Hugh de Loayza, Zynga

• 50% of US women play online games, but when interviewed for a panel, don’t consider themselves on-line gamers. 41% of these ladies have used virtual currency
• Of those that play games with virtual currency, only 9% chose offers based on the points being awarded.
• They even stock up on virtual currency more often than they hit the ATM.

What explains this behavior? Q Interactive and The Social Media World Forum conducted a study of 2,100 women to study how US females interact with games. And they are not the typical teenage boys playing first person shooters.

Bob Girolamo of Q Interactive presented the study last week in San Jose at the conference.  Some interesting tidbits:

• Women are using few games—50% are using 2 or less games. 85% of these ladies are at 5 or less.  So there’s lots of trial, but only a couple stick.
• They earn and spend virtual currency daily—the game dynamics draw them in.  And it’s not just FarmVille, though that is the most popular of virtual currency apps with over 60 million users. 56.8% of women visit social networking sites at least a few times per week.
• When asked, “What made you want to play certain games?” 53% said that a friend or family member recommended it.
• When asked, “Why do you use virtual currency” 38% want to advance in the game, while 17% to acquire gifts.  Peer pressure works.
• Have you used real money to purchase virtual currency? 10% said yes.
• So why not spending “real” money?  38% can’t afford it. Yet 88% of the women are controlling the household finances—60% completely. Many don’t understand how to use PayPal, plus privacy issues.
• Do you give more virtually or in real life? 53% give as many real world gifts as virtually.

Now how about the offers themselves? The current wisdom is that incentivized ads are of low quality because users complete the offers solely to get points:

• 67% of women say that the offers are useful—but the glass is half full.
• Women pick offers based on content, not on the amount of virtual currency awarded. Only 9% choose offers based on the reward.
• Surveys were the most popular method to earn currency at 34%. In second place at 22% are hard goods (toys, electronics). Mobile is surprisingly not in this mix, which argues for a different demographic converting on mobile offers.

So how do we interpret these results? Some hypotheses:

• Female games are a completely different demographic than overall Facebook users—true, in that certain apps skew by gender and that this is a distinctly non college age user base.
• Sample bias in the study: This is something that can be leveled at any study, especially in how they selected these women and the small sample size. It may be that there are working professional women who are playing almost as much, but doing so in stealth and are harder to contact than stay-at-home moms. However, I’d rule out sample bias. Matt Wise, President of Q Interactive, noted that “Women seek a partner to support their entertainment, which is exceptionally important given their busy lives.” Thus, games provide interaction among groups of women who stay at home.
• Winning is fun: The fact that 97% of women prefer to earn their way through the game versus paying for currency says that the process of earning coins is likely enjoyable and that “cheating” by buying currency is taboo. The study did not comment on how much of this was influenced by the lack of purchase power.
• Users want to engage with brands: It’s not that the games built by players such as Zynga are bad or that the ad networks themselves are locked into an evil cycle. Rather, the right offers from trusted advertisers might allow users to enjoy free games, advertisers to get decent ROI, and game developers to be able to support their applications via games.

Overall, I found these results surprising, but intuitive in hindsight. What do you think?

Source: All Facebook

Source: Facebook Emoticons

Many people have a problem with the fact that Facebook is so completely ingrained into our collective conscience. What was once a cool place to share photos with friends and family at University has now become a place for families to unite and for parents to keep an eye on their college-loving offspring. It has come a long way from the campus-based information and communication site that was its founder’s initial plan.

Over the last five years, it has not just been Facebook’s rise which has been so famous, but the fall of other social networks which once competed with the big blue and white monster. Myspace, once the crowned king of the internet (with the most popular website of them all, and traffic and advertising figures to match) has now become an afterthought, a joke made by ‘cool people’ who talk about what is now completely ‘out’. Their fall was due to a mixture of factors, one of which was the Facebook took the social network experience and made it ‘clean’ and thoughtful.

