Anyone have an idea what is happening to their margins by the way? Who is competing against the same ad dollars as Google (FB seems a bit different), if cost per click is going down, why?
Also, wouldn't all those hundreds of "box of the month"-style subscription sites where you can pick a product to send and get it periodically be prior art?
Big spenders or "whales" are much ignored when considering how to make money with a game. There really are people out there that are willing to spend thousands a month on a social game. You could even think that all the other players merely exist in the game to entertain that small slice that really brings in the money.
In my own apps with virtual currency I could see this only in a small way as the incentive was low to spend a lot, so this is more based on the experiences I have heard from fellow devs.
I imagined I had given some thought to these subjects, but Permutation City did have new ideas. If you slow down a simulation to some ridiculous degree, the simulated beings don't notice. Even if you run the simulation backwards or in random order, they wouldn't notice. If you abruptly shut it down, they'll just continue finding the pattern somewhere.
How did you get started in organizing such a collaborating group, are you offline friends or used a forum? How does leadership work? I see no collaboration at all in the shooters I play, so curious about how that emerges.
My favorite was staying in a $10 / night hut in Thailand, next to a resort that probably cost $100 / night. It was near enough that I could use their wifi.
Am I the only one really skeptical about that Derren Brown video? I think the real deal with that video is that it is just completely made up entertainment for the viewers, not an actual documentary of something that happened. That, or there is something not shown in it.
It seems rather unlikely to me that a few cues placed would make someone's behavior that predictable. What about the lifetime of other cues they have to draw from, or even just simple random whims that can influence the outcome?
As an occasional stumbleupon user myself, I can say I'm not in the prime mood to book a vacation while using it. You probably prefer 10 people in vacation shopping mode than 300 people in lol I'm bored -mode.
I remember reading they have an AdSense competitor in the works, but that initial tests showed it wasn't a good enough competitor yet to be released.
I don't know if it would be $10B though, even AdSense isn't quite there for Google yet. Assuming they could lure a big chunk of AdSense publishers away, I suppose it could be several billion though.
Maybe they'll release it just before IPO to show their true promise. Name predictions... FB AdConnect?
I spent way too long trying to get my likes to conform to allowed characters. It doesn't like periods in them or unicode characters, so I had delete 30% of my likes.
Could this be what Facebook is planning? They have all the like info from users and plenty of more data beyond that, plus tons of business and developer contacts for leads.