Jeff Jarvis wraps up a couple of weeks of bloggers’ angst about Facebook in a post titled “Confusing *a* public with *the* public.”

Some things.

1. I +love+ the Facebook like button. More on that in a minute.
2. So far only about 50 of my more than 1,300 friends have disappeared from my Facebook friend network. Hardly an indictment by the tech elite (and some of those probably haven’t deleted their accounts, but just removed me as a friend, something that’s pretty common and has been
3. There’s a competitive social network, Pip.io, which answers all of Jeff’s concerns (has much better thought out model of privacy and publics) but so far it hasn’t seen any major adoption.
4. Isn’t this the fifth time Facebook has pissed off pundits? What happened the previous four times it pissed off people? Oh, yeah, it saw huge growth.
5. When I was in Tel Aviv Facebook’s like buttons were so popular people were wearing them as fashion statements and at the biggest tech conference there, Marker.Comvention, they were handing out Facebook like buttons as stickers.

But over the past few weeks I’ve talked with lots of people about Facebook and my attitude toward privacy. It’s clear that Facebook has messed with something and that some of us are having a tough time with that. I think Jeff nailed what it was.

Instead of calling it “publics” I say we wanted to be in control of our story. I said that Facebook had brought us an inch closer to the end of privacy.

The thing is, my wife says she doesn’t care. My wife is closer to a normal user than I ever will be. I haven’t cared about privacy for years. If I don’t want you to read something I don’t put it on a computer. Period.

Remember, I worked at Microsoft. What happened in 2000? The DOJ took all of Microsoft employees’ supposedly private emails and put them into public. So I knew back then that anything I put on a computer could end up on the front page of the New York Times.

This is why I took a very transparent attitude for the past decade toward my life. I have always set my Facebook to the most public setting possible.

Whoa?!? Here’s the deal: I wish Facebook had NO PRIVACY AT ALL!

That’s called the open web. I wish Google could index every word I write on Facebook. Hint, it can’t.

The thing I hate about Facebook is that people who want to see my profile can’t. Even now only 5,000 of you can look at my Facebook profile. That’s lame.

I want to live my life in public. Why? Because that way none of you can exploit me more than any other.

Right now 1,300 people have access to my Facebook profile. That sucks.

I wish you all had access to my profile.

Yes, I know some of you have delusions of creating the equivalent of an exclusive dinner party, or, even, something bigger like a TED conference in your Facebook page.

I’m just so bored with all that talk. Just what are you doing that needs to be so damned private? Are you having sex inside Facebook? Doing illegal drugs? Cheating on your wife? Damn, your Facebook life must be SO interesting!

Me, count me out of this whole privacy thing. I want everything I do to be public and then I don’t have to spill thousands of words crying when Mark Zuckerberg takes my stuff and exposes it in a search engine.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about why I love Facebook’s new features so much.

1. I’m finding new restaurants, thanks to Yelp’s use of Facebook’s likes.
2. I’m finding new hockey players to follow thanks to NHL’s use of Facebook’s likes.
3. I’m finding new questions and answers thanks to Answer.com’s use of Facebook’s likes. (That’s the #18th biggest site on the web, and they just turned on likes).
4. I’m finding new music over on Pandora thanks to its sharing of my Facebook’s friend’s music listening behaviors.

So, cry me a river. Your “publics” have been destroyed. Your privacy is gone.

Come join us in the open web Facebook! Get rid of all the walls, including the stupid limits of 5,000 friends and the stupid kicking people off of the service (which continues to this day).

I applaud that Zuckerberg is trying to be less like AOL and more like the open web.

Now excuse me, I’m off to click “like” on some more things and, even, have added a new bar from Wibiya where you can see other people who have clicked like on my blog. Oh, yet another cool feature thanks to Zuckerberg’s throwing our publics under the bus.

Thank you Mark!Jeff Jarvis wraps up a couple of weeks of bloggers’ angst about Facebook in a post titled “Confusing *a* public with *the* public.”

