Facebook as Game
Facebook is a game, the same as Linked-In is a game and bebo is a game and all the rest. Google doesn’t want to be a game, but a lot of people want it to be and are playing it anyway.
The first stage of the game is getting to level two. Level two means having more contacts than all of your contacts. That is the same game that has been running for a few years, via Linked-In or MySpace or myriad other social networks. Unfortunately, that game traditionally ended at level two and so people ran out of steam as it became apparent that the network offered no more real value.
The interesting thing about Facebook is that the ‘most contacts’ part of this game isn’t the be-all and end-all. Most people on Facebook don’t care about how many contacts their contacts (oh, sorry, friends) have got. That isn’t the real game. The real game is getting onto people’s home pages: that’s level three.
The real game is still about publicity and exposure. But this time, the person who wins has lots of contacts but they upload content that’s only available to Facebook users. You see what Facebook has done there? The people who give their content to Facebook are the people who will get onto friends’ home pages. When is the last time you saw someone’s imported blog entry (i.e. non-unique content) on your Facebook home page? Back when you had two friends is when.
These things give you +10xp in the MMORPG on Facebook, from my observation:
- single/not single profile changes +100xp
- uploading photos; tagging people =20xp; comments =25xp
- notes - viz. content unique to FB +20xp
- getting lots of friends to comment on notes on FB +5xp per comment
- Shared links through FB; + comments on that +5xp per comment
- Events published on FB; + comments on that + 3xp per comment
Notice a shared characteristic in those items? They’re all just on Facebook. If the system can’t find enough recent stuff like that, then it’ll fall back on the sort of dross I produce on occasion: statuses; profile changes; all that shit - just to inject a bit of spice.
I expect people are already hard at work on what ingredients are necessary to game the Facebook homepage algorithm. Beware of being told what is important, is all I can say.
