Someone just asked how to block Social Cam on Facebook.  This method could also be used to block out any of the other “Social Reader” apps that are currently asking for friend-spamming permissions.

HIDE SOCIALCAM

First, go into your mail Facebook stream and look for a friend who is sharing a viral video via SocialCam

(sorry Drew, not picking on you directly)

Just for fun I had never installed Socialcam, so I added it just to see what would happen, then I went back and wiped it out completely.

Now click on the top right corner of the post and select “Hide all by Socialcam”

By taking this first step it should remove any future Socialcam posts from coming into my stream.  Unfortunately as an example I also installed Socialcam to watch the video, so let’s wipe the permissions of Socialcam as-well.

DELETE SOCIALCAM

At the top right of the Facebook bar, there will be “Your name”, “Home”, and then a drop down arrow.  Click on the Drop Down to go into Privacy Settings.  (ignore the white space in my profile, you should still the menu items)

It should take you to https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy

Go to -> Ads, Apps and Websites -> EDIT SETTINGS

find the offending App named Socialcam and click on the “X” and agree and click “Remove”

Optional: Scream at full voice, “Take that you freakin’ stupid Socialcam!”

Optional 2: Remove all other apps that you really don’t want accessing your information without your explicit permission

BLOCK SOCIALCAM

So, think you’re done?  Nope.  Make Socialcam suffer even more.  Block the app.

Go back into Privacy Settings

And see that last item “Blocked People and Apps”

Click on “Manage Blocking”

Scroll down to Block Apps:  type in “social” or “socialcam”

and then BLOCK IT!

Optional: Scream, “Socialcam, deal with it!  It’s over!  You’re blocked! I never have to deal with you again!”

Optional 2: Go get yourself a coffee and feel free to PayPal tip me $1  :)

Optional 3: On the block page, feel free to block ex-girlfriends and weird folks from seeing you on Facebook

You have now effectively purged Socialcam from your Facebook feed, revoked their permissions and access to your account, and blocked the app from ever berating you again.  The only way that they can bother you again is by creating a new app with a different unique ID.  Then you can just simply rinse and repeat this process to get rid of it again.  ENJOY your new clean Facebook feed.

Bicycling in Portland

Bicycling in the Netherlands

Bicycling in India

Bicycling in Japan

Well, so this is what I this we are all expecting

It looks like this is what we’re going to receive

There is a strong tradition of great orchestral music throughout the entire Star Wars series, but Space Pirates don’t dance.  Lando looks like he needs a “40,” and darnit, Han shot First!

Yes, this might just be one level in the game (which I’ll likely still buy) but it will make me cry every time Han Solo needs to “kick it.”  Best comment I read this morning was something like:  ”I want to be a good parent for my children, but this…. [Kinect Star Wars]”    

Now here’s a solid Kinect implementation! Check out this “preview” of Assassin’s Creed for Kinect

xkcd

Randall Munroe rocked it last year with the xkcd bash shell, but this year he went with customizations based on region and browser.  Here’s my desktop screenshot from left to right: Firefox, Chrome (linked via reddit) and then Internet Explorer (with Seattle-specific VALVE PORTAL).

Kodak

Taking the magic of photo development into genetic engineering.

Sony

Making the smallest Ultrabook ever, the Vaio Q.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome Multitask Mode for when one-handed mousing is just not efficient enough

Google Youtube

The Youtube Collection, exclusively on DVD

Google Search

Google Really Advanced Search

Google and Nascar

Google automated cars for stock car racing!  No more crashes?

Adblock

Introducing Catblock.  All ads now become cats.

Warby Parker

Glasses for your dog

Cute Overload

Cute Overload becomes the Huffington Post

 Big Fish Games

Ha, MimeSomething, a clever spoof of DrawSomething

I could swear they did this mode sometime in the past, but I can’t remember.  What is definitely new is the addition of the 8-bit characters and the awesome YouTube Video!

