Why did Seth Priebatsch garner so much attention with his keynote speech on Gamification at SXSWi in Austin this year? At a conference where everyone agrees it is becoming increasingly difficult to break through the noise at all anymore no less.

Why? Because Gamification has not only been one of the trend words of 2010/11 in tech, but also one of the very real trends in the actual designs of user experiences/user interfaces (UX/UI).

Here are some key excerpts from a great recent post, The Gamification of Life, the Universe and Everything by Allan Patrick:

As the first “Gamification” workshop in London was held today, I thought it might be interesting to look at this rather fascinating Fortune article about Seth Priebatsch who:

…sensed something three years ago that most of the rest of us did not: that a generation raised on video games would want to keep playing a game in real life. “I found out that basically the real world was essentially the same game as Civilization [an old computer game], just with slightly better graphics… and slightly slower.”

[...] ”I have a much broader definition of game than most other people,” he says, explaining that games are just systems of challenges, rewards, and biases.

So it turns out that a lot of this straight-up Behaviorist thinking is very important in the development of technology, more important than most people realized before the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, and more important than most of us would like to admit to ourselves. Because… well… we like tho think of ourselves as more evolved than simple stimulus/response “machines”.

But the fact is that whenever a game or game-like structure is presented to people, people as human beings will tend to play them. This fact is of course much older than Social Media, or than the above-mentioned computer games, though Seth may be right that the acceptance of game mechanics in all manner of contexts could have only gone up, not down, from these societal developments.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal wrote recently that “some analysts claim 50% of businesses will be gamified by 2015″!

One recent example of what I call an “indirect game mechanic” is the Twitter “follower count game”, which a lot of people were “playing” rather vigorously ca. 2009-2010. The fact that this count metric is presented front-and-center on the services main user pages, keeping score like a pinball machine, enticed users to jump through all sorts of hoops in their quest to gain more followers.

But even the micro-blogging activity itself on Twitter could be described as having game-like aspects, because 1) the activity is short and regulated (the 140 character limit on Twitter had more implications than people realized).

And 2), there are instant feedback loops such as the tweet count (“score”) going up, your tweet becoming an instantly visible “result” in your and other people’s update stream, and further intermittent/irregular-schedule feedback by other people responding to your tweets, or passing them on as Retweets.

Twitter’s @ mentions tab is the Behaviorist’s irregular reward-schedule mechanism of sorts, because we are literally pre-programmed to check for our reciprocal attention “reward” often. Behaviorists such as Skinner and Pavlov figured out long ago that such an “irregular reward schedule” was the most reinforcing of all.

So it comes as no surprise that the micro-blogging activity has become so self-reinforcing (in other words: addictive) for a lot of people, that they do things subsumed under it that they heretofore shunned. For example, doing a form of short-burst knowledge management (KM) inside of corporate organizations or more loosely-based interest groups.

Twitter clones like Yammer and SalesForce.com’s Chatter have sprung up since 2009 that propose to piggy-back on these effects, and are creating real changes to internal information flow and exchange: It turns out that with all previous iterations of corporate KM attempts, people were simply not incentivized in a way that “made them” actually do the desired activity…

Here’s a key quote I curated in 2009:

[W]hoever acquires Twitter will in essence take possession of an army of… tens of millions… of humans who are actively, accurately, and enthusiastically meta-tagging pages. In the arena of human-augmented search, Mahalo is a useful wheelbarrow, while Twitter is a fleet of 747 cargo planes.

The key word here is “enthusiastically”… why? Why is anyone enthusiastic? In large part due to the underlying gamification “rewards” as described above!

It is very important to understand all of this if you want to think yourself into the “games” of current and future social media. As Allan Patrick states:

The trend will be to build in more gamification by adding in more games for people to play:

- There are no badges and mayorships in SCVNGR [Priebatsch's own gamified geo-location-based service similar to Foursquare]. There are points, and you get these points by not just checking-in, but also by doing various crowd-generated “challenges” while you’re at the place you’re at. [...]

- He started a pilot program in Boston and Philadelphia that gives users better and better deals as people continue to come back to a restaurant. “Pure [geo] checking-in isn’t going mainstream,” he says, and is working on a Groupon-Gamification called Level-Up [...]

There is no doubt that the “white hat” attraction of Gamification is to get people more hooked on your online businesses rather than the competitor’s, and also [...] the “black hat” attraction of getting your hands on more of people’s personal data, the New New Gold.

