My Internet Notebook

Social apps, mostly games, on Facebook and MySpace can make a lot of money. As long as you have a good game play designed, you have a couple of monetization options that are commonly used/proven by the existing players today.

Virtual Goods

Players of social games are ready to pay for a) customization and decoration of the game environment; b) advancement in game levels. For example, Tencent made a lot of money with premium instant messaging, pet penguins, page decorations. Playdom did with clothing, weapons & adornment for cars, and advancement in the game. Zynga did with poker chips, mystery crates, home improvements, flame throwers. (Via: paidcontent.org)

Free v.s. Pro

Games designed with two or multiple levels of players can charge for a Pro experience. For example, in Playfish games “Who Has The Biggest Brain?” and “Word Challenge?” users have the opportunty to access additional content by “Going Pro” payable either via payment methods like PayPal, PayMo or PayByCash, or by using affiliate programs such as Trial Pay.

Advertising

Social games can also monetizing their audience by advertising, with direct or through a ad network. For direct advertising to work, you probably will have to already have a sizable player audience so that direct advertisers are willing to work with you.

For advertising through an ad network, you have quite a few options: Offerpal Media, adparlor.com, tattomedia.com, Super Rewards, etc.

If you are still looking for evidence on whether there is a serious business in social applications and social gaming, just take a look at the big players such as Zynga, Playfish, Playdom, SGN, RockYou, Slide and how much venture capital money they have raised so far.

I am sure you already heard of twitter.com by now. Well, I started using Twitter in Feb. 2009 and found it quite amazing in terms of discovering new people, new information, and sharing what you know with the ‘public’. Here are a few links and tips on how you can get the most out of Twitter.

Using Twitter

You first need a twitter account. That is an easy one, a trip to twitter.com and 2 minutes of time will take care of it. At the minimum, you should say a few words in your profile, and upload a picture of yourself. When other people stumble upon you on twitter, they want to have a basic idea on who you are. So you show that you are a real human with a genuine interest in whatever, they are more likely to follow you.

Twitter Clients: usually the web client (i.e. your favorite browser) is what most people use to tweet. But there are other twitter clients that offers enhanced features than the web client. My favorite one is TweetDeck (which is available on both Windows and Mac). If you have an iphone, TweetFon is what you will want to use.

Lastly, you may feel lost in the first few days of tweetering, here is a good blog post on how to be a successful twitter: http://blog.mrtweet.net/7-habits-of-highly-effective-twitterers-kris-colvin

Search Twitter

You can find interesting people to follow by going to http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter

You can searching for topics of interests to you by going to http://search.twitter.com/. For example, if you are interested in knowing what people are talking about iphone, you can just do: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=iphone

tweetbeep.com: Tweetbeep searches twitter for you on topics you care to monitor and sends email alerts to your inbox. A good research and reputation monitoring tool for you advanced users.

Twitter Tools

TwitterSheep: TwitterSheep is a website that builds a “tag cloud” from the biographical information of your Twitter followers.

HootSuite: The self-styled “ultimate Twitter toolbox” is a fantastic resource. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule and automate your tweets to other services, such as RSS feeds, and even gives some useful stats to help you hone your Twitter performance.

In a NY Times article: Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web – New York Times, John Markoff features Adobe’s fisrt official release of AIR, a runtime that allows online applications (i.e. browser based applications) to be taken offline (i.e. disconnected desktop application).

This is clearly going to have big implications for the existing software developers and companies because all existing applications have to be re-written to take advantage of the capability of AIR. But the advantage is that potentially your applications could also work on many types of devices (such as advanced mobile phone) if and when Adobe ports their AIR runtime to these mobile platforms.

As with all things software, the concept is clearly very good. But there will be a number of players that all want to be the de-facto standard bearer for the new paradigm. So Adobe is not alone in this space.

Small players like OpenLazlo and Xcerion are creating “Web-top” or “Web operating systems” intended to move applications and data off the PC desktop and into the Internet through the Web browser.

Mozilla has created a system known as Prism. Sun Microsystems introduced JavaFX. Google is testing a system called Gears. Microsoft is pushing its alternative to Flash, called Silverlight.

Wired.com reported on a so called ‘Learning 2.0’ program started by public services technology director Helene Blowers at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library (plcmc.org). It involves self-learning 23 things that requires using a host of web2.0 services such as Flickr, Weblog etc.

Libraries all over the world are doing just that — moving the entire Learning 2.0 program to their own websites. The program has been duplicated by university and community library systems in Sweden, Australia, Canada and Denmark. In the United States, programs are underway in South Carolina, Florida, Maryland and California. Even the Combined Arms Research Library, a military repository, is trying it.

This is fantastic. I think the current library catlogue system also should gradually move to incorporate some web2.0 features so patrons are more engaged around the public library services. Maybe a great opportunity for social entrepreneurs here.

Joga.com is social network for world-wide soccer fan. Although joga.com is sponsored by big companies (namely Google and Nike), its traffic has not been on a steady growth. On the other hand, traffic to Myspace.com (THE generic social networking site) has been on a phenomenal upward growth ever since late 2005. So the question is: is there value in creating niche (such as sports) social network sites?

Two other VC backed niche social networks, wiredberries.com and takkle.com, are in the same boat as far as growth in traffic is concerned.

Related Info for: joga.com/

Technorati Tags: social networking joga sports

Update: a new sports social networking site Ballhype.com just released their public beta.