So go to maps.google.com and click on the “Quest” square at the top right, and you get the warning message

Here’s what happens when you enable this and go to seattle.  Note: Space Needle and cute Google’rs

Washington, D.C. with the White House and GW Memorial and a PANDA!

Here’s New York City (I found another monster in Glouster)

Here’s Tokyo (Zenrin and Square Enix 8-bit Scorpion and Blob)

I guess check out your hometown and look for 8-bit game characters hidden across the world.

Shan-Ming Chiu just recommended going to 0,0 and going with a full zoom.  There are two images there at max zoom and max zoom -1.  Here’s the Max Zoom one.

Today Rovio came to town and are promoting Angry Birds Space with new merchandise including a National Geographic Book launching at #1 on Amazon National Geographic Angry Birds Space: A Furious Flight Into the Final Frontier

Here are some shots from this morning’s event.  The initial setup and folks waiting in line for merch.

Amy E. Briggs, Senior Editor of National Geographic who wrote the new book, and some plush birds!

Cheezburger Peeps and my new best friend (unless you can convince me he should be your best friend)

And these are the guys running things: Andrew Stalbow GM North America Rovio and Ville Heijari VP Franchise Development Rovio and Peter Vesterbacka CMO & Mighty Eagle of Rovio.  (he’s also Santa Claus)

In the Android App you can click on the gearbox and do watch the full story, and that will take you to this YouTube Video.

A: YES

Yes, I bought the Hunger Games on Amazon Kindle.  Yes, I did like the story.  Yes, I enjoyed the characters.  Yes, I look forward to the movie.   Yes, I felt it was a rip-off of Battle Royale.

I hope the author of Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, would say, “My inspiration for the Hunger Games was the epic movie Battle Royale by director Kinji Fukasaku and the book Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, and then I crafted my literary masterpiece to be more accessible to US kids and adults alike,” but likely that’s not going to happen.

We know that writers can be inspired by other works of art, and Battle Royale is what would be the obvious inspiration.  Wikipedia says that Collins said her inspiration for the book “…came from channel surfing on television. [combining] people competing on a reality show and… footage of the invasion of Iraq.”   I’ve read in other places online that she has even claimed to have never heard of or seen Battle Royale, and that’s simply ridiculous.

Seriously?  SERIOUSLY????  SERIOUSLY!!?!?!?!?!!?!

Should I write a book based on Romeo and Juliet in Japanese and call it “Two High School Kids Who Fall in Love and Die in the End” (translated into the proper Japanese) but not credit the influence of Shakespeare?  That wouldn’t be right.

note: Hunger Games will be referred to by HG and Battle Royale by BR

The movie Battle Royale is a must-watch, and you can’t be checking your email, updating your Facebook page or tweeting plot points while watching BR.  The movie is shocking, smart, brutal and in some segments deeply emotional.  You will miss many of the side stories if you’re not paying full attention.   I just got my four disc Battle Royale Blu Ray set, but the second BR II movie doesn’t match the greatness of the original, so I’d recommend buying the single disc version from Amazon.  Link HERE-> Battle Royale [Blu-ray] still on sale since it just launched.  Please watch it in the original Japanese subtitled to your native language.

If you haven’t had a chance to watch the incredibly awesome Battle Royale movie and have not read the Hunger Games Trilogy, then please leave now and do both, otherwise you will get the pain of some spoilers.

Hey look, I made a list

I wrote this as a way to start listing out the specific things where I saw Hunger Games “borrow” from the Battle Royale movie rather than speak of this as a total generalization. Here’s a quick list of the similarities between the movie version of Battle Royale and the book version of the Hunger Games.  If I missed any, then please feel to let me know in the comments.