How did it do this? It removed the trash graphics, the email forwards, the glitzy text and served the public what they really wanted – information and communication. This first came in the form of ’status updates’ and wall posting. What is a status update? It’s something which Facebook users use to give information about what they are doing at any specific moment. Some also use them to share web addresses or funny websites which they think their friends might be interested in. This function on Facebook was completely new – it changed the face of messaging from ‘push’ (like email) to ‘mini blog’ (like now, Twitter).

Wall posting was similar – it was like walking over to someone’s own bulletin board and leaving a note for them. People would read other messages on their friends boards (also known as Facebook stalking) and then connect with new people. It was a cyber revolution. There was, however, always something missing – the live chat feature which some people thought would never be able to be integrated into a social network.

Facebook chat emoticons

That’s when Facebook chat was introduced. It had always been the intention of the biggest social network in the world to constantly keep innovating and evolving, to stay ahead of the curve. When they introduced their chat function many people thought that they had made a mistake – the beta process was a little slow and had errors – the javascript sometimes made the pages disappear or act strangely, but after ironing out all of these issues, it turned out that they had struck gold. Facebook chat was one of the most popular clients on the internet, and its fans were wild for its clean cut style and cool colours.

One thing seemed to be missing however – Facebook chat emoticons! Where were the colouful smileys and symbols that were in nearly every other chat client available on the web? Text emotions were ok to use for some people, but generally speaking it was unheard of for an organization to create software like Facebook chat and not include Facebook chat emoticons listed for people to find. So where were they? The answer was that they were hidden in the software itself! After hours of testing, users managed to find a full list of the icons available for use in the chat program, and many were surprised by the different types and styles.

We will provide more exact information about which emoticons for Facebook chat are available in a later post, but for now just know this – they are some of the coolest and most fun symbols around! You can find some standard ones such as a love heart, smiley face, angel and devil – but also some strange emoticons or rare ones like a robot emoticon or a shark smiley! There is even a penguin! Keep reading for much more information about Facebook chat emoticons and how to use them!

November 24th, 2009 | Posted in emoticons | Tagged with emotes, facebook chat, facebook chat emoticons, icons, smileys, smilies |

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Source: Facebook Emoticons

One thing seemed to be missing however – Facebook chat emoticons! Where were the colouful smileys and symbols that were in nearly every other chat client available on the web? Text emotions were ok to use for some people, but generally speaking it was unheard of for an organization to create software like Facebook chat and not include Facebook chat emoticons listed for people to find. So where were they? The answer was that they were hidden in the software itself! After hours of testing, users managed to find a full list of the icons available for use in the chat program, and many were surprised by the different types and styles.

We will provide more exact information about which emoticons for Facebook chat are available in a later post, but for now just know this – they are some of the coolest and most fun symbols around! You can find some standard ones such as a love heart, smiley face, angel and devil – but also some strange emoticons or rare ones like a robot emoticon or a shark smiley! There is even a penguin! Keep reading for much more information about Facebook chat emoticons and how to use them!

Source: Facebook Emoticons

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg

Official facebook news!

Source: Facebook Blog

In 2006, two events occurred, which at first glance couldn’t have been more unrelated. Frustrated by a lack of engagement from business in the fight against AIDS in Africa and trying to push companies to contribute more to the Global Fund to help fight HIV/AIDS—one of the most devastating yet preventable and treatable diseases in Africa—(RED)’s founders launched a new model of creative capitalism. It was a very new idea and a very different concept.

In September of the same year, Facebook expanded registration so anyone with an email address could join the site. The hope was that with more and more people sharing with each other online, the world would be more open and connected.

Both concepts have proven to be successful beyond what people could have ever imagined. And as far as (RED) is concerned, our success is very much owed to the emerging world of social media that exploded, just when we needed it. Like social media itself, with (RED) the power is not so much in the act of one individual but in the incredible power of the collective acts of individuals. In just over three years, over 1.5 million people have joined (RED) via a range of social media.