Some things.

1. I +love+ the Facebook like button. More on that in a minute.
2. So far only about 50 of my more than 1,300 friends have disappeared from my Facebook friend network. Hardly an indictment by the tech elite (and some of those probably haven’t deleted their accounts, but just removed me as a friend, something that’s pretty common and has been
3. There’s a competitive social network, Pip.io, which answers all of Jeff’s concerns (has much better thought out model of privacy and publics) but so far it hasn’t seen any major adoption.
4. Isn’t this the fifth time Facebook has pissed off pundits? What happened the previous four times it pissed off people? Oh, yeah, it saw huge growth.
5. When I was in Tel Aviv Facebook’s like buttons were so popular people were wearing them as fashion statements and at the biggest tech conference there, Marker.Comvention, they were handing out Facebook like buttons as stickers.

But over the past few weeks I’ve talked with lots of people about Facebook and my attitude toward privacy. It’s clear that Facebook has messed with something and that some of us are having a tough time with that. I think Jeff nailed what it was.

Instead of calling it “publics” I say we wanted to be in control of our story. I said that Facebook had brought us an inch closer to the end of privacy.

The thing is, my wife says she doesn’t care. My wife is closer to a normal user than I ever will be. I haven’t cared about privacy for years. If I don’t want you to read something I don’t put it on a computer. Period.

Remember, I worked at Microsoft. What happened in 2000? The DOJ took all of Microsoft employees’ supposedly private emails and put them into public. So I knew back then that anything I put on a computer could end up on the front page of the New York Times.

This is why I took a very transparent attitude for the past decade toward my life. I have always set my Facebook to the most public setting possible.

Whoa?!? Here’s the deal: I wish Facebook had NO PRIVACY AT ALL!

That’s called the open web. I wish Google could index every word I write on Facebook. Hint, it can’t.

The thing I hate about Facebook is that people who want to see my profile can’t. Even now only 5,000 of you can look at my Facebook profile. That’s lame.

I want to live my life in public. Why? Because that way none of you can exploit me more than any other.

Right now 1,300 people have access to my Facebook profile. That sucks.

I wish you all had access to my profile.

Yes, I know some of you have delusions of creating the equivalent of an exclusive dinner party, or, even, something bigger like a TED conference in your Facebook page.

I’m just so bored with all that talk. Just what are you doing that needs to be so damned private? Are you having sex inside Facebook? Doing illegal drugs? Cheating on your wife? Damn, your Facebook life must be SO interesting!

Me, count me out of this whole privacy thing. I want everything I do to be public and then I don’t have to spill thousands of words crying when Mark Zuckerberg takes my stuff and exposes it in a search engine.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about why I love Facebook’s new features so much.

1. I’m finding new restaurants, thanks to Yelp’s use of Facebook’s likes.
2. I’m finding new hockey players to follow thanks to NHL’s use of Facebook’s likes.
3. I’m finding new questions and answers thanks to Answer.com’s use of Facebook’s likes. (That’s the #18th biggest site on the web, and they just turned on likes).
4. I’m finding new music over on Pandora thanks to its sharing of my Facebook’s friend’s music listening behaviors.

So, cry me a river. Your “publics” have been destroyed. Your privacy is gone.

Come join us in the open web Facebook! Get rid of all the walls, including the stupid limits of 5,000 friends and the stupid kicking people off of the service (which continues to this day).

I applaud that Zuckerberg is trying to be less like AOL and more like the open web.

Now excuse me, I’m off to click “like” on some more things and, even, have added a new bar from Wibiya

Original Link: http://scobleizer.com/2010/05/08/much-ado-about-privacy-on-facebook-are-we-protesting-too-much/

The newspaper’s publisher departed last week, while a former editor is reported to be a possible bidder for the paper.

Original Link: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=399e044382861065553f0c03c5005e9f

Josh McHugh Wrote:
Mahir was one of the funnier interviews I did while at Forbes. I kiss him.

