In addition, we’ve just completed construction of quids.org, a non-commercial implementation of the superfluid technology. With a focus on volunteer projects, it has a simpler process, and a cost-free model that requires only a $1 donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  -superfluid.biz is also free for the time being (at least a year for beta users), but will eventually have an annual subscription fee.  As quids.org is all about collaborating on services, it doesn’t allow commercial transactions, or those involving physical goods, so we don’t collect W9 information and membership is available to international participants. We envision it being used for social good/software/games/art and any number of other areas we haven’t yet conceived.

Upcoming for quids.org is a facebook application, allowing you to pull together your volunteer projects from that site as well, and a mess of other stuff that we won’t spoil by mentioning now.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please do let me know. We continue to develop superfluid.biz and quids.org with a lot of feedback from the community, and are pretty responsive to needs, whether that’s in the form of functionality or rounding up offerings of specific interest to current members.

superfluid is all about fair value for participants; it’s built to facilitate utilization of unsold or spare time, and to compensate each participant fairly within the system. This is also a great way to create a project from scratch, without the insecurities of buying into someone else’s vision, or giving a piece of your project to someone who may or may not be the ideal partner in the long term.

I believe that in general, the existing models of executing on a concept tend to be less than ideal, and don’t draw on community in the wholesome, yet self-interested way that superfluid can. One conventional path to completion of such things is for an entrepreneur to spend enough, from savings or debt, to fund the project. Another classic path (especially in open source) is for one person with the vision, personal magnetism, and technical skills to start the project, to work like mad on it until eventually it’s complete enough that he can draw others in to join him on it. In this context, a shared vision brings in others who join together to create the finished project. -The problem with the latter is that the timing, personalities, and skillsets don’t always necessarily align to enable even a brilliantly conceived concept.

It’s simple to use superfluid for such a project. You’d first want to define your needs (programming, design, project management, marketing, etc.) then assess how many Quids this is likely to cost you from vendors in superfluid. Then sell your own services into the superfluid system and claim Quids to convert into a project. If you’re a programmer, you sell programming into the system (possibly to other concepts at startup stage), if you’re a marketing expert, you sell that, and so on. You keep your own project and everyone else keeps their own projects, while the organic whole allows for execution of as many projects as possible.

btw: If you’re a business (game developer, designer, marketing folks, etc.) that’d like to participate in superfluid, for a limited time you can submit for the beta here.

-Nathan

Both rely for now on the lack of  universally available connectivity or hardware to combine with the lack of a universally compelling business model, to drive certain specific users to their locations. -Neither is yet broadly enabling under a new philosophical reason for existing. But, as Bijan’s posters note, in fairly short term, the barriers will indeed fall in both of these situations. This leaves, in the case of game specialty retailers, thousands of high traffic locations and a brand well known to a lucrative demogaphic, that, for appropriate shareholder value, really should/must have value beyond the place where boxes are moved. And, in the case of libraries, an important social asset that goes beyond simply being the place where users get books, to being a safe place for kids, and an important safety net.

Both are gathering places for youth, and for each the medium should be secondary. Kids will always draw together physically, no matter what they have in the way of online media, both because there’s a basic human need for proximity and because their homes won’t always be safe, useful places for them. That doesn’t mean that they’ll be buying discs or checking out books. So, the question is; what do you do with your physical space to make it useful?

Connectivity is good, combined with a physical space from which kids won’t be ejected. -Although, given the ever-changing nature of connectivity, and the promise of ubiquitous 3G and beyond, proximity-based connectivity is a transient benefit. In a mall, store managers will often switch off interactive kiosks (gameconsole demo machines), in order to keep kids from dawdling; this is the wrong approach. Stores should create and use in-store technology that keeps employees part of the physical and online community. Growing social aspects of retail beyond anything yet seen, is what would save a GameStop. As they stand, relying on logistics to enable massive, very fast distribution of soon-to-be redundant media, they are an elephant, but they could fairly easily be something significant that won’t lose value in the new environment.

Libraries are a bit similar; their masters often think of them simply as places that hold books, and see the end of physical books as the end of library value. But they are a critically important place for youth, and as importantly, they create an alternate distibution model for knowledge in our society, which is not a bad thing. If libraries take as a starting point those two elements, there are a hell of a lot of useful forms they could take. Even at the most primitive concept of being on one hand a place for people to borrow kindles (or perhaps an open licensed e-reader) and load them up with content, and on the other a quiet place to study and take in face to face education.

If libraries or physical game presence die over the next few years, it won’t be because it’s inevitable, it’ll be because the people behind them lack the vision (or funds, in the case of libraries) to take a necessary next step to something even better for a new era.

I liked the guys I spoke with, and they seemed open and forthright about the product, giving me the feeling that OpenLive isn’t bunk so much as the product of good technical people creating something moderately useful. But that product has, for strategic purposes, been positioned by their marketing and biz dev folks as something it truly is not; competitive with existing products or in any significant way market changing.

When I quizzed these guys on how well the system would work in the real world, they were open about its limitations. The Internet is squirrely, and the way that most folks configure home networks (wifi, multiple users, etc.) degrades performance, while an instantly streamed video needs ideal performance. You really couldn’t play a frontline game on OnLive. The most you could do is get a basic feel for the graphics and gameplay, so it could usefully be positioned as a marketing device for frontline games, and I can see this being a worthwhile use of the technology. -The easy gut check on this is to think of clicking on any content on a webbrowser, and how often you have to wait a moment for connection and download to start, even with an edge network employed.