I would have to agree. Some of it will be explicit, in the form of games that are identified as such. But much of it will be more implicit, or “invisible game mechanics” not consciously perceived as real games, but of game-like character.

And either way these will get you and hundreds of millions of other people online to do certain activities, billions of times a month. Still think you can afford to not understand Gamification?

…could things go a lot more quietly, the way of the MP3 player market and total Apple / iPod dominance instead?

GigaOM was quick to point out 5 Problems With Gartner’s Tablet Forecast, among them:

Apple’s iPad is poised to continue its overwhelming lead in tablet sales until 2015, holding 47.1 percent of the market according to research firm Gartner. Google’s Android tablets will slowly catch up to nab 38.6 percent of sales by then, while media slates built upon platforms such as MeeGo, QNX and webOS will barely be a blip on the radar, accounting for just a combined 14 percent of tablet sales four years from now. On the surface, these predictions may sound logical, but upon closer inspection, there’s more wrong than right here.

1) 2015 is at least two (or more) product cycles away. [...] While the iPad may not see monumental design changes each year, Apple is sure to evolve the device several times in the next four years. The same holds true for other tablet makers using different platforms. Simply put: It’s too early to predict what the tablet market will look like several device iterations from now due to powerful new processors on the way, faster mobile broadband in wider coverage areas and improvements in mobile software and apps.

While I agree that the Gartner study is making way too many assumptions overall, some of the rosier projections for Android (including Gartner’s own forecast of near 40% share by 2015) are probably having the same issue:

1) The only thing that we know with relative certainty is that Apple has put up a huge lead, and has become the uncontested category leader. If past experience is any guide (study your Ries & Trout on Positioning), that should put it on track to retain 50% share at a minimum, but quite possibly more (60-70%).

2) Especially since Apple went all out on pricing the entry-level $499 iPad so competitively, that the first few would-be competitors couldn’t even begin to catch up with Apple in that regard. Only now are e.g. Samsung rolling out an Android 2.2 tablet in a Wi-Fi model for $349 (April 10), which is priced below the $499 “price anchor” Wifi iPad/iPad 2.

But this is hardly a direct price beat, given that we are talking about a 7″ screen size tablet, not running the latest Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” OS optimized for tablet use (and it may not ever get the upgrade to it), and not fully up to snuff to the iPad’s build quality. So that consumers may well view this price in line with expectations for the different form factors.

3) That’s how strong Apple’s lessons learned from their iPod mass-market device manufacturing have been. Which brings up the legitimate question of whether the tablet market will turn out more like the MP3 player market than the smartphone one:

It all hinges on the question of how much Apple bungled things by staying with AT&T exclusivity for too long. What if there had been a Verizon iPhone (and Sprint and T-mobile as well) by the X-mas shopping season 2008? Would Android have even stood a chance? Would it have surpassed iPhone share as it did by now?

Since the carrier lock-in factor is almost a non-issue for tablets (the trend has been toward the Wifi-only versions anyway), Android has no such help in tablets.

4) Another thing missing: The ingenious “Droid” counter-branding to the iPhone’s own deep Archetype Branding that lifted the sale of all Android smartphones, whether intended or not, doesn’t appear to be crossing over into the Android tablet market.

Motorola created a brand with the Droid that was smartly capturing the few remaining archetypes that Apple had not employed:  Mainly “The Outlaw” (unrepentant, dangerous, bad) and “The Titan” (greatest strength, number, expanse) archetypes inherent in the allusion to the Terminator robotic eye, and to robots in general.

Symbols of “bad boy, take-no-prisoners machine”, combining within itself “the greatest strength”. To quote the original ads: “In a world that doesn’t, Droid does…”.

It appears that Motorola, Samsung, Acer, et al. are starting nearly from scratch in this regard in terms of the tablet market (which may be their biggest mistake yet, because they could have easily pushed the Droid branding into the tablet realm as well, it’s not too far of a brand extension), and so far I have not seen a break-out branding concept from any of them.

