GamesGRABR says UK gamers prefer being told what to buy

gamesgrabbrA new study from GamesGRABR, the gaming social network, has found that nearly half of UK gamers prefer content that is recommended by friends and other social networks to traditional search engines such as Google.

According to GamesGRABR and as the accompanying image shows, 45% of UK gamers prefer to share. While we were once a nation of shopkeepers, now we appear to be a nation of social butterflies who now jump over the net curtains as opposed to peering through them. Continue reading

The best times to post on Twitter, Facebook and Google +

In social media nobody can hear anybody scream their messages if they are posted the wrong time, but some recent data may make things a little more time-effective.

According to RadiumOne’s po.st tool and the data received from more than 10,000 publishers reveals that social network traffic peaks between 10am-12pm and 8pm-10pm as workers go on lunch and arrive home from work.

This may seem retchingly obvious, but the data also shares marked differences between each social media channel and the device used to post status updates and messages.

Somewhat surprisingly, the optimal time for Facebook is around 5pm, which goes against received wisdom that 9pm is the time for people to get active on that channel.

Twitter comes in at 1pm and the spoilt orphan of Google + is at 10am, underscoring the fact that most people just want to get that channel out of the way. Lip service some might call it.

As for deivices, mobile is busiest at 10am, tablets at 1pm and fixed-line computers at 9pm, which again seems to make sense, although data that doesn’t mention LinkedIn when it comes to social seems more than a little odd. For professional people, LinkedIn is now almost like email in its ubiquity.

When it comes to blogging, the report doesn’t mention optimal times, but if you’re reading this, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what time it is.

Good content will invariably out, but in a digital age where using digital tricks and linking is as important, if not more important, than content, knowing what time to post is probably as useful as anything else out there.

To find out more about the RadiumOne data, please go to po.st and all will be revealed, although I can’t tell you the optimal time to do so… you’ll just have to do it for yourself.

Facebook should have an 'engaged' link not a Like button that 98% of people only use once

By regular contributor Lloyd Gofton who tweets here

As a social species, we should expect our habits and actions on social networks to reflect our natural priorities as humans… as a species we crave companionship and like to feel part of a community.

Our instinct is to learn from each other and share our experiences with like-minded individuals. That habit has served us well, but at some point in our conversations and relationships the number of contacts we have has been given a higher value than the quality of the connection we have with those individuals, groups and brands. Continue reading

Perhaps PeerPerks Palestinian premieres pack perfect punch

The alliterative headline to this piece was one I submitted for my latest article on TechCrunch and was somewhat prosaically replaced with ‘The limits of social influence? Big Ben is influential on… drugs’.

Still you can’t win them all and while the piece was all about the so-called measurement of influence through social networks, it underlines how people perceive the use of words, and how the words themselves influence people. Continue reading

The 1992 vision of Mondo 2000 was right and wrong, but also true

Mondo 2000I picked up my copy of Mondo 2000 – User’s guide to a new edge (Thames and Hudson 1992) the other day. What an optimistic and anarchic place the soon-to-be digital world was then, and indeed for the next few years.

Fax machines were vogue, mobile phones were still big and barely anyone was using text messaging. But in Mondo 2000, under article headlines such as cyberpunk, virtual reality, wetware, designer aphrodisiacs, artificial life, techno-erotic paganism the future was being mapped out – and its predictions were wilder than your wildest dreams with genuinely mind-expanding possibilities. Continue reading