potential to become even bigger than Facebook. It’s definitely an interesting opinion that I’d recommend watching so I don’t want to paraphrase too much, but his main point is that with Twitter’s simplicity and update speed (nearly instantaneous compared to Facebook’s 15-minute News-Feed update), it has the power to potentially become the social tool of choice for being socially connected to the global social scene at any moment.

That Twitter is gaining massive hype lately is no lie – SXSW confirmed that it has become mainstream for the tech geeks. However, I’d argue Gary’s main point solely on the fact that the mass majority of Facebook users are not part of the uber-tech geek crowd that would leverage Twitter’s instantaeous connections and social dynamics. In this day and age, most users are content to logon to Facebook, check their messages, browse their friends’ profiles, view some pictures, and possibly check out some applications. It remains to be seen whether the mainstream Facebook user will see value in an app like Twitter. But as history has shown, the social web is evolving at light speed, so it will be interesting to see how the mainstream evolves with new social media applications.

Tags: Facebook, Social Network, Twitter by Tim McKillican
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It seems that Facebook is continuing to respond to many users’ overwhelming complaints with regards to Facebook Applications and the constant spam that they receive through Invites and Newsfeeds from Applications (we really don’t care that Distant Friend X’s zombie bit Even More Distant Friend’s zombie).  Today Facebook announced new Application Feed Forms, that will allow developers to create new interactive Mini-feed stories through their applications, but will explicitly ask the user for permission to post the feed.  Applications can also now publish new engaging News feeds involving interactions amongst friends to both friends’ feeds.

This is a win-win for everyone all around.  Users gain more control over what is published in their news feed, while developers have another tool for engaging the user (and their friends) with quality interactions.  Facebook gains overall by reducing the spam from annoying applications that has plagued users since the launch of the platform.  I am quite impressed with how Facebook has quickly responded to user complaints while at the same time providing developers with a new tool to really engage users through their applications.

Tags: Applications, Facebook, Social Network by Tim McKillican
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One of the traditional kingpins of mass marketing – the Television – is slowly beginning to see the light shining from the modern advertising revolution. The 6 big cable companies in the US are teaming up to develop a customized and targeted ad system, paving the way for potentially lucrative advertising deals that can target ads based on a viewer’s viewing habits and demographics, giving the viewer a much more relevant and contextual ad viewing experience.

Now how does this relate to Facebook? Well, the goal of any advertising platform is to produce relevant ads that are in line with each individual’s interests and demographics. It’s in the advertiser’s best interest to maximize the relevance of the ad for each user, as forcing a 25-year-old male bachelor to watch a commercial on teen fashion products is pretty damn inefficient.

But in order to optimize efficiency, the more information that is available about the user, the more the ad can be targeted to his or her interests. And who is best positioned to have a complete view into the details surrounding every individual’s life? Yes – Facebook.

Social networks are unique in that users frequently volunteer many details about their day-to-day activities and social connections, not to mention they provide detailed demographic information (education, age, political views, relationship status, etc.). Whoever owns this data has the ability to leverage it to build a very powerful advertising system. I’d imagine Facebook will first use this data to build an ad platform internal to Facebook – but there’s nothing stopping them from then going one step further to license this information to 3rd parties, whether it be CNN.com or a new TV-advertising platform (I know, I know, that privacy point again). Google’s grip on contextually-based online advertising is about to face another dimension in the advertising wars. And don’t you think Google has realized this disturbing fact?

Now to address the privacy police. Of course Facebook, Google, and anyone else who owns private customer information would not dare to release it without the user’s consent. No one is disputing that fact. But as with any market-driven solution – Facebook et al. must will come up with an incentive so that it’s in the user’s best interest to make their demographic information available (individual identities will remain private, of course, so this scenario is quite feasible). Those who choose to remain anonymous can do so, but their personal experience will be limited, and most will end up consenting so as not to disrupt their experience.

This mutually beneficial relationship will drive unmatched efficiencies in modern advertising. You’re a 25-year-old male who just bought a new pair of skis? Let me show you an ad for Whistler promoting the powdered ski slopes and the happening party scene. Swap the 25-year-old to a 55-year-old and we’ll instead contrast the powdered slopes with some fancy dining and relaxing amenities. This will all be done automatically and will drive ad relevance and positioning to new extremes.

