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Google Quietly Invests Over $100 Million in Zynga, Readying Google Games
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5584118/google-quietly-invests-over-100-million-in-zynga-readying-google-games
Whoa. TechCrunch reports that Google has invested between $100 and $200 million in Zynga, the social gaming behemoth behind Farmville, Mafia Wars, and others, in preparation for the launch of Google Games later this year.
TechCrunch’s “multiple sources” say that Google itself, not its venture capital division Google Ventures, has invested between $100 and $200 million in Zynga, a huge power play presumably with the aim of eroding Facebook’s social media dominance.
It seems that Google sees Zynga as the best way to hit the ground running with Google Games, a social gaming service from the search company that’s set to launch later this year. TechCrunch points to this job opening for “Product Management Leader, Games” at their Mountain View campus as proof that we’ll be seeing a lot more about Google’s move into gaming in the near future.
With Google Me, the company’s purported Facebook killer, continuing to take shape, this major investment in Zynga is just further proof that Google is making a very serious effort to hit Facebook where it hurt, namely, the farms. [TechCrunch]
More and more tools to block ads and other “distractions”
As more and more users adopt tools to de-clutter web pages and remove all distractions (such as ads) the effectiveness of display ads will continue to decline, despite innovations and advancements in targeting technologies.
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5568752/add-safari-reader+like-powers-to-firefox-and-chrome
The Safari 5 feature that’s caught the web’s attention is the Reader button, which strips down articles and blog posts into an ad-free, highly readable format. Two add-ons for Firefox and Chrome do a good job of recreating that convenience.
If you missed our round-up of what’s new in Safari 5, the short explanation of Reader is that, while many bookmarklets have come along to offer a simplified, less-cluttered reading experience, Safari is the first major browser to go ahead and offer that kind of feature by default, as an address bar button. If you’re a fan of bookmarklets, and your bookmarks aren’t too cluttered to lose them in, we recommend the tools from arc90′s Readability, the Instapaper Text bookmarklet, and the Readable app for highly customized formatting.
But maybe you want your Firefox or Chrome rig to offer that kind of button-click functionality. You’re in luck. First off, here’s the Top 10 feature we’ll try our reading tools out on—click the image for a larger view:
Now here are two add-ons for Firefox and Chrome, and a look at how they do at getting all minimalist with the text and pics. Click any of the images below, too, for a larger view
Readability (Firefox)
Baris Derin rolled the Readability bookmarklet into a full-fledged add-on for Firefox, but also added in a pretty neat auto-scrolling feature for the true lean-back-and-read experience. Readability tends to keep more of the text and formatting in and around the page, but strips out all the marketing and navigation material. It places an “R” button in the lower-right status area of Firefox, which isn’t the most convenient spot for our use, but some may prefer having it hidden away until needed. Notice the transparent icons, too, that provide printing, email, and refresh functions for live-updating posts.
iReader (Chrome)
Mhd Hejazi’s iReader is directly inspired by Safari’s Reader function, offering the same kind of pop-out white box that darkens the rest of the page, a button right in the address bar, and very, very minimal decoration—as you can see, it pared down our Top 10 feature quite a bit. There are also keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac to activate iReader, and options to change the background opacity, font and formatting, and add a “Send with Gmail” link to your articles. Neat stuff.
Both add-ons are free downloads. Know of another reading/simplifying extension that gets the job done? Tell us about it in the comments. Thanks to emmikkelsen for the inspiration!
Popular Posts – Week of June 7, 2010.
This Is Why that Amazing NASA Earth Image Looked So Familiar
After publishing the The Most Accurate, Highest Resolution Earth View to Date, it got extremely popular: The day after, countless newspapers and blogs worldwide reposted the story. NASA wrote to us, surprised. Why? Because everyone already knew about it:
Yes, the Blue Marble is the iPhone’s default screen, which have been seen by millions of iPhone owners and by everyone who has read about the iPhone since 2007. In fact, the image has been public since 2002:
From: *************** <***********@nasa.gov>
Mr. Diaz
Hello. I am the photo editor for the Public Affairs Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
We were happy to see you featured our Blue Marble image on your website last week.
http://gizmodo.com/5478787/the-most-accurate-highest-resolution-earth-view-to-date#comments
We also featured it on our Flickr page but it has really taken off on the web. We had over 500,000 hits in the last two days alone.
Given that this is an image from 2002 I’m just curious what prompted you to post it on your site? Or did you pick it up from someplace other than our site? I see at the bottom it says “NASA via Twitter”
Really, I’m just curious because it’s gotten so much play over that few days.
Thank you for your interest in our work.
Take care,
Rebecca
The reason? Because it’s a beautiful image, that’s all. One that makes you marvel at the beauty of our planet, and how tiny and insignificant we are, but also how unique and rare. [Gizmodo—Thanks to John Hermann for telling me about the obvious]
Don’t forget to check NASA Goddard’s Flickr page. They keep posting really cool stuff.