The Two Main Protagonists are involved in a Love Triangle
BR Shuya-Noiko-Kuninobu
HG Peeta-Katniss-Gale

The Two Main Protagonists are unwillingly thrown into the fight
BR Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa are classmates are forced to kill, trying to survive
HG Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark are schoolmates are forced to kill, trying to survive

Revolts against authority caused both the HG and BR
BR Youth revolted against Adults, so the adults instituted Battle Royale to keep youth obedient and prevent them from unifying for another mass walkout.
HG Districts revolted against the Capital, so the Capital instituted the Hunger Games to control the districts and prevent them from unifying.

Random Selection of Participants
BR Entire school classes are randomly and secretly selected to participate in the Battle Royale
HG The reaping is a public event of random selection (and/or volunteer) in the Hunger Games

Both main characters lost their Fathers
BR Shuya’s father died of suicide because he could not find work
HG Katniss’ father died at his work in a mine explosion

Both had their own ways of dealing with the grief
BR Shuya found peace with his friends in the foster home and sports
HG Katniss found peace with a friend in the forest while hunting

Teachers forever alone
BR Kitaro was dealing with a family that hated and left him
HG Haymitch never married and never had a family

Backpacks
BR Each student starts with a Backpack containing random weapons, food and water, and other items used for survival
HG The initial battlefield is littered with weapons and Backpacks with random items used for survival

Poison
BR Poison is used as a plot device in a key scene leading up to the end game
HG Poison nightlock berries are a key plot element both in game and at end game

Professional Killers in the Competition
BR Transfer students were added to the class prior to their class trip. Those transfer students were deadly ringers.
HG Some districts train kids to be warriors who may volunteer to be tributes. These tributes are the Careers

Prior Winners to Return
BR One of the transfer students who joined Battle Royale was a previous winner of a Battle Royale
HG Prior victors were reaped again to return to the games in the second book

Controlled forced movement on the Island
BR Map sections are scheduled to blow up explosive collars of students to drive them to the same areas to fight
HG Areas became deadly at different times to force surviving players to go to the same areas to fight

Full monitoring of players
BR All students are forced to wear explosive collars which control their movements and fully monitor them
HG The game is televised, so they are being watched by all of Panem, and there are tracking implants

Start of the Game
BR Initial massacres and team ups and chaos
HG Initial massacres and team ups and chaos

Hackers
BR Students who were tech experts decided to beat the system by hacking into the computers, creating explosives and beating the military and government organizers
HG Wiress and Beetee from District 3 were tech experts who decided to beat the system by hacking the system and take out the computers of the government organizers

Cliques
BR Groups were formed among school groups: bullies, geeks, girls, opportunity, etc.
HG Groups were formed based on alliances: careers, districts, skills, opportunity, etc.

Hot Girls can be Killer
BR Mitsuko is a proficient seducer and killer
HG Johanna is the naked seducer and killer

References to the Prior Winner
BR Movie shows the last year’s winner as a crazy bloody smiling girl
HG Review of prior winners shows one as a crazy bloody smiling girl (I think, fuzzy memory)

The main protagonist is considered a leader who everyone ends up trusting and following
BR Shuya is trusted by most of the students and is only attacked by the desperate and the evil. Others look to him to get them home safely.
HG Katniss is the central figure, the Mockingjay, able to convert others as well as used as a symbol by the resistance to fight the Capitol.

Rules say that there can be only one winner, but both end with two
BR Shuya-Noiko
HG Peeta-Katniss

Conclusion… seriously?!?!

I will still throw my money at the Hunger Games movie, and I bet I’ll enjoy it.  It’s just that so many things from The Hunger Games line-up so perfectly with things from Battle Royale, that it can not be mere coincidence.  Also, for future reference: I’m on Team Peeta.

oh, and about the Hunger Games’ GAME

If you have an iOS device, please download and Play Hunger Games: Girl on Fire.  My friend @adamatomic made it.  :)

… and already setup for Apple’s announcement today.

So like SXSW, the GDC main conference is important, but parties help with networking and promotion of companies and products.