---

Spotted Mahir, the hero of one of the earliest internet memes that circled the globe in 1999, giving media interviews at ROFLcon today. Stay tuned for more geeky celebrity sightings.Spotted Mahir, the hero of one of the earliest internet memes that circled the globe in 1999, giving media interviews at ROFLcon today

Original Link: http://api.postrank.com/log?url=http%3A%2F%2Fadverlab.blogspot.com%2F2010%2F04%2Fmahir-i-kiss-you-cagr-ten-years-later.html

Physically setting up a blog is not that difficult. A little while back, I wrote a post for small business owners on why start a blog and 25 tips to make it work.

It was so popular -- got more than 350 bookmarks on Delicious at the time -- that I also packaged it as a free eBook for portability.

What's often difficult is integrating the blog in your existing content and marketing strategy. Where do you start?

There are so many things already going on. If you're a marketing or communications professional you probably have a few ideas. 

When you're the blogger

Starting is easy. As a marketing and communications professional you're used to writing content for the organization. You may need to get some practice on conversational style and voice and negotiate what is acceptable to post with regulatory and legal, for example.

How do you stay the course over time when you have competing campaigns and priorities? It's not enough to be a great project manager, although that helps. Developing content is a creative activity and you'll need to dedicate chunks of time to it. Which you may not have.

Plus one more thing, is having marketing and communications people or, even better, buying posts from writers, going to attract the kind of organic relationships you want to have with prospective customers? What about participating in the community? Is very organization's blog an island? Should it be? 
When you're not the blogger

Some organizations are better off involving technical or scientific subject matter experts. Imagine you're a company that caters to other businesses and your literature touts your expertise in a specialized field, why would you not have the experts in that field active in social media?

In the same way professionals speak at conferences and events -- live and virtual -- talk to the media and analysts, they should also be the ones building a platform and a following on behalf of the organization. And today, they have a chance to get their name out there tenfold without having to wait for anyone to publish them.

We reviewed a few months ago why developing a B2B content strategy starts with who. In this case, you'll be the coach. You can do background research, share competitive analysis, provide training on using search terms in posts. Make introductions to others in the same field. Get things started.
Integration points

Since you're going to be a publisher, you'll want to have an editorial calendar. You'll also need to establish a cadence -- how many times a week you post and when. This will help you make the commitment. You can always write when you can and schedule the posts for those days.

The cadence will help you build a readership by setting expectations.

The integration happens at strategy level. Your social media strategy builds on your communications strategy, which is designed to support the business. In an ideal world.

Here's how you think about it:

* what's my objective? How can a blog help you achieve that on top of or to extend other marketing activities?

For example, have you ever heard from a customer: "I didn't know you did that, too"? If "that" is a profitable line of business where you may not have as much marketing awareness activities going, then your objective may well be to get the word out on that.

Or imagine you have a region that is underserved by your search marketing strategy -- maybe the keywords are too expensive or competitive and you don't have a strong enough case for too specific Web site pages.

They're both cases where integration would work well. You can then use other marketing activities like trade shows, Webinars, and opt-in newsletters to get he word out about your blog -- cross post the invites, repackage the content, etc.

* how do I set goals for the blog?

Look at your objective and think how you can make it specific for social media. Say that by the end of Q2, I want to become the "go to" company for "that" item for small businesses that do xyz or buy abc, how do you think about the editorial calendar?

This means your content -- and your social media activity -- will need to map to certain topics and events that attract and speak to specific buyers and their needs.

* when you think strategy, you figure that in this case you'll use social media to identify and connect with your buyers by being helpful, personable, and getting to know them better

You do want to bring the getting to know them better part back in house to give you content and potentially service ideas.

* what do you measure?

Start with a baseline, then look at performance indicators, for example, do you have more subscribers, comments, are people contacting you? Are they signing up for your newsletter, which you cross promote on the blog?