It’s an exciting time to be a part of the modern advertising revolution.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Google, Marketing, Social Network by Tim McKillican
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Late last year, Federated Media, one of the first blogosphere advertising publishers, announced a big move into Facebook. The centerpiece of the announcement was the integration of the Hewlett-Packard brand to the Graffiti application. This turned out to be a proof-of-concept for Facebook marketing, with HP’s brand and printer offerings integrated into the application workflow itself. For example, after a user draws a picture on Graffiti, users are shown Hewlett Packard’s branded “Print Button”, and taken to the HP website to print the images.

Along with other moves into what they call “conversational marketing”, FM has shown an aptitude for looking forward in a market in the midst of transformation. Their recent move to secure a second round of funding is no doubt a response to the large amount secured by Glam Media, and the precursor to a new era for online advertising, where companies will vie for the use of social networks’ targeted advertising to present their products to their precise target demographic.

While the many competing technologies (OpenSocial, Facebook, OpenID) that will be used to tie a user’s preferences and profile to an advertisement are still developing, demand will steadily rise. With attractive Facebook marketing strategies, like FinancialTimes’ recent campaign, sprouting up, more and more companies are going to question whether their existing advertising budget, locked in mass-market print & television ads, is properly allocated. And if they start looking to Social Networks, companies like Glam Media and FM stand to pioneer a new market.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Social Network by Neil
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If there was any doubt about the new development paradigm that Facebook ushered in last summer with the launch of the Facebook Application Platform, all dissent was crushed this week with Apple’s launch of the iPhone SDK and MySpace’s recent launch of their own application development platform. With these recent announcements, the viability of allowing individual developers free reign on proprietary platforms was significantly strengthened.

While individual developers have always had creative ideas and innovations, they historically lacked a channel by which to bring their creations to the masses in an easy and efficient manner. With the floodgates now opened, individual developers and small teams from around the world can now develop innovative applications in just days/weeks and then leverage these channels to gain a mass following sometimes even hours after launch. You no longer must be working for a global development company with footprint in major retail chains or a large online marketing presence to market your wares. The opportunities for creation and distribution are now easily at the fingertips of any aspiring developer. It certainly is an exciting time for both these developers, as well as consumers, who will reap the benefits of all these new innovations.

But there’s always a catch, right? With everyone and their dog having access to these new channels, consumers are going to be overwhelmed with choice and bombarded with new applications left and right (as if I need to allude to the problems that Facebook has had with controlling the spam around applications). What application developers must do to really establish a quality and loyal user-base and wade through the influx of applications is to create applications that deliver immediate benefits (since modern Internet users generally have the attention span of a 5-year old) while providing real and lasting value to consumers.

Tags: Apple, Facebook, Marketing, MySpace, Social Network by Tim McKillican
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I, like thousands of other Facebook developers, have come to the realization that nothing is going to happen overnight. Facebook ads are not going to pour from the sky raining cash on applications far and wide. The money just isn’t there yet.And this post is in response to the discontent and negativity pervading the blogosphere upon this realization.

Just like when eBay, Yahoo and Amazon started their ascent, things are unpredictable. People aren’t really going to bite until there is a proven use and revenue stream for social networking applications. Why advertise on Facebook when click through rates are sub par? Why advertise when you’ll be featured on a small banner alongside “John’s Pants Corporation”. There’s no glamour and in fact at this point it could damage your brand. Blah.

Can revenue be created? At this point, the money is still in the air, but you can secure yourself a future in one simple way. By adding value for your user. I had a short discussion with Jamal Ashraf, founder of 12-million Facebook App-install powerhouse Esgut.com, and among other things, he pointed out that the economy of Facebook is yet to be decided. Every aspect of Facebook, in fact, is under transformation. The only consistency is the number of users, and the consistent amount of time per day (~20 minutes) that people spend connecting. There are 50 million+ users, and if you provide them with value, they will engage. The focus needs to be on something that will enrich their lives in some sort of way.

Why bother if there’s no money? Because $0.00 is the future of business. Large corporations and basement-bound two-man development teams are on the same playing level. Whoever can generate the most creative way to integrate useful products into popular applications will be the winner: Companies that market to and understand social networks and application developers who attract users.

It’s not easy, but seeing the creative ways in which Graffiti plans to fuse with Hewlett-Packard, I think we can all agree that the potential is there. An HP sponsored comment board and the HP sponsored “What Do You Have to Say?” segment. IMHO, that’s integration and positive branding in the social networking world.

Reading the article, we can see that Federated Media also plans to get involved with the massively popular “Addicted to…” series of applications, which all focus on specific TV series or cult followings.

In my opinion, if you want to win out here, stop crying about low click through rates, and start pounding on vendor’s doors, promising them a fantastic way to reach a completely new market.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Social Network by Neil
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