Here are a few of my photos from WB’s Lollipop Chainsaw Event which is launching this summer

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and an event sponsored by Verizon to bring on mobile developers to their platform also showcasing a ton of innovative companies to help with mobile services

A party sponsored by Tapjoy and Papaya to show off their platforms and feed us tasty Kung Fu Tacos

And a small party by Zynga

Lots of friends have asked me whether I regret choosing GDC over SXSW this year, but I’ll say that so-far GDC has provided some great networking opportunities that reminds me of the old days of SXSW.  I’m not quite sure if this sentiment will match how I feel when the wall-to-wall crowds come today, but then again, SXSW interactive looks like it’s going to be massive this year.  It’s possible that at SXSWi, people won’t be just squished together but double stacked on top of one another.

GDC is definitely relevant to my professional interest and not every conference gives you the opportunity to be eaten by zombies.  

Peter Vesterbacka at Casual Connect 2011

Peter Vesterbacka, CMO of Rovio, had stated at Casual Connect that there was real excitement when they hit the first 100 million installs, with less excitement at 200 million and then less at 300 million and so on.  I’m guessing however that a few bottles of champagne will be popped in the next few weeks when Rovio announces that Angry Birds will have surpassed a total of a billion total installs across all platforms.

The game is purposefully simple.  There are no complex instructions to read or review, and the mechanics and controls are familiar to anyone who has used a rubber band or better yet a slingshot.  All the instructions to play are shown as pictures.

Versions of the game exist on nearly all mobile platforms and already has an free HTML5 optimized version running on Chrome.  The latest update on the Chrome version allows for user logins and the use of the Mighty Eagle upgrade in the first series.

Angry Birds on Chrome

Now we can take a quick look at the Facebook version.   It looks like it’s being hosted on the Google App Infrastructure and utilizes Flash supported by the Starling Framework for GPU accelerated 2D.  It would be logical for Rovio to leverage the Google relationship since they need it for the Chrome and Android versions.

Fast Customer Acquistion

Angry Birds is a well-known property, so customers won’t need to question the application as much as something that they have never heard-of.  Further, the cost for them to manually  acquire customers should be low since all they need to do is capture user information from existing mobile users and directly contact all those customers with targeted emails pointing to the Facebook version.  Reinforce that with an application upgrade on each mobile Angry Birds game and that will send new users to the Facebook version in droves.

Add in all the typical Facebook social tools

Invitations to play, Free Gifts Inbox, and leaderboards.  These well-understood social mechanics will serve to notify existing users of the existence of the Facebook version and provide discovery to a set of users who may not have a mobile phone but may use Facebook.  Perhaps these are social game players who are now used to puzzles but not an arcade experience.

Provide the option to expand-out to a maximum window resolution for a full-screen experience

This is likely the highest-resolution, largest-size Angry Birds experience you can get.  I’m running this currently on 1920×1080, but I’m wondering if I can hack this to run across two screens to get to  3840×1080.  :)

Full Screen Angry Birds

Virtual Goods – Sell powerups

The available powerups are: Mighty Eagle, Sling Scope, Birdquake, Super Seeds, and King Sling.  At the lowest level of non-discounted pricing it’s 20 uses of a powerup for $1, so one nickel every time you want to use a powerup.  There are also bundles and volume discounts for buying higher dollar amounts.  I think this removes much of the “skill” component of earning a high score, and I’m not sure how much fun the game would be clearing it  with 1000 Mighty Eagles.

Angry Birds Powerups

How Much would you Pay for a Mighty Eagle?

The future of Angry Birds on Facebook is Ad Revenue

Talking about browser-based users of Facebook, that’s a darn good place to sell ads whether for application installs or for branding.  We already know now that the cost of customer acquisition for social games has increased significantly, so that also moves in favor of Rovio with their established brand and user base.  While advertisers will not be able to buy super-social-targeted ads, with “basic information” provided by Facebook, there are many ways to slice that data to find the most highly valued future customers.  They can then use that information to do internal yield management when doing deals with the advertisers and agencies.