One thing that many company blogs are still catching up with is the integration with industry conversations and market ecosystem. In other words, many are just blog versions of marketing material, or press releases, or technical bulletins in intent.

Why not become the platform for a certain subject matter in the industry and examine the offerings of many companies, or discuss industry trends in a geographic area?

Who does this well? Usually independent consultants. It takes an enterprising person who plays well with everyone to get the market ecosystem integration done well.

***

These are just some ideas I've been thinking about. Integration takes discipline and hard work and it pays off in reinforcing and supporting your existing strategies. What do you find challenging with integration? Who does it well in your industry?

_______

Other resources for blogging:

How do you Develop a Blog Content Strategy?

Blogging at work if you Don't have a Blog

Write a Corporate Blog that Matters
Corporate Blogs

© 2010 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.Physically setting up a blog is not that difficult. A little while back, I wrote a post for small business owners on why start a blog and 25 tips to make it work.

It was so popular -- got more than 350 bookmarks on Delicious at the time -- that I also packaged it as a free eBook for portability.

What's often difficult is integrating the blog in your existing content and marketing strategy. Where do you start?

There are so many things already going on. If you're a marketing or communications professional you probably have a few ideas. 

When you're the blogger

Starting is easy. As a marketing and communications professional you're used to writing content for the organization. You may need to get some practice on conversational style and voice and negotiate what is acceptable to post with regulatory and legal, for example.

How do you stay the course over time when you have competing campaigns and priorities? It's not enough to be a great project manager, although that helps. Developing content is a creative activity and you'll need to dedicate chunks of time to it. Which you may not have.

Plus one more thing, is having marketing and communications people or, even better, buying posts from writers, going to attract the kind of organic relationships you want to have with prospective customers? What about participating in the community? Is very organization's blog an island? Should it be? 
When you're not the blogger

Some organizations are better off involving technical or scientific subject matter experts. Imagine you're a company that caters to other businesses and your literature touts your expertise in a specialized field, why would you not have the experts in that field active in social media?

In the same way professionals speak at conferences and events -- live and virtual -- talk to the media and analysts, they should also be the ones building a platform and a following on behalf of the organization. And today, they have a chance to get their name out there tenfold without having to wait for anyone to publish them.

We reviewed a few months ago why developing a B2B content strategy starts with who. In this case, you'll be the coach. You can do background research, share competitive analysis, provide training on using search terms in posts. Make introductions to others in the same field. Get things started.
Integration points

Since you're going to be a publisher, you'll want to have an editorial calendar. You'll also need to establish a cadence -- how many times a week you post and when. This will help you make the commitment. You can always write when you can and schedule the posts for those days.

The cadence will help you build a readership by setting expectations.

The integration happens at strategy level. Your social media strategy builds on your communications strategy, which is designed to support the business. In an ideal world.

Here's how you think about it:

* what's my objective? How can a blog help you achieve that on top of or to extend other marketing activities?

For example, have you ever heard from a customer: "I didn't know you did that, too"? If "that" is a profitable line of business where you may not have as much marketing awareness activities going, then your objective may well be to get the word out on that.

Or imagine you have a region that is underserved by your search marketing strategy -- maybe the keywords are too expensive or competitive and you don't have a strong enough case for too specific Web site pages.

They're both cases where integration would work well. You can then use other marketing activities like trade shows, Webinars, and opt-in newsletters to get he word out about your blog -- cross post the invites, repackage the content, etc.

* how do I set goals for the blog?

Look at your objective and think how you can make it specific for social media. Say that by the end of Q2, I want to become the "go to" company for "that" item for small businesses that do xyz or buy abc, how do you think about the editorial calendar?

This means your content -- and your social media activity -- will need to map to certain topics and events that attract and speak to specific buyers and their needs.

* when you think strategy, you figure that in this case you'll use social media to identify and connect with your buyers by being helpful, personable, and getting to know them better

You do want to bring the getting to know them better part back in house to give you content and potentially service ideas.

