This is part of a response that I wrote to Eric Nehrlich's post, " Affordances of social software". The question at hand is... why do I have a gut feeling that it's "better" to build a social networking site through providing people with fun tasks, rather than just a place to gather? Looking …
The Network
Is it really good to know who’s watching?
A few months ago, I read that MySpace or Facebook, or one of those sites, released a tracking feature - you could see who had visited your page and when. This backfired pretty badly because (a) people were creeped out when they saw that strangers were coming to their page over and over and (b) …
Shout out from eTech – Games and Happiness
I'm in San Diego at the fabulous O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, haven for nerds and technocrats. This morning I attended Jane McGonegal's keynote presentation, Creating Alternate Realities. One of the premises of Jane's talk centered around how games, and in particular immersive …