I’m looking forward to hearing what happens in the next few months with Rovio and seeing the MAU’s on Angry Birds on Facebook.

PINTEREST

Pinterest is being reported as the latest hot site that has had explosive growth.  Pinterest is a collection of links to external sites fronted by rich content thumbnails, and currently women are the core audience.  In the ‘About‘ section of Pinterest they self-identify themselves as:

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

That description is obviously not written for the typical male audience unless we are looking to redecorate our man caves.

I currently find Pinterest boring, but that just means that at this time their content doesn’t resonate with me.  Women have built the site, provided the content and the organization, and women are the biggest by percentage consumers of the site.  It makes sense that I shouldn’t like it, but if women love it, then Pinterest has the best long-term chance for their success.

WHAT IS THE PINTEREST DEMOGRAPHIC?

Pinterest has found a great niche.  The female demographic is one that may not have already been pursued as aggressively on the internet as the male demographic, has great spending power, can exert strong social influence among friends, and loves cute and pretty content.   That sounds like an optimal audience to target.

So how does it work?  Content is defined as a link to an external site that may have a picture or video you like.  You’re allowed to add links to Pinterest, to share content, and to follow content posted by friends as well as content you “find.”  For any content, you are allowed to “repin” this content.  The fundamental mechanics are well understood and used by nearly every social site.  The difference here is that “pins” can be categorized into a “boards” which can then be searched and followed.  This means that a new layer has been added which is user-curation of collections of links.

Using purses as an example.  A user could find purses offered from multiple sites and “pin” them into a “board” called “Cool Purses.”  Friends would be able to see the “Cool Purses” board, comment on each pin to comment on each purse, and even go to each site to buy that same purse.  The vibe I’m feeling with Pinterest is that it’s just a link engine to Etsy and other specialized sellers.

WHY IS PINTEREST DIFFERENT FROM GOOGLE/BING?

Temporarily, let’s remove the shopping aspect and say that Pinterest provides cool pictures.  As we said earlier, Pinterest uses “boards”  to provide a layer of categorization beyond the name of the “pin.”  That means that as long as people are correctly categorizing pins, you should get some good content if that particular term has been categorized.  If that content has not been categorized or pinned, then the search will be empty and you get nothing.

Let’s search for “Lightning” then as an example:  For Pinterest there are a bunch of folks who have collected “boards” of lightning images.  Google and Bing provide truly comprehensive image search options, and if you’re looking for a particular subset of a lightning search, Bing and Google offer clickable links to delve into subcategories of searches of Lightning, like Volcano Lightning or Purple Lightning.  Google Image search further provides social content from people in your Google+ Circles and presents you first with search results from those friends.  In my case I get results of lightning pictures from Chris Pirillo, Trey Ratcliffe, Robert Scoble, and Eddie Codel   listed before other search results.  Pinterest can not win pure image search.

I think I prefer Google and Bing because I trust their categorizations better than Pinterest.  Search engines will use full page data and meta tags to find the most relevant photos and all related categories, Pinterest can not compete in terms of quantity and completeness.  Pinterest still feels that it is more about shopping or scrapbooking

I also have a Super Bowl Example:  Fiat USA released a Super Bowl commercial this year that completely blew me away.  It used a beautiful woman seducing a regular guy to promote their Abarth performance package.  Here’s the FIAT commercial (now at 6MM views)

Questions after watching that was 1) Who is that woman?  2) Have I seen her before? 3) Can I see more of her?

Google search found the answer to her name, but the following searches of images of Catrinel Menghia, a Romanian model speaking Italian, on Google and Pinterest yielded different results

And here are the related Google and Pinterest searches

There are plenty of google images of Catrinel (I’ll use her first name now because we’re cool like that), while Pinterest shows a blank page.  Sure, she’s pretty, but she’s not a purse, and as I said, ” Pinterest hates men.”  Eventually she will be listed in Pinterest as users increase and more men start using the service.