* what do you measure?

Start with a baseline, then look at performance indicators, for example, do you have more subscribers, comments, are people contacting you? Are they signing up for your newsletter, which you cross promote on the blog?

One thing that many company blogs are still catching up with is the integration with industry conversations and market ecosystem. In other words, many are just blog versions of marketing material, or press releases, or technical bulletins in intent.

Why not become the platform for a certain subject matter in the industry and examine the offerings of many companies, or discuss industry trends in a geographic area?

Who does this well? Usually independent consultants. It takes an enterprising person who plays well with everyone to get the market ecosystem integration done well.

***

These are just some ideas I've been thinking about. Integration takes discipline and hard work and it pays off in reinforcing and supporting your existing strategies. What do you find challenging with integration? Who does it well in your industry?

_______

Other resources for blogging:

How do you Develop a Blog Content Strategy?

Blogging at work if you Don't have a Blog

Write a Corporate Blog that Matters
Corporate Blogs

© 2010 Valeria Maltoni

Original Link: http://api.postrank.com/log?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.conversationagent.com%2F2010%2F04%2Fintegrating-a-blog-in-your-content-strategy.html

Love this quote from the new CMO at Dell from her interview in Adweek Can social media scale and be measurable? I think it can and has to. We have 2 billion conversations online a year. If I can't scale...

Original Link: http://api.postrank.com/log?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkdpaine.blogs.com%2Fkdpaines_pr_m%2F2010%2F04%2Fthere-are-more-important-metrics-than-roi.html

Some more deal activity in the media monitoring space: Traditional and social media monitoring firm Biz360 has been sold to Attensity, which sells a suite of software applications for businesses looking to analyze “unstructured data,” such as customer surveys and e-mails. Biz360—which counts companies including Dell, HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Allstate Insurance among its clients—says its platform stands out from competitors in part because of the diversity of the sources it culls, which include more than 50,000 news sources, 10,000 product review sites, and more than 50 million blogs and forums. Attensity says it will expand Biz360’s products beyond North America. Financial terms of the deal were not announced. Biz360 had raised at least $10 million in funding. More in the release.

Related

* Media Intelligence Firm Biz360 Raises $10 Million
* Meltwater Buys Social Media Monitor BuzzGain For $4 MillionSome more deal activity in the media monitoring space: Traditional and social media monitoring firm Biz360 has been sold to Attensity, which sells a suite of software applications for businesses looking to analyze “unstructured data,” such as customer surveys and e-mails. Biz360—which counts companies including Dell, HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Allstate Insurance among its clients—says its platform stands out from competitors in part because of the diversity of the sources it culls, which include more than 50,000 news sources, 10,000 product review sites, and more than 50 million blogs and forums. Attensity says it will expand Biz360’s products beyond North America. Financial terms of the deal were not announced. Biz360 had raised at least $10 million in funding. More in the release.

Related

* Media Intelligence Firm Biz360 Raises $10 Million
* Meltwater Buys Social Media Monitor BuzzGain For $4 Million

Original Link: http://feeds.paidcontent.org/~r/pcorg/~3/2p95mnD-XqY/

Original Link: http://consumerist.com/2010/04/steve-jobs-e-mail-generator-lets-you-create-your-own-zen-platitudes.html

Despite surveying Facebook users about Social City and trademarking hotel game names, it would seem that Zynga has a few surprises up its sleeves. After the release of the simplifed card game Poker Blitz, we suspected something bigger was also in the works — that was its first new launch since December.

But what we got was not a city builder or hotel management title. No, Zynga went with a very different concept as it released its newest Facebook game, Treasure Isle, last night.

In a nutshell, Treasure Isle is almost a quasi-farming title. Taking a page out of the growing number of tropical farming titles, this app has combined some of the popular elements of FarmVille with an old, almost point-and-click adventure. To that end however, the core objective is not to grow a bustling island farm, but to seek out and find buried treasure across the island chains of this Caribbean-like sea, then build a tropical inhabitance.

