Back in April, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote an article on his blog entitled Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO. He concludes that Google is transitioning from a period where it was a dominant, unchallenged player, to a period of intense competition. This is unique during the existence of the company; Google has famously declared in the past that they have no competitors, and that they seek a collaborative role with other companies. Continue reading
Finally got signed up with Google Plus on the weekend.
My reaction so far is mixed.
Its certainly interesting to be able to follow some very influential people, but not going to be feasible to actually strike up a meaningful conversation with them, as far as I can tell. Too many people talking, but few listening.
I’ll probably check in from time to time to see how things are progressing. Google has promised a large number of new features, and they look like they’re integrating it very cleanly into other tools, particularly Gmail.
I always wonder about sites that are focused on Twitter-like feeds though. To my mind, that functionality basically forms the same purpose as RSS feeds. Its just crying out to be aggregated, and then where does that leave the feed sites, or the individual content creators?
Don’t get me wrong: it looks to be a useful tool. I’ve already implemented the +1 tool on this blog. Unless there’s going to be more to it though, there isn’t going to be a pressing need for me to login frequently.
TweetMUD is a silly little project that I threw together, just to see if I could.
Its a MUD (multi-user dungeon) game that runs in Twitter. It still runs very slowly, and is missing some functionality, but it appears to be working.
There’s a quick and dirty website here with instructions on how to play.
The way it works is that you post messages to the “bot” (or using its name as a hashtag). The bot listens for mentions, picks up your username, processes the game commands, and sends back a response. I still need to implement inventory and armor.
Twitter’s “you already tweeted this” functionality is getting in the way a bit. I find that it is necessary to put a random number at the end of commands in order to make it work properly.
The game is built using Zend Framework, and particularly Zend’s OAuth module, which makes it fairly simple to integrate into Twitter.
Total development time was about 3 days (with lots of breaks to work in customer’s projects). If nice people sponsor me, I’ll put in more effort to add functionality, make it run faster, and add levels. A polished game of this nature is probably a few week’s worth of work, particularly if it integrates picture posting (i.e. images of the room you are in).
Oh and please excuse the silly humor. I tried to make everything as ridiculous as possible, in order to demonstrate that this is just a feasibility test for building Twitter games.
I know its old news, but I’ve still been thinking about the Facebook PR misfire from a few weeks back. A few people I’ve spoken to lately have asked me to write some more strategic material, so I’ll take one more hack at it here before writing about something else (I don’t want to bore people!). I can’t take credit for the central idea below though; a fellow by the name of Jay Gould used to do this a lot back in the 1800s, and it probably predates him too.
For part 1 of this article, see here.
In part 1, we looked at some of the issues that may effect Facebook’s future growth and profitability, as well as some of the strategic decisions they could make to counter them. Continue reading