5) Much has already been written about the retail display advantage that the iPad currently has vs. the Xoom and other would-be competitors, another area that is quite different from the mobile carrier retail situation with smartphones:

Of course they are the only tablets on display at the Apple Stores, but they also visually dominate at non-exclusive retail outlets such as Best Buy, where the iPads sit on display with the rest of Apple’s shiny “tech-marvel” products, while the Xoom sits somewhere off to the side crammed in with a variety of netbooks and other cheaper fare…

All in all, those are a lot of advantages for the iPad. And any would-be competitors clearly have their work cut out for them if they are hoping to get even close to the 40% share predicted by Gartner for Android. Not to speak of the smaller challengers like HP’s TouchPad with its own WebOS (from the acquisition of Palm), or Blackberry/RIM’s Playbook, who’s only hope appears to be to make a play through entrenched enterprise computing relationships.

For more on my early predictions on iPad’s category leadership due to competitors missing the boat on getting their offerings out quickly enough, see: Is the iPad a fine young cannibal?

“Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter” claims a recent article in the New York Times, based on some statistics gather by Pew Center research that appear to show a percentage decline in self-identified bloggers among the younger age groups, and stagnation among the more middle-aged set.

Is Blogging dying, or at least on the decline?

The article has sparked a good bit of debate, prompting e.g. GigaOM to retort: “Blogging Is Dead Just Like the Web Is Dead .”

But rather than latch on to the specifics of some percentage gains or losses, that may well be semantically arguable as pointed out in the Times piece, I believe the key quote to be this:

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

Which is both an argument for the type of Curation-plus-commentary-plus-community activity I’ve been advocating for on my current “mini-blogging” platform of choice, Amplify.com, as well as apt to highlight what I have come to call “the Content Creator’s Plight” or Dilemma (I’ve been cooking up a longer, substantive post on this for a few months, but ironically always find myself dragged in other directions…):

It is difficult enough to keep up with our 21st century information “maelstrom” to begin with. And to arrest the flow of the real-time Web long enough in one’s mind to write much of substance on rapidly emergent, “newsy” topics, so that a post might persist in providing value for longer than a day or two. The other day I curated a post that aptly coined the term “content decay” in this regard.

In a way, it represents a massive act of will, especially in the face of what is now a fair number of professional “blogging machines” (like Techcrunch), that do nothing else.

Now add to that the fact that without already having sufficiently large, built-in audience, which very few bloggers ultimately achieve, the motivation for these “acts of will” is very quickly used up… Notice the second sentence in the above quote, which points out that many find such a built-in audience, and hence at least perceived affirmation, on their social networks of choice.

A service like Amplify, and intelligent curation tools in general, can solve at least the first issue, and while many of its curation peers are neglecting the community/conversation angle, this is where Amplify ultimately shines in solving the second problem to some extent as well.

Going back to the original question, one could say that blogging is most definitely evolving, though also certainly still alive and well:

[B]logging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

Ultimately, people are still expressing themselves online, in however long or short a form (though the trend has certainly gone toward the Twitter- or SMS-like micro-blogging), and the main differences are merely the User Interface (UI) metaphors used.

For example, Amplify has been wrestling with the issues of providing easy-to-use, elegant metaphors, while still maintaining a modicum of depth and relevance for conversation. Bigger services such as Tumblr (another mini-blogging tool) or Twitter have grown so rapidly precisely due to the extreme, push-button simplicity with which content could be created or curated, and passed along socially.

As I’ve argued before, Simplicity Wins, but there is also a fine line to walk to provide both simplicity, as well as still allow for the depth that at least some of us crave.

OK, so Facebook game maker Zynga is raising additional money at a $10 BILLION valuation. One would hope that that’s enough to make anyone’s ears prick up…

So how did they get here: By understanding something about human psychology, and then HACKING it for all its worth.

1) Addict people with SIMPLE, low learning-curve games, that 2) are social in the way you might have played certain board games in real life in the past, and that 3) have Irregular Reward Schedules (these are the most addicting forms of behavioral reinforcers, read up on your Behaviorism 101…).

THEN, 4) offer them little ways to essentially cheat in the games (making things go more smoothlyfor you), that 5) can be purchased for amounts that fall within the Impulse Purchase threshold, i.e. below the price level where your conscious mind kicks in fully and begins to wonder whether this is really a good idea, asf.

Read the following quote at least 3 times to yourself: “Zynga makes all its money selling virtual goods…Tiny amounts of money make the games progress faster.” (From Business Insider.) If you get it, you’ll know that tons of companies have been neglecting/violating the lessons therein to their considerable detriment.