Essentially, each island is broken up into an invisible grid space, and players expend energy to search each grid one at a time. Doing so will have one of a handful of results. Sometimes the player will find treasure, sometimes gold, sometimes nothing, sometimes fruit, and sometimes items to share with friends.

Regardless, of what is discovered, each dig earns a small amount of experience, which obviously levels your character, which, in turn, allows users to visit larger islands and unlock more decorations for your personal one.

This is where the farming and virtual space elements come into play. In Treasure Isle, users do not grow crops or trees to make money; they do so to hunt longer. Players can actually grow a crops to place in their backpack to eat while they’re out adventuring, thus restoring lost energy. Additionally, they can grow various “gem” trees that can be harvested and used as keys to unlock parts of the game’s 15 islands. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can manually plant more that two plots of crops, but perhaps this will change as users level up and expand their island.

The fastest way to earn gold is to complete treasure sets. On each island you visit, there are one or more sets of treasure that consist of five pieces. Once completed, they are logged (as a sort of achievement) and can be sold for hundreds to thousands of gold.

Curiously, however, it does not seem like you can revisit a completed island – one in which you have dug up every grid space.

This gets tricky. It is quite possible, that the player will not find every piece of treasure needed to complete a set within that island, even if they dig up every grid space. However, it seems that only that island will give that particular treasure (i.e. the second island, Sunny Shores, gives Tiki Idols). Now, socially, players can send each other treasure they find, which is a great thing, but currently, if you do not find all of the treasure pieces, then that appears to be the only option to complete a set.

Perhaps that’s sort of the point? The company has been planning to add more truly social features to games, chief executive Mark Pincus highlighted in an interview with us at the end of 2010. It has honed group-driven quests in role-playing games like Mafia Wars so in some sense Treasure Isle combines that with the farming mechanic that has done so well in FarmVille and other games.

Anway, the game still offers plenty for the player to do on their own. As new islands unlock, greater amounts of treasure can be found and larger numbers of tools are needed to discover them all. From shovels to dynamite, players must purchase and use these to explore every inch of an isle. As a simple example, you cannot search through trees and plants until you buy a machete. This requirement actually adds a small amount of length to Treasure Isle. Though they are not terrible expensive, one often finds that most of their money has already been spent on leisure island decorations, and has to wait until the energy slowly recharges to go out and earn more. No, no, we didn’t do this… it was our, umm… friend… yeah…. Oh well, you spend money faster than you earn it sometimes.

While buying and earning tools does add a little to the game, the biggest boost to longevity comes from the islands themselves. They get very big, very quickly as you progress through the adventure. That said, it can take a few days to dig up an entire island in the upper levels. Combine that with the gates that require gems to unlock, and you have yourself a pretty long game. However, since islands don’t seem to be visitable once finished, the game play seems currently finite. A curious choice for a social game, and it will be interesting to see how Zynga improves the longevity (not that it isn’t long already). We can imagine all sorts of expansions taking users to, say, New York City’s Little Italy, Cuba, Moscow, Bangkok and Las Vegas — or given the all-ages them, maybe more purely G-rated locations like midwestern farms, Antarctica, space, etc.

On a final note, it is worth mentioning that Zynga’s attempt to allow emailing to users was much more creative this time around. As opposed to forcing players to allow it (otherwise they couldn’t play), like in Poker Blitz, players can dig up a “locked chest” which you must email to a “locksmith” to have opened. Doing so will sign the player up for email updates, and they’ll get whatever is inside as a reward.