They did advocate for OnLive being a good place to play less demanding or casual games, but I don’t get how that business needs this sort of technology. Casual has a fully functional model in browser-based and small executable games, which tend to require similarly minimal processing power, so OnLive’s posited server side GPU advantage is basically obviated. When I first saw this sort of tech demo-ed by g-cluster for Comcast some years ago, it was intended to leverage the broadband network to help minimize the barrier to gameplay of cruddy settop boxes from MSOs. There’s a lot more going on around the television these days, so that’s less important, especially for anyone with an interest in games, even casual. My own feeling, though, is that the big push by OnLive to present itself as significant and strategic is largely to achieve presence at the headend of broadband providers (especially MSOs), because I don’t believe it will work well enough for any sort of games unless they have ubiquitous presence at the headend. -This is where the questionable feel of the thing comes in; they need to sound game-changing, but they’re not, and anybody that’s familiar with game and/or internet tech knows that they’re not.

Where the guys at OnLive almost had me on their product having a unique value was in their description of video compression and decompression technology. My feeling generally is that the problem models like OnLive must deal with best is optimizing video streaming, and that with all of the major entities putting significant resources to this problem, I don’t see how a game-video-streaming entity can compete. Hence, their core technology is never defensible.

But the fellow at OnLive responded that games have a unique need for immediate “bufferless” video with instant compression and decompression. Which seemed valid at the time, but not completely sayisfying to me. Upon further consideration, my opinion is this; while it is true that games have a unique need, all that “instant” compression and decompression actually is is highly efficient compression and decompression. And highly efficient compression and decompression is the holy grail for a number of powerful and important entities. The game-specific focus doesn’t really drive the need for a different sort of compression, it just changes the requirements for compression of the stream, most likely forcing the 1:1 ratio of “servers” to users that OnLive utilizes. The unique aspect of video for games distributed in this manner is in making the video feel like an unbroken experience, rather than sequential pieces, somehow masking the ugliness of connection irregularities, but that’s likely just a matter of aesthetics.

As has been pointed out, Amazon, the most interesting of these from a usage perspective, is fairly insignificant when you look at actual market share. They may do well on the model of having users ship games in to them, and nobody is better set up to do so, but this isn’t a new model, and it hasn’t taken off yet for others.

Toys R Us has only 585 stores in the U.S., so that’s pretty much a destination store with only a limited demographic overlap with GameStop. -Probably incremental pre-owned sales, which is great for GameStop, but seems set to rile publishers.

Best Buy’s depth of involvement appears fairly undefined at this point, although they do look like the most direct threat, if they choose to get heavily involved. But there are several factors that make BBY seem less likely to be wholehearted in this area:

• They make their money on hardware, and brand is meaningful here; now, though, in the current economy, this is less true, and it may well be what they feel gives them the chance to move further into pre-owned games. But, nobody knows better than BBY that content on physical media is transitory.
• They are aggressive in moving toward support of digitally distributed product. -You’ll remember how they jumped on music distribution, and that would have been even more substantial earlier if they could have gotten their buyers more into line. It is an odd time for them to double down on sales of games on disks.
• If they’re going to push publishers on anything at this moment in time, it doesn’t make sense for it to be pre-owned. If I were Best Buy, I’d threaten to do this, then find a way to partner on sales of digital content revenue. Best Buy could stop selling games on disk entirely, because their bottom line comes from other categories, and this is a key strength they have over GameStop. Getting more reliant on physical media today, at the cost of vendor relationships seems unlikely unless just it’s bizarre desperation.

These moves from retailers do however seem to combine with an economy in which:

• Developers have a hard time finding backing or loans to make full frontline titles.
• Larger publishers and developers are laying off talent, freeing up creative for other projects/models.
• Users still buy a lot of games, but are likely to buy them in smaller pieces, if they can.

To form a perfect storm for accelerating the move to digital distribution and more varied content models.

What the marketer actually needs is a solution that integrates truly comprehensive understanding of their business as well as the new social and technological environment in which customers dwell. This is a more expansive relationship than almost any ad agency can handle, although most will imply that it’s core to their thinking. The ideal entity for this environment is something like Ideo, which is all about that sort of in-depth user identification and experiential focus. Ideo does have a somewhat burdensome and expensive process for understanding everything about a given project, but it may be that some version of that process is the only major marketing relationship worth engaging. And if one can’t afford an Ideo, it’s probably best to simply replicate that process with internal efforts, then implement using talented small design shops/creators, or just a very smart guy; with conventional agencies, large and small, nowhere in the mix.

To start with, Second Life, with its static and culturally delimited audience is a lousy analogy, even if you only judge twitter by the quantcast numbers Carton quotes. Looking further at those numbers, contrary to what he states, the twitter audience actually seems fairly well split among demographics. Where he is minimally correct is that return visits seem sparse, per quantcast. But this is the core error he falls into; the beauty of twitter is the API, and the >150 external applications built upon it, and he’s far from approaching the interesting complexities of tweet creation and consumption. Not only does the API allow for a thousand flowers blooming, which it does especially well, but it enables integration into the full flow of social networking. The fact that the twitter site does not have a huge number of return visitors is a signal of success, not failure. The successful pattern for this medium is of users setting up accounts and accessing/posting tweets from a variety of sites, apps, and devices. And, really to think that twitter is a navel-gazing exercise is an error that is forgivable in non-professionals, but not in anyone demanding fees for their opinion. Small bite messages, utilized as common currency among early adopters and integrated as twitter is, serve a wide variety of purposes, including, but not at all limited to, navel gazing. If my ad agency told me that twitter was insignificant because not enough people were visiting twitter.com, I’d get another agency.