Metaplace, a service that lets you design your own virtual worlds, has now launched embedding, so that you can stick your world (or your friends’ worlds) on your website. (BoingBoing)
You can use it as a gathering space for your community — on forums…You can make it the central gathering spot for a Ning community…Over time, crazier uses will come about, such as this experiment in using virtual worlds to annotate the real world by embedding a Metaplace world on a geolocation in Google Maps.
Me like.
Social Gaming Summit 2009 happened a few weeks ago. These people are making hundreds of millions of dollars off millions of people on social networks. Online dating works harder, these people work smarter and make a lot more money. Just sayin.
Travelocity Banner Knows Where I’m Going (MIT Advertising Lab). I mentioned to several people at iDate LA that in the future ads wouldn’t be jpeg’s or GIF’s served up by a webserver. Rather, they would be placeholders for dynamic ads based on the content on a page (Google), the images (Milabra) and several other types of metata.
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/Twitter-Architecture. Its cool that Twitter is showing everyone exactly what they are doing to deal with scalability issues. My first sysadmin is now a head geek at Twitter.
“Stealing MySpace†and my personal experience monetizing MySpace ads.
iPhone Virtual Goods: Late to the iPhone, Trip Hawkins’ Digital Chocolate falls in love with it.
VB: What do you like about the iPhone 3.0 software update coming?
TH: It’s very exciting. They are adding additional billing models like virtual goods. It’s a step in the right direction. Now they have to deal with tougher security problems related to virtual goods like credit card fraud. But we’re excited about push notifications inside apps. You can do voice chatting, peer-to-peer WiFi, and streaming.
Buying stuff from within iPhone apps is going to be huge. Do you have any idea how much money companies are going to make doing this? Especially upgrades, although it sounds like you can’t upgrade from a free to a paid app in the app itself.
So much going on in the web scalability arena these days, and lots of large dating sites are hitting performance walls more often. Is it true that Hadoop is not the best?
Customer Research: someone mentioned to a friend at my local coffee shop today that I worked with online dating sites. Here’s how the conversation went, lightly paraphrased.
“I tried eHarmony, eh.”
“Everyone on PlentyOfFish just wants sex.”
“Craigslist is scary!”
“JDate is stale, same old guys.”
“I met my husband on Match” (hey, it happens).
One out of four people had something positive to say about online dating. This was like an instant focus group. Everyone around us had an opinion except for the married people, who, as usual, sit there scratching their heads and feeling sorry for “you single people. It wasn’t like that in my day…” and so on. I wish these people were up on the final iDate panel, their input would have been incredibly valuable.
Dating executives, go talk to some of your members. Personally email them through your messaging system. (When is the last time you did this?) I would be surprised if you didn’t learn at least one valuable thing, and think how good it will make them feel that you are listening.
