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I have already mentioned how Flickr has the characteristics of a massively multi-player online role-playing game, but I wanted to expand on this a little more. A “sticky” site has a sense of play to it. Flickr does this wonderfully, with interesting features just a few explorative mouse clicks away. What’s more, Flickr encourages you to explore and make interesting connections, and this exploration keeps Flickr incredibly sticky.

For example, Flickr constantly encourages you to explore other people’s photo collections, from the tag searching, to latest photos on the home page, to groups and contacts; everything invites you to network and make links. But it never bullies you into doing this, merely points you along a path you can chose to take.

Exploring Flickr is like exploring any game environment. You can make discoveries, amusing connections, get lost, and find your home again. Along the way you will meet interesting characters, perverse characters, and the incredibly dull. Flickr is not only a game, it’s a story, and it succeeds because the story is about us and our lives, and it’s delivered visually.

Perhaps this is why the ‘friend networks’ have invariably failed to sustain their original hype. People’s personal profiles are only so interesting; people’s photos on the other hand are intimate, personal, and interesting.

The realization that Flickr is, in many ways, a game, leads one to an interesting thought. Is it possible that all truly great websites are games? Ebay is a nice example of this. People don’t just log in to buy and sell, they also log in to play, explore, and even fight with other users over items. Who hasn’t heard from a friend of a great Ebay discovery, or a bidding war, or a fantastic sale? Play makes Ebay fun. Google is another example. It has exploration and discovery game elements in abundance!

Perhaps when we think web usability and design we should also be catering to human kind’s innate curiosity and desire to solve problems that games tap into. With these ideas in mind, let’s hope the next generation websites learn from Flickr and sites like it to produce truly interesting experiences.

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What is Flickr?

Until recently, I defined Flickr simply as a free service for bloggers who wish to post photos, not only on their blog but also on the Flickr service for other Flickr users to peruse, vote on, add to their favorites list, etc. Flickr even supports RSS feeds, with ability to add comments and notes to photos. You can of course use Flickr to share your family photos and snapshots with friends and relatives. And amateur photographers can show off their work. On Flickr, the photographic “creme” rises to the top, due to other Flickr users who make comments, post blog entries, and cause the photos to achieve recognition in “most popular” lists.

But now I’ve come to realize that Flickr is so much more. It’s not just a cleverly designed web application. It’s a repository of human knowledge and creativity organized organically. It’s a visual conversation. It’s countless stories intertwined. It’s a community. It’s a virtual world. It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

(more…)

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With Microsoft throwing its hat into the ring alongside Google and Yahoo!, consumers as well as search marketers have more choices. This side-by-side comparison of the top three search engines looks at essential stats, tolerance levels for “worst practices” and more…

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Brian Klais, VP of Natural Search, Interviewed on Wisconsin Channel 27 News about Google and SEO

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A lot is at stake here for Web marketers. Whether you are knowledgeable about search engine marketing or just an observer at this point, you need to follow this development. Your search rankings - free and paid - in all the major search engines are important marketing assets.

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Microsoft’s new MSN Search is poised to take some of Google’s market share. That’s good news for marketers, if you know how to optimize for MSN Search. Happily, it doesn’t appear to be difficult. The tried-and-true optimization tactics appear to work quite well.

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Ever since I discovered the wonderful ITConversations.com, I have become a real fan of podcasting. Podcasting is a way of delivering audio files to your PC and then to your MP3 player (e.g. your iPod) whenever they are updated — automatically at night while you sleep. Although podcasting is quite new, there are already episodic radio shows being made for delivery via podcast. It’s amazing the quality of some of the audio commentary being published out there on the web, free for the taking. Bloggers are really the driving force of podcasting right now. On the commute into the office they make a recording of themselves and post it onto their blog. The BBC really legitimized podcasting by delivering the series “In Our Time” via podcast. With plans to put all of the BBC’s radio archives online and to continue to deliver new shows online, it is possible we will see thousands of classic BBC radio shows podcast. It’s great to see a traditional broadcaster right at the cutting edge of technology!

I love the way that podcasting democratizes radio broadcasting. Literally anyone can do it — even me! It takes a bit of fiddling to get the right setup in place for good quality audio recording — particularly when there’s someone on the other end of a phone to interview — but I’ve finally nailed it.

I conducting my first successful podcast interview today. I phone interviewed Marc Holland, CEO of Sky Radio Networks. I’m not going to put it online yet, as the podcast is supposed to be released in conjunction with the publication of my upcoming MarketingProfs article on podcasting (due out within the next week or two). I will post here to my blog once the article and the podcast interviews are online.

You may wonder why I selected Sky Radio as my first interviewee. Well, while I was writing my podcasting article for MarketingProfs, it occurred to me that podcasting would be an obvious next evolution in Sky Radio’s business model. Sky Radio is the exclusive producer of the in-flight business audio programming on many of the major domestic airlines. They’re the folks you hear on the business channel when you fly United, for instance. I think their interviews would be fantastic material to make available on a podcast RSS format, as sometimes you don’t get to listen to all the shows or you want to recall something you heard half asleep 30,000 feet up. Podcasting would allow business execs who don’t even fly to regularly partake in these audio interviews as they become available. If Sky Radio developed a strong listener base and online distribution channel for the podcasts, then they could charge for this just like they charge for having professionally-produced interviews distributed to air travelers.

I’ve lined up some more great podcast interviews, so there will be lots to come! As they say in broadcasting, “Stay tuned!”

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