Overall, Treasure Isle is a very fun game. It is a bit odd that Zynga would make a game that seems finite, but by the time anyone completes all the islands, that issue will likely have been resolved. Moreover, the tropical change is a welcome change of pace, and the limiting of crops on an island really focuses more on the creative, decorative element of the game, rather than seeing hideous virtual mega-farms that have about 10,000 crops, with all the buildings and animals crammed in one corner. Once Zynga’s cross-promotion kicks in, you can expect this game to grow pretty well, pretty quickly.Despite surveying Facebook users about Social City and trademarking hotel game names, it would seem that Zynga has a few surprises up its sleeves. After the release of the simplifed card game Poker Blitz, we suspected something bigger was also in the works — that was its first new launch since December.

But what we got was not a city builder or hotel management title. No, Zynga went with a very different concept as it released its newest Facebook game, Treasure Isle, last night.

In a nutshell, Treasure Isle is almost a quasi-farming title. Taking a page out of the growing number of tropical farming titles, this app has combined some of the popular elements of FarmVille with an old, almost point-and-click adventure. To that end however, the core objective is not to grow a bustling island farm, but to seek out and find buried treasure across the island chains of this Caribbean-like sea, then build a tropical inhabitance.

Essentially, each island is broken up into an invisible grid space, and players expend energy to search each grid one at a time. Doing so will have one of a handful of results. Sometimes the player will find treasure, sometimes gold, sometimes nothing, sometimes fruit, and sometimes items to share with friends.

Regardless, of what is discovered, each dig earns a small amount of experience, which obviously levels your character, which, in turn, allows users to visit larger islands and unlock more decorations for your personal one.

This is where the farming and virtual space elements come into play. In Treasure Isle, users do not grow crops or trees to make money; they do so to hunt longer. Players can actually grow a crops to place in their backpack to eat while they’re out adventuring, thus restoring lost energy. Additionally, they can grow various “gem” trees that can be harvested and used as keys to unlock parts of the game’s 15 islands. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can manually plant more that two plots of crops, but perhaps this will change as users level up and expand their island.

The fastest way to earn gold is to complete treasure sets. On each island you visit, there are one or more sets of treasure that consist of five pieces. Once completed, they are logged (as a sort of achievement) and can be sold for hundreds to thousands of gold.

Curiously, however, it does not seem like you can revisit a completed island – one in which you have dug up every grid space.

This gets tricky. It is quite possible, that the player will not find every piece of treasure needed to complete a set within that island, even if they dig up every grid space. However, it seems that only that island will give that particular treasure (i.e. the second island, Sunny Shores, gives Tiki Idols). Now, socially, players can send each other treasure they find, which is a great thing, but currently, if you do not find all of the treasure pieces, then that appears to be the only option to complete a set.

Perhaps that’s sort of the point? The company has been planning to add more truly social features to games, chief executive Mark Pincus highlighted in an interview with us at the end of 2010. It has honed group-driven quests in role-playing games like Mafia Wars so in some sense Treasure Isle combines that with the farming mechanic that has done so well in FarmVille and other games.

Anway, the game still offers plenty for the player to do on their own. As new islands unlock, greater amounts of treasure can be found and larger numbers of tools are needed to discover them all. From shovels to dynamite, players must purchase and use these to explore every inch of an isle. As a simple example, you cannot search through trees and plants until you buy a machete. This requirement actually adds a small amount of length to Treasure Isle. Though they are not terrible expensive, one often finds that most of their money has already been spent on leisure island decorations, and has to wait until the energy slowly recharges to go out and earn more. No, no, we didn’t do this… it was our, umm… friend… yeah…. Oh well, you spend money faster than you earn it sometimes.

While buying and earning tools does add a little to the game, the biggest boost to longevity comes from the islands themselves. They get very big, very quickly as you progress through the adventure. That said, it can take a few days to dig up an entire island in the upper levels. Combine that with the gates that require gems to unlock, and you have yourself a pretty long game. However, since islands don’t seem to be visitable once finished, the game play seems currently finite. A curious choice for a social game, and it will be interesting to see how Zynga improves the longevity (not that it isn’t long already). We can imagine all sorts of expansions taking users to, say

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InsideSocialGames/~3/yFbPci6ZYKM/

I have arrived!