I’ve published a first study on game monetization via virtual items on Gamamoto here: http://gamamoto.com/2012/01/17/game-monetization-lenses/

1. If you don’t have it, install Thunderbird (I’ve also was careful to say “no” to the various “set it as default for…” questions).

2. Set up your Gmail account in Thunderbird; don’t worry! This does not mean that you’re reverting to use a client, you still will have all your e-mail online. You will use this just for the export.

3. Install this import export tools plugin in Thunderbird.

First download it, then to install it,  in Thunderbird go to tools –> add ons –> settings icon –> install add on from file

4. After Thunderbird synched your label (you can check that the number of messages is the same as on Gmail), select the label, go to Tools –> Import Export tools and export the label (which in Thunderbird will appear as a folder) in CSV or any other format.

This made my day.

Addenda to the previous post on fatal flaws in marketing:

Flaws and miracles

Yesterday I saw a big ad of the new mini saying more or less “If you feel like you are not living –> get a Mini.”. Their new ad line is that by buying a mini your life will be full full of adventures – an absurd and silly idea, but that doesn’t matter.  The fatal flaw here is clearly boredom. The ad must be here extremely elaborate because of the weakness of the link between the flaw and the proposed solution.

I just wanted to add that to each fatal flaw focused by the ad creator, a corresponding promise of a miracle is formulated by the ad: smell –> perfume, weakness –> strength, boredom –> adventure…

Flaws and pop

If you want to apply the “fatal flaw” reading to a different theme, just listen to the effective lyrics of Lily Allen: a fatal flaw is always evoked.

I have been fighting in software and games marketing for a while, and I’ve read many books and tried several techniques. I’ve launched several software products with diverse results, and I’ve also taken creative writing courses, studied storytelling techniques for marketing, studied TV advertising, even created a game on this theme.

Whenever I see an ad, read about a new product idea, see any kind of promotion I’ found it useful to ask these two simple questions, that somehow are my brief “extract” of all the experience and study process (I use “product” as a generic term for product / solution /service):

1. What is the fatal flaw that this product meets?

2. No direct fatal flaw met: so what is the narrative transmitted by this message?

Products that don’t meet any fatal flaw usually need more investment in narrative construction. If a product does not make me beautiful, perfumed, seducing, healthy, slim… (fatal flaws) – e.g. its an iPad – so its a solution is search of a problem – I need to create a powerful narrative so that some fatal flaw solution is evoked.

Next ad you see, ask yourself the two questions above. May be a useful exercise.

I wonder why Twitter lists don’t expose an RSS. Anyway the rest part of the API does, and with a very simple url pattern, which we’ve found developing Licorize / Twitter integration. Just use this:

http://api.twitter.com/1/[your Twitter name]/lists/[your list name]/statuses.atom

So for example, being I “ppolsinelli” on Twitter and one of my lists is “game-designers” here

http://twitter.com/#!/ppolsinelli/game-designers

the RSS feed is here:

http://api.twitter.com/1/ppolsinelli/lists/game-designers/statuses.atom

and this is the RSS url that you can feed to your reader, e.g. Google reader.

Google searching for this problems led me to tools, services, installations, Yahoo pipes… but it is as easy as shown above.

The web page above is essentially made of text and a few images. And the ads on the right too, are text based: these communicate their message using words, not animations. Still, the right part is entirely made of little Flash pieces.

We all know that Flash has been used for providing web pages with videos, interactive presentations, creating globally animated web presences. But what I didn’t realize until I started bookmarking pages “fragments” with our Licorize browser plugin is that Flash is widely used for writing text. Text that once clicked has some side-effect (that is why Flash is used), but still text.

The problem is that in writing text on pages through small Flash embeds, we have contents inside web pages that is not interpretable by anything else consuming the page, apart from a being capable of vision and semantics i.e. some living beings. But applications can’t do anything with that.

What I’m trying to say is that more and more we use the web to “read” the web, extracting contents from several sources. The words aggregation, curation are recurring frequently because of this. We even created a browser game where the web itself is used as a creativity source.

