Great posting:

Just like with golf, technology is as much about ensuring that your bad hits are recoverable as it is ensuring that you make great ones. We’re all going to have failures in our careers but avoiding the really big pitfalls will help you keep your company on the right growth path. Here are 10 common mistakes we at AKF Consulting see made during platform development — and the ones we believe are the most important to avoid.

Read the full article: 10 of the Biggest Platform Development Mistakes – GigaOM

Another great post by Andrew Chen, this time about how to loose customers:

I imagine that many in the readership are working on social products – for any product in this space, you often have a number of fuzzy stages that a user can move through during their lifecycle. This may include stages like:

* First experience
* Soloing and single user value
* Encountering some friends(?)
* Hitting critical mass for social
* Becoming a site elder

Read the full article: Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: 25 reasons users STOP using your product: An analysis of customer lifecycle

Sean Ryan from Meez gives a convincing answer why virtual goods and social networks are a good combination:

The best reason for them to pay is that in an SNS, which is really about people interacting with each other, the #1 goal is STATUS – how can I be different, better, have more authority, etc, and most importantly, how can I impress those around me with that status?  It’s so basic, and is sometimes overlooked.  It’s not about getting loyal users to pay for premium services like Music since those are generally solitary services which don’t take advantage of a social network filled with people checking each other out. It can be as basic as a virtual gifting system, and as sophisticated as a fully built-out virtual item marketplace.  The “online bar” FUBAR is probably the most developed in the US, with a relentless focus on getting users to pay to impress members of the opposite gender, or to somehow benefit the group through happy hour sponsorship, but there are numerous other examples emerging.

Read the full article: SharkJumping: The Social Network Service Quest for Premium Revenue = Virtual Items

Very, very interesting thoughts about designing a social game:

By spending time in the “social gaming” space, it’s interesting to see the intersection of approaches from both the consumer internet folks versus the traditional game folks. In addition to business models (ads versus subs/virtual goods) or product emphasis (functionality versus storytelling/characters/etc) or other topics, I’m particularly fascinated by the difference in how they think about their players/users and their activities.

Let’s look at the two approaches – both the “Web 2.0″ view as well as the games perspective. The former is represented by a pyramid, and the other is a 2-axis landscape.

Read the full article: Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: Social gaming design – Bartle types versus Web 2.0 participation pyramid

We are propagating this vision for more than half a year, but now it’s becoming mainstream:

If you take a look at social networks in Asia, they are all monetizing their sites primarily through social goods. For instance, 51.com, which recently raised a $50 million round, earns 70 percent of their revenue through virtual goods according to VentureBeat. Compare that to domestic social networks in which only a small fraction of revenue is generated through virtual goods. Honestly, Facebook is the only site that comes to mind domestically when it comes to the sale of virtual goods.

We also predicted a year ago, that Facebook will launch a (micro-)payment service to monetize their platform. Now it’s becoming reality:

Next month at Facebook’s F8 event, Facebook is expected to launch their much anticipated payment system which will include micro-payments as well as traditional payments. While a fair amount of revenue has been generated through third-party ad networks in the Facebook platform’s first year of operations, Facebook may be betting heavily on substantial revenue generation through their new payment platform.

Read the full article: Will Selling Goods be the Answer for Social Networks?

Thanks to a posting from Bret I discovered the following article:

In April, Viacom’s Paramount Digital Entertainment signed a partnership agreement with Makena Technologies, making thousands of movie clips from the Paramount movie library available on There.com, an online virtual world. Visitors who purchase the clips can use them to communicate with others by having their avatar “speak” lines from movies while the actual clip plays in a small window. Links allow users to purchase DVDs of the featured movies.

Read the full article: Movie Studios Expand Into Virtual Web Worlds

Last thursday I visited Berlin to join the TechCrunch party and to visit my old friend Michi. Btw: thanks Michi for showing me the most delicious restaurants in Berlin! I love Berlin!

I met a lot of new and exciting people at the party and it would take a while to mention them all. Because it is late today (I watched the German soccer game together with Andi and Sebastian) I just post a picture from the party with a link to a whole collection of party pictures from Nicholas (Twidox – co-sponsor):

I loved SimCity, I played it for hours, okey to be honest, weeks; I’m a fan of Wills Wright (the SimCity creator) game design philosophy; I’m a bioinformatician who is very interested in evolutionary theories; I’m a convinced web 2.0 enthusiast. Now, mix Will Wright, Web 2.0 and evolutionary theory and you get probably the most addictive game ever! It’s called Spore and GigaOM has a preview on it. Oh shit, the launch of Spore will put real risk on our venture ;-)

There was much noise yesterday about a new project called Virtual Greats:

Millions of Us LLC, an agency specializing in virtual worlds and large online communities, today announced that it is launching a new company, Virtual Greats, to take advantage of the rapidly growing market for virtual goods. In connection with today’s launch announcement, Millions of Us also announced that Virtual Greats will have distribution rights for virtual goods associated with Justin Timberlake, Elvis Presley, Tila Tequila, Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, Raven Symone and — coming to theaters June 13th — Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk, across multiple media platforms.

(From => Virtual Greats Enters $1.5 Billion Virtual Goods Market <=)

The CEO of Millions of Us made a very interesting statement about the virtual goods market we totally share:

“The inspiration for Virtual Greats came when I realized that this was a $1.5 billion market without any high-value copyrighted material,“

Further information about the company can be found on their blog.

Tina informed me about a new magazine called WE which has a new distribution and a new business model. Their mission is:

We dedicated WE to the empowerment of many given to us by the Internet.

They also have a manifesto (like the Cluetrain manifesto). But what’s best: they have very interesting interview partners: David Weinberger (co-author of the Cluetrain manifesto), and even more interesting (to me), Stuart Kauffman (author of “At Home in the Universe”).

My recommendation: subscribe to it – they will rock you! And have a good time.