PINTEREST loves FACEBOOK/TWITTER

While Facebook cares about the social graph and Twitter about the conversation, Pinterest can leverage both to gain traffic into their site.  It’s impossible to use Twitter to create a collection of links to products or images.  Lists are only used in Twitter to identify users without further granularity.  Facebook can be used to create an album of purse images allowing commenting and likes, but to setup external links on those images requires work by the user, and Facebook does not monetize off those links.  The continual stream of Pinterest notifications from addicted friends is demonstrating just how many more women use the service.  I have clicked on a few “pretty” things because of that.

WHAT ABOUT TUMBLR

Tumblr can provide the same curated experience and content curation as Pinterest, and it has amazing traffic, but fundamentally the content on Tumblr is more for teenagers and not optimized for the women’s demographic.

I’ll say”Pinterest is tumbr – now made for a woman”   ReadWriteWeb has stated that Tumblr gets 12 billion page view per month.  That’s insane!  Well how do they do it?  1) excellent user generated content   2) incredibly funny user generated content  3) hard core pornography

My personal joke about porn on Tumblr is that nearly no matter what tumblr site you’re on, you’re going to be four clicks away from pornography.  Because of porn, Tumblr will never be able to successfully draw in advertising dollars.  No smart Fortune 50 brand would want to see their logo over hard core porn.  If Tumblr decides to remove all adult content, then I’d bet their traffic declines significantly, and since they’re not really monetizing, traffic is the ONLY thing they can show their investors.

Because Pinterest content is not-yet R-rated, Pinterest does not nor will have that same limitation.

CAN PINTEREST MONETIZE?

Advertising yup, what a great demographic with cash in-hand ready to buy stuff.  Premium ad space embedded into the boards will work great.  It’s how a few other 100% curated sites make all their revenue.

Direct deals with partner sites: yup, as long as the demographic is matched, and this is a good one.

Premium accounts?  If people want “status” in the community than perhaps there’s some way to provide them premium status and higher rankings, but that seems unlikely unless there were other social rewards.

Affiliate revenue?  Absolutely, Pinterest is currently a great comparison shopping engine.  Pinterest has and will replace every referral link with their own.  They have provided a great site that aggregates content.  They need to get paid, or it all goes away.  If you area Pinterest user who wants to build affiliate revenue, then leave Pinterest and create your own site to generate your own traffic.  The only thing Pinterest should have done is say that honestly and be upfront with it for every user.

Here’s a quick graphic of the Pinterest Referral data from Shareaholic.  This is what everyone has been generalizing and calling absolute fact.  Seriously it’s a small percent of traffic from a limited series of sites.  I think it’s a strong indicator of referral capability, but again, every freakin’ thing on Pinterest is an external link.  Twitter is not like that.  Google Plus is not like that.  Linkedin is definitely not like that.

THE FUTURE OF PINTEREST

I think it’s great that Pinterest is growing.  They will figure out monetization, and competitors will push forward.  Shalendra Chhabra here in Seattle just left Swype and joined a new company called Clipboard.  The design is right now more for a more technical user, so it’s a different demographic being targeted vs Pinterest.  There are probably others also up and running now that don’t have the weight of Pinterest yet, but could catch up.

As the popularity on Pinterest grows, more men will sign-up for this site, and that will change content from women-only into more PG-rated tumblr content.  Likely teenage boys will finally hit the site realizing that all the women have gone to Pinterest, and then there will be some serious issues with signal to noise ratios and NSFW content.    Pinterest better have some better segmentation and filter mechanisms in-place soon so they can maintain their core audience.

If Pinterest does not hate men, it should.  Pinterest doesn’t need to kick out the men, but they need to keep the site “pretty” and “clean” to ensure they don’t lose their strongest demographic and their future to monetize off of that audience.