We can read the web through the web because… web contents are mostly accessible – this also partly explains the popularity of jQuery, a tool which greatly eases content navigation.

Having the Flash islands progressively replaced by readable HTML contents makes the web more accessible to applications. I know that by tagging the Flash embeds one could document their contents – but that is not what happens.

Making the web more accessible to applications can be described as the web is becoming more semantical – giving a clear, modest reading to the semantic web  mouthful expression.

Technical part: how we try to understand whether a “piece” of the web is a video?

Here we try to explain some technical points that evidence the usefulness of the move to explicit tags instead of embeds by showing how complex it currently is to capture non HTML web parts. This is part of a recent set of updates to Licorize bookmarking due to @robicch and @pupunzi.

By “video” we mean is bookmarking any kind of “dynamic” content – could be a Flash game.

Our plugin

When our plugin is clicked, the currently focused web page is analyzed with JavaScript (we obstinately use HTML+JavaScript to analyze HTML+JavaScript – the Firefox XUL part is just a launcher of our component, so that we use the same code in all browser versions).

When we have textual Flash on the page, it confuses our plugin, as we assumed in construction that Flash is not used for that (not that it actually hinders the plugin functionality in any serious way).

“Mono video” pages

Pages whose main aim is to present a single video are somewhat easier to identify, and our latest plugin version does so on YouTube, Vimeo and many others. This also because there is some convergence towards the usage of tag “standards” set by Facebook (Graph API), so jQuery code selectors can work with expressions like

data.video = $(“meta[property='og:video']“).attr(“content”);

Other sites use older methods like “video_src” but these can be captured too.

Notice that the URL can be edited – say with your favorite embedding features. This is the large majority of cases.

P.S. In the same way we recognize “maps” web applications as Licorize location types.

Non-standard video embeds

Some pages still embed videos without declaring in tags the video content. In these cases we use a “DOM hunter” function, which is a heuristical mess – will be available (free: MIT license) on a coming update on Pupunzi’s jQuery components web site.

You have to consider that Flash sometimes even “kills” the DOM on click events – these are managed entirely it its small universe – making it harder to analyze behavior: another reason for preferring not to have such embeds on sites.

I’d be very happy to get feedback on this new service idea: Your Change Manifesto – about a free online service for facilitating creating consensual change in companies, teams, enterprises.

A webcast where I present the idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL6IM1yV41o&hd=1

These ideas are inspired by Seth Godin’s writings.

Feedback can be posted on this Facebook page, discussed on Hacker News, by sending an e-mail to info@licorize.com or a tweet to @ppolsinelli.

But I always had an allergy for such statements, and I was unpleasantly surprised to hear it repeated in the form of “best developers” by some of the guys I most respect as web opinion makers. “You want to get the best developers in the world”, or “you should have your company in the Silicon Valley because there only you can get the best engineers”.

Is it a notion that makes sense? What do you mean by “best”? For there to be a “best developer” there must be an unchanging global notion of “developer”, and a unique scale of “best” (I believe that in particular those with a developer’s training will be already becoming aware of how silly this sounds). This is also assuming that people skill’s don’t change in time, relatively to conditions and motivations.  I understand that there are people more talented relatively to meeting specific problems (surely not as wide and vague as the “developer” term), but all this is again relative to motivations.

I don’t have any scientific data, but my experience in working in different countries is that you will meet smart, energetic people simply everywhere; talent requires a minimum of facilities to emerge – to learn more about the secondary role played by environments in acquiring real skills, read the books from Freakonomics fellows. Talented people desperately need motivations – but this is a different problem, it is not a question of best and second-best.

Believing that some places magically generate smarter fellows is even sillier, verging on the delirious.

So never again say “we hire the best developers”, or “we work with the best developers”. Replace it with “given the limited set of problems we try to solve, and the limited number of people we get to meet, we are happy with what they have done so far. And wish the best for the inscrutable future.” Or something even more relativistic and non committal. Or stay quiet, and smile. As my father’s wink suggested.