Tadhg Kelly dot Com

My instant reactions to the new Facebook redesign (#facebook)

First impressions matter. So, in that vein, I just clicked open my Facebook profile, and here’s my immediate reactions:

1. Like the new featuring of games and apps in a much more visible space. Much better than the grey bar at the bottom which people couldn’t see.
2. Dislike the disappearance of Lists. I use lists quite a lot to see what’s going on in my various groups of friends. It strikes me that Lists could sit where “Friends Online” is. Friends Online could be easily integrated on the right with the Chat window. They’re nested too far inside the interface now.
3. I like the Games and Apps dashboards. They seem a little confused (some games turning up in Apps) and I care less about who’s playing games as much as finding actual games to play. But still, on the whole, not bad.
4. Really dislike the placement of the search bar. No matter how they push it, Facebook isn’t really a search destination. Its new position feels forced.
5. The messages, notifications etc area seems a bit cluttered. It’s because of the dominating Search bar. Does it really need to be that big?
6. The consistency of the interface when accessing Events or other stuff is nice. It only goes one level deep though.
7. The left sidebar feels visually just a little dominating. It’s a bit too wide, and the central column of content feels squeezed.

All in all, it’s ok. It’s nice that the apps have more visibility, but overall it feels compressed and not entirely friendly to use. The worst part is the insistence of pushing search front and centre when it doesn’t really feel like it’s the primary reason to use Facebook. The de-emphasising of lists is disconcerting, and the split attention of online Friends is somewhat jarring.

Time to Liberalise Immigration (#government #politics)

(http://startupvisa.com/modified-eb5-visa/)

There’s a really interesting movement going on in the US at the moment calling for the creation of a “Startup Visa”. Broadly speaking, the movement’s founders believe that entrepreneurship is the soul of the US economy but that the immigration laws in the US are acting as a serious constraint on the supply of entrepreneurs into the US economy, and that this in turn is restricting the ability of their economy to create new jobs, products and industries.

Which is all true.

However I think that maybe this doesn’t go far enough. One of the things that strikes me about the current international immigration laws is how arcane they are in general, and how very un-globalised they are. We live in an age where many of the rules of capitalism, such as the flow of money, trade laws and international protections for copyright, are becoming standardised and allowing an interconnected economy to develop. But th movement of people is held back.

For some sectors this presents less of a problem. For example, finance people, fashion models or doctors generally have an easy time of emigrating to wherever their skills are best suited. This is because of a variety of localised arrangements and laws between countries covering small individual needs.

On the other hand, most labourers, craftspeople, technology workers and various other sectors are basically forbidden. In some countries like Canada there are largely open arms to all sectors, but in others like the US the availability of visas to outsiders is a tortuous process which usually involves getting transferred via the company you work for, or whatever. And yet the people who often work hardest, strive to do the best and make something of themselves are immigrants, no matter what their skill-set.

So I think it’s time for countries to come into the 21st century and start placing liberalisation of immigration front-and-centre in their agendas. I don’t think it can all be done at once, but certainly a good start would be for developed nations (like the EU, US, Canada, etc) to adopt liberal economic migration treaties along the model of that currently practised in the European Union.

Broadly, this model allows anyone who is a citizen of a member nation the right to travel to any other member nation and work within its economy free of constraint or sector. That at a stroke would remove the need for startup visas, green cards, archaic control of specific sectors and generate populations of willing workers looking to apply their talents wherever they can succeed.

And eventually in time this arrangement could flow out to other countries (China, India, Russia, Brazil, etc). It’s the smart thing, for population, business, the flow of resources, ideas, entrepreneurship and the overall health of economies to allow people to live and work wherever they choose.

What do you think?

Be Authentic (#games #marketing #social)

In a previous post I wrote that the primary mistake that game makers have often made is lacking a marketing story behind their games, and how that reflects an attitude of thinking of your players as distraction-seekers rather than would-be members of your treehouse.  Even when they accept this, the follow-on mistake that game makers then commit is that they try and create a fake story at the last minute. This is every bit as bad as having no story at all.

The core of why they try to do this? In essence it’s because that’s how PR has worked for 30 years, and it seems like everybody’s been doing it that way, and game makers often still think that their audience lives in TV-land. When an elder celebrity of the games industry gets up on a stage and talks up a big innovation, they tend to attract a lot of press attention. Lesser mortal developers then think that this is how it’s done. Be like the legend and you become the legend.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) this is not so. In a social media world, true celebrity is quite rare and tends to attract an impermeable air of authority only by having an unassailable reputation. Unless you actually are a legend from back in the day, you have to talk to players like real people and not try to be full of sham and spin.

The breakdown of the PR-ing of games happened to Sony, and it started with them claiming that some animated footage pretending to be Killzone 2 was actually the real game at E3 (which set off a veritable storm of believers versus unbelievers), and then the following year when the less-than-spectacular truth emerged, three little words hammered the nail in: Giant Enemy Crab. Giant Enemy Crab (and associated memes) show exactly how a PR approach can fail utterly.

What Sony failed to comprehend at the time was that the game-playing audience had moved on from being a broadcast-only environment, where magazines acted as the arbiters of authenticity, to a conversation environment where gamers directly talked to each other. Exposed to that sort of sunlight, the seeds were sown by interested amateurs and professionals in the conversation that Sony were basically making up a story. And they got burned very badly as a result.

Old-style PR attempts to basically tell a television-friendly story. In most cases it does not work. Some people have the charisma to set the world on fire, such as Steve Jobs with his iPad, but those that do also have to deliver on a track record of being amazing every time. The story has to be authentic because they, the public, have so many more tools at their disposal now to call you on your bullcrap.

The PR industry is built largely on getting the right contacts in the journalistic media, selling the key journalists on a vision (the preview, the junket, the time with the celebrity etc) and then exercising control-of-access to make sure that coverage is benign. This used to work really well.

Nowadays, it looks foolish. Nowadays, it’s the viral BAM! video after Microsoft’s E3 conference in which they bragged about being able to see the underside of an avatar’s shoe. Nowadays it’s the obsessives trawling through the frame-by-frame footage of Milo (the Natal demo) and declaring that it must be at least a bit fudged. Nowadays it’s Onlive’s original claims of their service being seriously questioned on day one (starting with speed of light issues) as opposed to when it’s released.

The thing about the internet is that while it’s better at spreading previews than magazines ever were, it’s even better at spreading gossip. Gossip is more interesting. News blogs like gamasutra and gamesindustry.biz spread information, but gossipy blogs, Twitter and a thousand forums are populated with armies of geeks ready to pick apart the bones of every announcement.

The temptation is to regard those people as the enemy, and to keep them at arm’s length, but actually they are both foe and friend, and the difference between their reaction is as simple as this:

Are you being authentic?

Are you speaking honestly, from the heart, and with no bull or cod-phrasing attached? Are you telling them the real story of what your game is and why you’ve made it? Are you telling them about a genuine passion that you have and which you have reflected in your work? Or are you making stuff up?

If you are being true, you’ll quickly realise that the game you’ve made actually has to be truly great. It has to be sexy, and the only way it can be sexy is by you making a game that you really believe in. Those questioners out there want to be members of your treehouse, but only if your treehouse is built of oak. Make a great game that you really believe in. Tell them the truth. Be authentic.

If you are they will love you for it.

Lie and they’ll find you out.