How to make a viral video – a 5-step guide
1. select a product that is a low consideration product (e.g. a song) whose primary missing link is awareness
2. create a funny and entertaining video that features that product or a key attribute of the product
3. [ contact us for the "secret sauce" of step 3 ]
4. continue to build the momentum and build further social amplification by real people (won’t happen if the content is not funny, entertaining, useful, or unexpected)
5. use analytics to determine how to further optimize the content itself to match what characteristics actually went viral (based on how people talked about it when they passed it along)
Examples of videos whose viral effects were successfully manufactured over time. Obama Girl; Lonelygirl15 Brea Olson; Notice the shape of the stats curve of the more recent lonelygirl15 video from 2008. It is much flatter, which is a characteristic of non-viral videos. This is after they revealed that the original lonelygirl15 was a fake; now they have to support the view count through traditional paid media and continuous PR to accumulate the views.
Non-viral videos of funny wedding dances.
Notice the shape of the youtube stats curve – each of these has 8+ million views, but notice the straight line of views that were accumulated over almost a 2 year period. Notice they each also got a bump in view count recently due to being listed as related videos on the #JKWeddingDance video.
The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED – Post 1 of 2
originally investigated and reported on Friday July 31, 2009 by Augustine Fou, with Tugce Esener @tesener
Several friends and colleagues had the same reaction when they found out about this video — that it was at such a high view count already and we were late to the party of finding out. Then we did some more digging — digital forensics :-) And this is a case where a viral hit was indeed successfully manufactured. There’s something to be learned from all this – how to successfully manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits.
Related: How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits – Post 2 of 2
Chris Brown is successfully tapping into the viral halo of a funny video that coincidentally used his song.
ReadWriteWeb article on how rights owners (Sony, Chris Brown) can make viral profits on other people using their work instead of suing them - http://bit.ly/KA3HI
The video was real. But promotional activities (possibly/likely paid) created the initial viral effect (led to the tipping point of the viral effect) which then got carried a further by people thinking they were simply late to the party, including myself (e.g. 440k bit.ly clicks and 3k detectable retweets out of the 13M views). The numbers don’t jive.
The viral halo has added 1 million more views to the video from August 1 – August 2. (13.1 M to 14.5 M)
Ten ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN proof points to follow, each with screen shot to illustrate.
1a. anyone notice that the “Forever” soundtrack is remarkably consistent throughout the video as if it were dubbed or added in after the original footage was shot. The sound is too consistent in volume and loudness to have come from a built-in, on-camera microphone. At the very end of the video, once it cuts back to the couple at the altar the sound quality goes back to the echo-y, tinny sound of an on-camera mic.
1b. The “TheKHeinz” user on YouTube was registered on July 19, 2009, the day the video was posted. We usually look for clues like this to detect “plants” by PR agencies. This is an issue of trust — a user “CmdrTaco” on Slashdot has been around the forums for years, made hundreds of posts, and was rated by the community very highly. PR agencies trying to seed stories have to create new user accounts during the PR campaign (recent registration date) and have made no other posts or uploads before (no history).
2. The social intensity detected in all of the top social venues like Technorai, Delicious, Reddit, Digg, etc. indicate there was not enough organic sharing to support a view count of 13 million views in 11 days (updated: 14.6 million today August 2, 2009).
a) Bit.ly shows only 447k clicks on the shortened URL
“At Fortune’s Brainstorm:Tech conference Ashton Kutcher effectively took credit for boosting the views from – in his words – 12,500 views before he tweeted the link – to some 1.2 million views 12 hours later…”
Well, unfortunately he used a bit.ly link which provides public analytics on how many people clicked. Most tweets result in immediate traffic, which then tails off immediately after the tweet falls off the first page. In his case, look at the following bit.ly stats URL and click “past month” to see the peak clicks on July 23. All he can actually claim is that his tweet drove a peak of about 100,000 clicks on that day not 1.2 million 
http://bit.ly/info/Z7vMw
too bad Ashton. next time you make a BMOC claim, be sure to use a non trackable method, so analytics won’t “out” you so easily.
after only 3.5 days of retweets the twitter intensity died off to next-to-nothing; if this were a truly viral video, carried forth by real people (and not by paid PR support and paid media) the retweet intensity would remain high. As of August 21, there are over 21M views on the video and the 505k retweets does not show actual organic support for that number.
b) Twitturly shows only 3 thousand retweets on the YouTube URL itself
c) Delicious shows only 447 bookmarks of the video itself
d) Reddit only shows 673 thumbs up for the video itself
e) Technorati shows only 277 blog mentions of the video itself — this could be undercounting if blogs used URL shorteners. But if you look at the blog intensity results (below) sorted by blogs with most authority the blogs have very little authority (i.e. influence or size of audience).
– these are real indications of interest by real people. The social intensity of the passalong for this video does not substantiate the huge number of views in 11 days.