Today, on World AIDS Day, we’re asking these people to come together to show their support in the fight against AIDS in Africa. Let’s turn Facebook (RED) — you can change your profile picture to any of the (RED) images at our Facebook Page. Shop for (PRODUCT) RED items like a (PRODUCT) RED Apple iPod Nano or (PRODUCT) RED sunglasses from Emporio Armani. For more information on how you can help, join us at www.facebook.com/joinred.

Over the last three years, in order to build (RED) and in order to channel a new flow of money to The Global Fund to support this fight, we have had to build a brand, not through traditional channels but one person at a time, virtually.

Unlike other brands, (RED) exists and grows and lives not only on a shelf, or in a store, but in people. (RED) is an idea we can all share, a concept we can all believe in that says there is a better way to help. (RED) means choosing the (PRODUCT) RED Converse sneakers or using your Starbucks (PRODUCT) RED card for your morning cup of coffee, and knowing by doing so, you are helping someone who is, in one sense, a world away, but in another is as close to you as your computer.

Those 1.5 million people have also given us the power to reach out to more and more companies. Companies see that our virtual brand has a powerful group of advocates and committed supporters so we see more and more companies joining us in our mission, by becoming (RED).

So, in three years, what have we done together? Collectively, people’s choices have resulted in $140 million being contributed to the Global Fund, with 100 percent of that money going directly to helping fight AIDS in Africa. Millions of people, like you, together have created this impact. But it’s bigger than dollars. This money flows directly to AIDS grants that have already reached more than four million people with testing, counseling, AIDS treatment and services—programs that truly change lives.

For this remarkable achievement, I would like to thank all of you who’ve played a part.

(RED) is a color that unites us. (RED) is a color that makes a difference. And today, (RED) is the color of hope—and of a new way to help make real change through small choices.

Together, virtually, we will do more than anyone thought possible. In fact, we already have.

Susan hopes you’ll go (RED) on Facebook today.

Official facebook news!

Source: Facebook Blog

There is placed fashionably in Facebook a Colombian game that is called ‘Dr Arrogante’, with which the knowledge of several languages is stimulated.

The target of the game is to compete to avoid the malevolent plans of mastery of the world of the principal personage.
Across questions one invites the users to compete to avoid the malevolent plans of mastery of the world of the principal personage.

Once inside the game, which for the time being only has tests for the English language, will ask him to recognize words and to associate them with the respective images to be accumulating points and to advance in the knowledge.
In the next months the versions will be published in German, portuguese, French, Spanish and Italian, to measure his skill in such languages.

According to the creators of the game, it is a way of practising a language of an entertaining way and in an ambience as popular as the above mentioned social network.

Route

Colombian, Juegos de Facebook

Source: News on Facebook

Next Sunday one of the outstanding figures will be lived in Spain of outstanding figures more expected from the world soccer between the Barcelona and Real Madrid, and I say that one of the most awaited because we will see face to face to the flaming hirings of Real Madrid against the harmonious and showy game that exhibits Barcelona in European courts.

This rivalry also moves to Facebook, where thousands of fans of both clubs demonstrate love to his team in diverse groups of the famous social network.

Undoubtedly this one finds many curiosity and emotiveness awake in the whole world, and when not, all these feelings remain demonstrated in Facebook.

Kaká, Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi, Ibrahimovic, Iniesta, Xavi, Benzemá, Raúl, definitely a constellation of stars that revolutionizes the virtual world.

And you: To whom do you him go?

Barcelona, Groups Facebook, Real Madrid

Source: News on Facebook

Worried some entities of the world are for the multiplication of harmful comments in Facebook. According to the signature Convergys Corp, a big percentage of clients has decided to do without the services that some companies offer because inside the social network they inhabit tens harmful comments that generate in turn doubt and suspicion.

The survey reveals that for a harmful comment in Facebook, a company might be losing up to 30 clients, this means that the image and the position of a company now are turning out to be affected by the comments that are generated inside a social network.

According to Sherlcok, vice-president senior of Convergys, the clients are changing companies without giving previous notice to this, apparently they do it in a silent way not to give any track of his recognition.

Route | siliconnews

comments, Convergys, entities, facebook, signs, harmful, multiplication, worried

Source: News on Facebook