I just argued yesterday that Sony is making a huge mistake by not going the $1/month route for complete/unlimited streaming music access with their new offering:

Another example that I saw just yesterday: Clever Twitter service “Buffer” ( @bufferapp ), which allows you to in essence do a bit.ly-like bookmarklet share to Twitter WITH automatic posting throttling/buffering built-in, so that your tweets are dripped out over time even though you can batch collect them all at once over, say, your morning blog reading hour:

All great, except that they are mispricing their premium levels very badly: 10 tweets in buffer, 3 tweets a day is Free. $5/month for 50 tweets in buffer, 10 tweets/day dripped, and $30/month (crazy…!?) for all unlimited is simply not going to work for them IMO. [See: http://www.bufferapp.com/pricing ]

$5/month is outside of impulse purchase range, while $1/month = Bingo! Sold! At $5, your mind is beginning to ask: Do I really need this? Is it worth it? Can I justify it directly via increased ROI? Where/how am I even going to measure this ROI?

All questions that you DON’T WANT your prospective customer asking at the entry point!! Which is exactly what Zynga has realized so brilliantly, and to such obvious success. The proof of the (psych) pudding is still in the eating… Zynga: “Would you like to improve your position in this game you are already playing for 10 cents?” – Unconscious Mind: “You bet I would.”

Which brings me to another of my pet points about successful online advertising/selling: Offer people only things which make sense in the context of what they were ALREADY doing. In this case, don’t try to offer them after shave, bracelets, or cars while they are playing Farmville, offer them something to do with Farmville!

Disclosure: I don’t play Farmville or CityVille, and have never tossed sheep or vampires at my Facebook friends. I do however study these phenomena very closely… :)

CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of The Music Industry

This stunning chart needs to be put in some context to understand the true nature of the upheaval facing what I like to call the “Dinomedia”:

1) Forget About Buying Music Online – People Don’t Even Want To STEAL Music!

2) FREE can actually work, with a little creativity: “How Girl Talk mashes up the Music Biz”.

3) Sony’s new “idea” to launch a me-too Music subscription service priced the way they are proposing is 1) Doomed, and 2) fails to take the reality of the above chart into account:

“Sony believes its huge userbase and retail presence can help its subscription music service succeed where countless similar services have failed.
…
The Basic tier of service — which will cost $3.99 per month in the U.S. — gives users a set of curated music channels with the ability to fast-forward and rate songs. That’s very similar to what users can get for free from Pandora and countless other Internet radio stations, as well as the free music channels on digital cable TV systems.

The Premium tier — $9.99 per month in the U.S. — is the same price as countless other subscription services (Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, Microsoft’s Zune Pass, and so on) but doesn’t have any mobile story [yet].”

Their retail presence?! Really? That is exactly the portion of the music business that is dying completely. I thought Denial was usually one of the earlier stages of the “5 Stages of Grief” model…

Why can’t they understand that they have next to NO PRICING POWER left? (Again: Many cannot be bothered to STEAL their product anymore…).

That they are much better off gaining whatever Attention Pie/eyeballs/earballs they can for their music ecosystem (and make further back-end sales there later on, similar to what ONE LONE, yet innovative DJ is able to do)?

For example, what if Sony were to do something bold, and price the “Premium” subscription at $1/month, no contract. That would put it in the complete impulse purchase, don’t-need-to-think, will-likely-never-cancel-for-any-reason category.

What if they could thereby garner 100 Million users, who would be spending about $1.2 Billion, in other words…about 20% of what still is left of the global music industry?!

At that price, could they get 200 Million users? One would hope so. Given that Apple is expecting to sell 40M+ iPad tablet computers costing $499 and up this year alone…

Wake up, #Dinomedia, before it is forever too late…

In the larger “tech wars” of Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Google, the tablet form factor has all of a sudden gone from a relative novelty (even though Microsoft had tried to establish stylus-based tablets for years) to one of the key battle fronts.

Why? Because the iPad, barely 6 months old, has already sold around 7-8 Million units, and is on track to break through 10M units for the year. That makes it the fastest electronic gadget sales ramp-up in history!

Still think that Apple’s deep Archetype Branding to create aspirational products is meaningless? Keep in mind that this record is being set as the wider economy is still largely suffering the after-effects of The Great Recession, and is at best in a tepid recovery.

