Articles in Headline
Facebook’s growth continues, here’s the latest statistics
People on Facebook
- More than 500 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Activity on Facebook
- There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
- Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
It’s amazing how technology is changing the world, and whilst gaming has had the reputation of taking people away from activity, camera technology is inspiring active games.
Kung-Fu Live is one example in which your image is placed directly into the game, and real movements are translated into in-game actions. As the video below shows, you’ll be able to kick and punch wildly into the air to take down virtual baddies.
This is one of the few games designed exclusively for the PlayStation Eye camera.
Want to know what your face would look like wearing a certain type of make up .. without touching your face? Well you could always summon up a magin mirror with the words “Mirror Mirror on the Wall, show me my face with make up all”.
And if that doesn’t work, you can head off to the Takashimaya department store in Tokyo and use their Digital Cosmetic Mirror.
The Digital Cosmetic Mirror lets store patrons test makeup and recommendations without actually applying anything to their skin.
Great presentation by Jesse Schell called “Design outside the Box”
It provides some profound insight into how everyday life is becoming a game
The East Festival in London will feature Pete Fowler keeping festival fans updated via his freshly painted Tweeting Bike.
Pete Fowler's Tweeting Bike
It’s a novel way to promote the festival and the @eastfestival twitter address as no doubt Pete will attract attention as he rides through the east london district.
You can check out Pete’s Flickr photo set here and follow the overall festival news via @eastfestival, or via the cleverly named #twike hashtag.
The agency behind this initiative is Chance Collective #twike
Here’s a great example on how to engage the socially influencial fans of your brand.
You”ll notice the campaign describes several phases of any social media campaign, including
- Recruitment of fans
- Engagement of fans
- Helping fans enlist their connections
Alan Long, Research Director for Hitwise reports that Social Media Traffic in Australia has nearly caught Search as depicted by the following chart.
Top 10 Social Networks in Australia are shown here, dominated by Facebook which boasts over 8 million Australians.
The net affect is that companies need more than ever to develop a strategy for Listening and Engaging with these networks so that they have the ability to influence consumers.
It’s surprising giving the hype surrounding Social Media, that it’s still quite a challenge to sell the adoption of social media to organisations.
There are many obstacles that stand in the way of running social media campaigns such as 
- Risks associated with open conversations
- Non existant Internal policies covering social media engagement
- Lack of internal communication of social media engagement policies
- Perceived lack of metrics
- Clarity of roles for managing the campaign
One of the hottest news for social communication this month was the beta launch of Google Wave.
Like a lot of people, I’m still waiting for my Beta invite – Google released 100K invites on Sept 30, 2009, and hopefully a 2nd wave of invites will come soon. {Update : Thanks to Gus for sending me a twitter invite soon after this post was published)
There is still lots of debate surrounding digital piracy.
Matt Mason’s new book “The Pirate’s Dilemma” addresses the issue of piracy demonstrating how piracy helped to evolve Hollywood prior to the existance of the internet. His book describes how piracy is an important source of innovation, and he describes how piracy can be used to effectively spread ideas. In doing so, Matt suggests how piracy itself can be leveraged as a valid business model.
Here’s a video of Matt talking about how youth culture is reinventing capitalism.
