Monthly Archives: June 2007

Facebook continues to make massive gains on Myspace

June 12, 2007 4:49 pmLeave a Comment

Facebook continues to make massive gains on myspace.
Myspace is increasingly losing ground to facebook, according to the latest historical stats compiled from Alexa below. When we compare some of the previous largest blogging and social networking sites, myspace, bebo, friendster and blogger.com and we look at daily reach we can see that blogger.com is just out pacing myspace.com. They sort of speak for themselves, but you can see that the new kid on the block – facebook making massive gains – especially this year.

The gains that Facebook is making is even more impressive when looking at the traffic increases over the past 18 months – facebook has come from almost out of no-where to be no.2 – second onlny to myspace in the daily traffic trend for 2007. It even looks like it’s going to overtake myspace towards the end of the year.
It looks like facebooks strategy is paying off, a controlled and personal approach while allowing 3rd party content – they’re certianly learning from the mistakes that myspace has made in the past. It’s going to be it’s going to be interesting to see how much they bend to the pressure for more advertising, or additional inclusion of fake facebook profiles to keep marketing happy. Whatever they do – it’s something that I’m going to keep a close eye on.original chart available here>> Matt

Posted in Social

H&M Breaking Into Virtual Environments

June 10, 2007 9:20 pmLeave a Comment

The Sims is one of the biggest selling franchises in the world. Designed by famous ‘sim’ designer Will Wright (creator of SimCity) it instant hit from when it began shipping in February 2000, it’s a gaming license that’s recognized worldwide, translated into 16 languages and selling 15 million copies. The game revolves around the premise of a gamne where you control the people that live in it. You can build the home of your dreams and then add luxury items, hot tubs, wallpaper, TV sets, and then populate it with a family, watching and helping their relationships and lives evolve. Helping them with jobs, education, and choosing the way they relax. Popular demand for the fans wanting to see the activity of their ‘sims’ outside of the house led to the release of many expansion packs. “Hot Date’ enabled downtown picnics, shopping, and out of town bars and have fun. This was followed by Sims ‘vacation’ and ‘unleashed’ (pets for your Sims).The Sims 2 was released in 2005 and it’s still going strong, and it’s massive. Fully 3D with downloadable content, It’s been followed by loads of expansion packs, and downloadable content. Allowing players to build their perfect ‘Sim’ and dress them up in current fashion, and this is the thing. It’s the ideal environment to add branded luxury items – it’s been done before with several individual items created by players, such as Apple or Sony products but never before on a scale as quite as big as this. This is where H & M come in. They’re allowing their entire summer collection to be available inside the ‘Sims 2′ world.
‘We are very excited that H&M is the first brand to enter The Sims world in this way. For us, the stuff pack is a fun opportunity to meet our customers in a new and exciting environment and to show parts of our summer collection,’ says H&M’s Head of Marketing Jörgen Andersson.” – source H&M Press office.They’re also running a fashion runway showcase which is inviting players to create their own outfit based on 6 design themes, the winner of the public vote will have their design made in a real garmet which will be sold in H&M stores.The Sims 2 allows far more detail and has a global teenage audience rather than the next best option which would have been low quality looking virtual clothing in second life, so this makes a perfect choice for H&M to test the virtual water.

>> Matt

Posted in Life, Media, Social

Search is Moving – Fast!

June 10, 2007 9:03 pmLeave a Comment

The upgrade of ask.com last week marked a significant advancement in search engine interface design. It’s a massive brand change for the company that was formally the friendly face of search with ‘Ask Jeeves’ – now it’s leapfrogging the competition and making Google seem pretty antiquated in comparison.They’ve changed an awful lot since 1996, June 2007 marked the biggest interface change to ask.com since they took away the friendly P.G. Wodehouse butler.
ask.com has been around an incredibly long time – partnering with specialist search engine teoma in 2001 it’s specialized in natural language search. Eg. asking the search engine questions ” What is the largest lake in the world?” type questions.

With the redesign of ask.com they’ve introduced predictive text into the search to save on typing. They’ve also given users a choice of theme, but these initial aesthetic changes are nothing compared to what happens when you click the ‘search’ button.Changes that they’ve made to the search are something which which every single company who has an online presence needs to be aware of – these are changes that use features that I guarantee are going to be adopted in very similar form by every major search engine on the internet over the coming year.Searching for a natural language type question like the one above results in proving the answer next to a light bulb icon (representing facts), and corresponding movies and images on the right hand navigation pane. You don’t even have to click the movies to view them, just move your mouse over the movie to watch the first few seconds, or move your mouse over the images top view enlarged views of the images in order to make your selection easier. With the search results in the main window you just move your mouse of the binoculars icon to view a preview of the website that you’ll be taken to when visiting the link. It’s incredibly smooth, and intuitive.The thing is that exactly the same thing happens when searching for a company name or subject. Start searching for a major brand like Wrigley and before you’ve finished typing in the name the search box has listed your choices in its window – providing a list of keywords that relate to your typing. If the search engine has related videos, images, and Wikipedia entries that relate to your search they’ll also be displayed – In the case of Wrigley – you get various pack shots of chewing gum, the corresponding Wikipedia entry providing the history of Wrigley.

click here for larger version
These kind of search results are taking the advertising content to the extreme, and it’s way ahead of Googles direct inclusion of video into its search results. Not only are companies going to have to make sure that they have an adequate video that represents their brand inside a search engine, they’re also going to have to make sure that there is a corresponding video library and even wikipedia entries that relate to their product in order to cover all search bases.>> Matt

Posted in Media, Tech