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Not a very new online property, but still a site that I hadn’t noticed before; Empire Avenue. On AE all social media activity is indexed and valued. You can buy shares of individuals and companies active on social media. Any social media activity counts towards a dividend that is paid on a daily basis at 14:00. So if I for example buy a share, I get a share of the value that person generates on a daily basis.

Stock prices are determined partly on this activity and partly on general demand for a stock.

So how does this gamify social media? It puts great value on activity and interaction and connects everything. My activity consists of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and my blog, it’s supposed to track 5 sources but I’m not interested in Flickr a lot

Anyhow, check out my profile and perhaps even join me! Would be great to be able to buy stock in my readers!

Not the first time I talk to you guys about this game, but it has broken another record, and I just wanted you know; the biggest social game up untill now is CityVille, with 100,256,070 monthly active users! This brings Zynga’s total just shy of 300 million users! about 5 times more than their competitor Takeoff Monkey.

I must confess I joined up as well, currently operating a level 16 city, the major problem is my lack of neighbors!

I feel strengthened in the argument I made earlier that Facebook will fail! StumbleUpon, a discovery engine to find the best of the  web, with its 13 million users is now responsible for 43% (Facebook@38%) of all major social media site traffic according to Statcounter. Pretty amazing isn’t it? Of course, Facebook has a different focus, to keep you in, but still, generating 700 million pageviews is a great feat! The newly introduced mobile app is responsible for most of the growth(from 400 million to 700).

Discovery based on cloud reference is ‘just a better way to find information’. According to Garret Camp, CEO of StumbleUpon.

Not the best title I agree, but it covers the sentiment. The Facebook valuation of $50 billion is the probably the last valuation pre-IPO,  which will evidently governed by Goldman Sachs who invested a solid $500 million themselves and are preparing to invest $ 1,5 billion of their clients money as well. I already pointed out that I believe that Facebook is using its leverage over game developers too aggressively, but there’s another argument to make.

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Finally, I finished another book! Because of my growing interest in the field of social media and its mechanics I bought Tara Hunt’s debut. Basically because Seth told me so, and enjoyed it, for a while. The book details a lot of best practices in the field of social media, a lot of them Hunt’s own accomplishments, and it provided me with some great insight, for a while. Because while the book is interesting and readable, the feeling that she tried to convince me of something kept creeping up on me. She lost whuffie, so to say.

In list form:

• All the basics are covered; both media and messages thoroughly explained
• Practical applications, a lot of them, every seperate subject is broken down in practical to-do’s
• Examples of great practices
• Personal experience
• Connect the dots between the different parts of the book

Sounds great right? It is, but my biggest problem with the book is that I fail to see what went wrong. You learn by making mistakes, you learn by trying, and in the book, Tara Hunt only presents her successes. There’s just two examples of worst-practices in the book if I remember correctly, how am I to learn from that? For all I know by this book, everybody is already 100% proficient in social media and I couldn’t even get in on it. End result; I focus too much on this bad feeling I got, the book is well-written, entertaining and very informative. Full marks minus 2,5 for bad feeling at the end comes down to a 7,5/10, not bad! I do recommend you guys reading it if you still don’t understand social media!

Just to keep you guys posted on one of the hottest social gaming properties of the moment: Cityville reaches 22 million monthly active users and is only spreading faster! 11 days in, 11,5 million people login on a daily basis, and it is probably because of the cross-promotion with sister Farmville, where even your top neighbor invites you to join CityVille! As I was saying before, target for CityVille is to regain Zynga’s lost market share in terms of total amount of users and since they recaptured the 200 million flag it succeeded for now. I’ll keep an eye out for more changes and will write a post about gamification very soon!

Great post by Gamasutra, already looking back on the major trends of the past year. I do not agree with these being the most significant realisation one can get out of gaming in 2010, but they’re sure up there. Digital download distribution is an on-going development, one we’ve seen building for at least the past 5 years, and one I don’t expect to drop off any time soon. Just to be complete, Gamasutra published the following list, check out their reasoning at the original post:

1. Next-Gen Motion Controls
2. Getting Smart With Digital
3. Cloud Gaming Possibilities
4. 3D Stereoscopic Gaming
5. Figuring Out Facebook Gaming (the REAL #1 in my book)