What we are seeing now is the additional viral halo, as the momentum is sustained by large media outlets reporting on the story — even Google Blog blogged about it (boasting about the success of YouTube advertising in driving revenues). Of course TechCrunch is right that viral videos can be monetized: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/30/youtube-viral-wedding-videos-are-great-for-advertising/ )
3. Twitter shows nothing in the top “trending topics” related to this video – indicating few people are actually tweeting about it — if this video is SO viral (13M views in 11 days) then it has GOT to show up on a scan of social intensity. (see screen capture below)
July 31 (Friday) August 2 (Sunday)
4. The original video was posted July 19, 2009. The people from the video appeared on NBC’s Today Show and danced around Rockerfeller Center on July 25th (6 calendar days after posting). Today Show staff may be great at spotting news, but to get all the wedding party from the wedding to re-enact the dance on the Today Show in 6 calendar days — too good to be true? Hmm…
5. Out of all the wedding videos on YouTube, how did Chris Brown detect this particular one that used his song. @glenngabe noted that there are song detection mechanisms - ContentID - which detect the pattern of the copyrighted song and report that to the rights owners. We know there are hundreds, if not thousaands, or really funny wedding home videos — America’s Funniest Videos has been running for years and years on TV showing funny wedding blooper videos that people submitted to them.
6. ALL TEN of the top viral videos on AdAge’s Viral Video Chart took around 3 – 6 months to achieve full viral effect — not 6 days. See all 10 videos’ stats, as reported by YouTube at the following link. This video has not shown up at all on the list of Adage viral videos.
AdAge Top Viral Videos all take 3 – 6 months to reach full viral effect
7. From @RedW0rm – YouTube Declares Wedding Video a Financial Success – http://bit.ly/9ZUtu
8. also check the velocity of this http://twitter.com/#search?q=jkwedding or this http://twitter.com/#search?q=jkweddingdance notice the tweets are not seconds apart but hours apart. Something that achieved 13M views in the 11 days since posting would show far higher velocity or twitter intensity.
9. For a top-trending topic on twitter, there is usually correspondingly high search volume that is detectable. At first glance, terms related to this viral video like “jkwedding” or “jk wedding dance” all seem to spike. But if you put it against even “Corazon Aquino” (one of the top trending topics NOW on Twitter) those JK wedding search volumes are dwarfed. (see chart below).
10. Google only reports 366 links to the video and most of them are not even important websites (see Alexa blue bar)
11. The video itself has no honors and no stats (yet); YouTube stats are conveniently turned off. Other videos have their stats graphs publicly available.
12. see the fine print in the YouTube description — For more information or to make a donation towards violence prevention please visit our website: http://www.jkweddingdance.com/ – why would a normal wedding video ask people to make a donation towards violence prevention? (see screen capture below), the WHOIS record shows the domain jkweddingdance.com was created 29-Jul-09 — today is 31-Jul-09
Updated: This was circumstantial evidence. A source confirmed that Jill is studying patterns of violence propagation for her PhD. Their choice of charity was their own choice. And the site was set up to help that cause.
Conclusion? The video itself is real, made by those nice people in the wedding. They may not even realize why or how their wedding video went viral (and the tens of thousands of other wedding videos on YouTube did not). On the Today Show, “The couple told Lauer they were surprised at the video’s popularity” (also see NY Daily News article – http://bit.ly/OA3iG )
Related articles:
ReadWriteWeb – Build Profit Not DMCA Suits
WSJ – YouTube Declares Wedding Video a Financial Success
PSFK – Co-opting Viral Hits to Sell More Music
TechCrunch – YouTube: Viral Wedding Videos Are Great For Advertising
Huffington Post – Viral Wedding on YouTube Drives Buyers to Chris Brown Music
What viral videos look like; what non-viral videos look like — by the stats
The first 2 are viral videos – notice the shape of the “total views curve” (quick rise and approaches the max asymptotically). The last 2 videos are not viral, and supported by paid advertising and promotion. It is a straight line that grows steadily over time. The 2 examples of non-viral videos were chosen simply to have similar view counts as the first and second examples.
Viral video examples – notice the asymptotic curve towards the max on the total views chart.
Frozen Grand Central ImprovEverywhere viral video – 18 million views – added on Jan 31, 2009. ”Other/viral” gave it its first big boost and embedded views gave it another big push.
No Pants Subway Ride ImprovEverywhere viral video – 9 million views – uploaded January 13, 2009; got onto YouTube homepage and got a major boost from it.
NON-viral video examples – notice the straight line of the total views chart.
Perfect example of NON-viral video that had help with paid media – in this case, GoDaddy supported these videos with costly Superbowl ads — which led to nice bumps-up in total views.
In the case of Smirnoff’s Tea Partay, it was not supported by paid media so it took longer to grow and the shape of the curve is a nice blend between the straight line of a non-viral video and the asymptotic line of a viral video.
Finally, blatant ads don’t go viral – Sony’s grand central product demo stunt. And even if they are discussed in dozens of blogs it is not enough to get past the first tipping point.
trends – coupon sites, network TV sites
coupon sites: definitely headed upward with a spike in Dec 08.
network TV sites are seeing healthy increases, likely due to “view full episodes” on their websites – but even this increase in traffic will not replace the advertising revenues lost on network television
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Recent Articles by Dr. Augustine Fou
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