And as Business Insider reports,

Apple is gearing up to sell 45 million (!) of them next year, says Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White who just chatted with supply-chain vendors in China and Taiwan (via Elizabeth Woyke at Forbes).

Sales are rising so quickly that according to BestBuy and other retail outlets, the iPad is beginning to truly “cannibalize” netbook and even laptop sales (by as much as 50%!). I had predicted the former in my Deeper iPad Intel post, but the sheer speed of the impact is surprising even to me.

How did this happen so quickly? First off, it turns out that the majority of people really didn’t need/want major creation powers with their computing devices, making the issue of “no physical keyboard”, etc. a moot point.

Sure, Bloggers and other writers are still going to need more powerful text input, image/video artists/designers/editors more finely grained image manipulation via a mouse, asf. But this “creative class” is only a fraction of everybody, and even they might enjoy some simple social media, video, reading, etc. consumption every so often.

And keep in mind that people are now able to edit photos/videos on their i- or Android Phones. Not super sophisticated, but I’ve seen some pretty impressive photo alteration results in recent months.

And people love the direct touch interaction, very long battery life (when compared to most laptops), and quiet/cool running with “rapid-ON” startup of the device.

Also as I predicted in that same post, Amazon appears to have successfully positioned the Kindle as the cheaper, and more task specific eReader. There even is a TV commercial out with a lady tanning/reading poolside, that makes fun of iPad’s outdoor glare problem. Smart positioning move by Bezos & Co.

And of course there are signs that the iPad will be sold at Amazon, Target & Walmart just in time for the Holiday shopping season. Somewhat related, Amazon is also coming out with its own App Store for Android smart phone apps. What it means is this: All mobile/tablets, all the time, everywhere…

Which brings me to another prediction of mine and a very important point about category leadership. As I said in the Deeper iPad Intel post, the longer that potential iPad competitors wait to get their products (hopefully actually competitive ones) out the door, the more Apple gains a head start that makes it the de facto owner of the entire category.

By default! Because the competition was asleep at the switch…as Nokia, RIM (Blackberry maker), et al. already were with the iPhone.

We are reaching an important threshold in the next few weeks. Whatever tablet competitors come out in time for the holidays (like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, which is launching at all four major wireless carriers according to their own launch schedules, but which may end up being priced too high, possibly $399 WITH contract), will have a chance at competing with iPad.

Especially on price, as is being proven by Kindle. But the window is clearly closing, so it must be disconcerting to Microsoft that there are still no particularly good/credible Windows 7 based tablets on the market. Part of the problem is that Windows 7 isn’t really optimized for touch-based computing, even though it sort of works right now.

But the much bigger issue will be the build quality and power/CPU needs of the devices that try to run with Windows 7. A current entrant into the field shows the main problem: The CPU needs a fan and creates heat/noise, same as in a laptop, while having less battery life for more weight.

So it may be well into 2011 until Microsoft is geared up to compete on par, by which time Apple could control HALF the tablet market for the long haul (as predicted by Category Leadership).

Writes PC Magazine(!) in “Windows Tablets Can’t Match the iPad’s Magic“:

“The iPad has No Competition…Sure the Samsung Galaxy Tab looks cool. Dell has Streak in the wings. God knows, at some point HP will release the Slate that it has been teasing for the last six months. And Microsoft will almost certainly…well, I am sure they will do something… Nonetheless, right now, there isn’t a single tablet that can go head-to-head with the iPad. The product has been on the market for six months and no rival… By the time The BlackBerry PlayBook comes out next year, Apple will be releasing the iPad 2.”

BTW, that 2nd generation of iPads could easily include the 7″ screen form factor I’ve been clamoring for.

Will Apple be running away with it? And if so, how much will it ultimately cannibalize Windows, and how fast? Certainly Wall Street has been in the mood to punish Microsoft’s stock of late.

Opines Goldman Sachs, heretofore forever bullish on the company who’s IPO it once underwrote:

…investor sentiment on Microsoft’s core Windows and Office franchises is unlikely to improve until the company gains a firmer foothold in the growing migration to mobile devices – both smartphones and tablets. We don’t see this happening this year as Apple’s iPad and iPhone plus Google’s Android operating system are well established; a Windows-based mobile device could certainly begin to garner momentum in 2011, but the stock remains in show-me mode until at least then…

The bet seems to be that iPad and possibly Android-based iPad clones will be “fine young cannibals”…