And you?
Oh! I’m sorry. Is this too intimate?
Well thousands of people are…
I Just Made Love shows on the map of the world places where people just made love in real time. What massive social change drives people to be ready to share that level of privacy? Interesting…
Facebook Connect has been around for a while. While some of us are still fooling around trying to find a real way to engage the Facebook audience – who’s definitely becoming tired of the overcrowded application scenary that feeds us with thousand of irrelevant quizes everyday – while other players are doing what seems right, which is using Facebook to communicate user necessities in a basic 2.0 fashion. Orbitz is one of those cases.
Having recently released a Facebook Connect application where users can share their travel plans with their friends. Not only this but it also allows friends to click on the trip in order to book their own travel, be it equal to the one they saw on Facebook. This makes group booking a lot simpler. The clever thing about this is:
1. The way it displays the brand and their product in a Facebook-friendly why. It’s not an invading application that you feel that is just another quiz, it’s actually something real (a trip a friend is making);
2. It generates opinion. Trip reviews – be it opinions on the destination or the Hotel – are the themes most commented on the web and regarded as valued knowledge coming from somebody who’s actually been to these places – it’s the basis of the 2.0.
While Orbitz is not the first vacationing app on Facebook, it definitely uses two important factors – simple and context-friendly. It is a natural fit with Facebook and users do not mix it with second rated applications. In an overcrowded social media scenario, it’s nice to actually see brands tone it down a bit and instead of creating complex in-Facebook mechanics, they just connect it in a natural way.
In case you’ve been away from the Internet for some time, Mozilla has recently developed a new app that allows users to, via the simple input of strings of text, command their browser to perform an action it could not previously via the usage of language based instructions- and they named it Ubiquity. Think old school adventure games applied to a browser! (Leisure Suit Larry anyone?)
Basically you can perform actions you once thought – like “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just email this picture I found without having to save it to my computer, open Gmail, attach it and add an address to send it to?”. Well, now you just select a picture you come across online and write down “mail to EMAIL” on the Ubiquity console – it will open your GMail account and have an e-mail ready with the address filled out and the image attached. Or better – you want to know where the nearest McDonalds is? Just write “map McDonalds Portugal” and it will open Google Maps with the McDonalds available.
And the best part is the possibilities are never ending – users are invited to create their own strings. All that is required is some basic code knowledge. So an entire library of direct inputs can be created by the users to create what I consider to be one of the most ingenious mashups created until now.
What is the learning we can take? Instead of inventing completely new stuff, why don’t you think of ways to improve current experiences by combining elements and giving the user the power to develop the rest by themselves? Think of Ubiquity, think of Spore (without the DRM controversy, please), think on how can your consumers engage with your Brand and improve it while giving them the feeling that they are actually helping themselves. It’s Free Love meets UGC!
If you’ve been tuned to the online world, you’ve certainly came across the name Spore someplace. In case you’ve been wondering what it is, it is basically the new game from the Sims’s Creator Will Wright (The Sims anyone?). The name of the creator itself should ring a bell as he is one of the defining videogame creators in all of the Videogame history. And if the name Spore doesn’t ring a bell, then believe me when I say it’s just a matter of time before it does. Continue reading ‘Spore – How to create a Online|Offline Mashup’
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seinn SCHLIDT [FullSIX Group], seinn SCHLIDT [FullSIX Group], jean, Regis Bergot
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