Socialmedia

Sorry Google Buzz and Facebook. It seems the idea for mobile social-networking was already patented by another company. in fact, it was Wireless Ink Corp. who was issued the patent in October of last year.

Wireless Ink operates a service called Winksite which, as you would suspect, facilitates social networking over a mobile device and currently has more than 75,000 users.

Now, as you probably already suspected, Bloomberg reports that Wireless Ink has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Google and Facebook. according to the article, the patent application was filed back in 2004 leading Wireless Ink to accuse the two companies of being aware of the patent before proceeding with their mobile social networking plans.

It sounds like Wireless Ink might get itself a nice settlement check or perhaps even a buyout offer from Google or Facebook if their patent is solid. Usually, companies which are the target of a patent infringement lawsuit will first try to invalidate the patent of the plaintiff. You can expect a full frontal assault by Google and Facebook toward this endeavor. Mobile social networking is key to the growth of both companys’ social business plans.

Read more at the Bloomberg article. You can also view the patent at the center of the lawsuit here.

• by Julian Murdoch
• March 10, 2010 15:33 PM PST

Facebook video game designers, including the creator of Civilization series Sid Meier, talk about the jump from developing traditional games to making games for what’s become the biggest platform in the world.

Imagine Facebook’s Gareth Davis sitting in Kublai Kahn’s pleasure dome rather than an office building in San Francisco. Davis, with an Anglophile’s dream of a British accent (think Doctor Who’s David Tennant, except Davis’s accent is real), is putting Facebook in context.

“Facebook has become the crucible of the new game industry,” Davis says without an ounce of hubris or arrogance. “And we’re just at the beginning of this new form of game design.” he could go on like this for quite some time, I realize. Of course, as the program manager for games at Facebook, it’s his job to do so.

“We’re the biggest game platform in the world now.” He’s right — no matter how you tally the numbers. more than 350 million people use Facebook every month. more than 100 million of those users play games.

“More people play games on Facebook, every single day, than on any other platform in the world.”

Of course, he can’t really know that. Sony would point out that they’ve sold nearly 140 million PlayStation 2 consoles. but I give him this one. Gaming is one of the fundamental drivers of Facebook’s staggering rise to power. San Francisco-based developer Zynga Game Network claims projected revenues of $300 million a year, and this comes almost entirely from microtransactions in Facebook games. Electronic Arts recently acquired Playfish, another significant player in Facebook gaming, for $400 million. That’s more than it would cost to buy triple-A developer THQ — and half the value of take two Interactive.

But I don’t even need to look at the numbers to understand the success of Facebook gaming. I can just look at my couch, where my non-gamer wife is adopting a festive reindeer in Zynga’s flagship title, FarmVille. She acquired the reindeer from her non-gamer mother. She just finished half an hour of fertilizing crops as a favor to a posse of non-gamer friends.the new face of gaming, Davis explains, is really a return to the social experiences of playing cards and board games. “All games are social,” Davis says. “Solo gaming is an aberration… due to the limitations of technology. What we’re seeing now is a rebirth, not a birth. It’s gaming getting back to its roots.”

Where I was once proud to wear the nerd-badge of gamerdom, I’m not sure I even know what it looks like anymore. If these are the roots, have I spent the last 20 years in the branches? the countless hours I’ve played in MMOs or shooting zombies in Left 4 Dead have certainly seemed pretty social to me.

I admit I haven’t taken the whole idea of Facebook games very seriously. FarmVille may have 70 million players, a number that dwarfs World of Warcraft’s “mere” 11.5 million players, but those WOW players pay more than a hundred dollars a year to play the game. how much are all of those FarmVille players paying?

Not much — they’re shelling out a dollar here, and a dollar there to fuel their virtual tractors or buy bigger plots of land. but “not much” multiplied by tens of millions of players across dozens of games adds up to piles of money — and these piles have grabbed the attention of some of the most successful hardcore game designers in the business. Zynga’s Brian Reynolds was one of the first to emigrate from major game-studio development to Facebook gaming, leaving Big Huge Games and his legacy (Rise of Nations, Alpha Centauri, Civilization II) behind last June.

Oddly enough, a number of strategy-game designers — a genre that ranks among the most hardcore of gaming experiences — are powering the rise of Facebook gaming.

“For better or worse, the market for hardcore strategy seems to have gone away,” Reynolds says. It’s a depressing prospect, but it’s one borne out by dwindling sales numbers. Hardcore strategy games have been absent from the top 10 lists at retailers for years. So Reynolds looked for where the action was, and he found it. “It’s a real business when you can get 10 percent of the country to play your game… that’s an exciting place to be. So that’s where I am.”

The “where” in this case is a new Maryland studio built around Reynolds — Zynga East — staffed entirely by triple-A development veterans. they haven’t officially discussed their projects yet, much less released a game. but they have been learning the ropes by helping iterate Zynga’s ever-evolving stable of games. “It’s definitely a different world, but a lot of the same, basic game-design principles apply,” Reynolds says. “At their worst, Facebook games can be pretty light. but at their best, they create this whole new level of interesting social interactions.” He’s quick to point out that Zynga’s not building a new Rise of Nations for the Facebook generation. “I don’t think Facebook games are ever going to become traditional hardcore strategy games. Not the ones that are driving this new market.”

Soren Johnson isn’t so sure. A fellow Civilization alum, Johnson left Firaxis after completing Civilization IV as lead designer, arguably the best version of that long-standing franchise. he went on to work with Will Wright on Spore before starting on a set of browser-based strategy games, still under the EA umbrella, likely to end up on Facebook. “The social games that are getting attention right now aren’t necessarily getting attention because they’re good games or bad games,” Johnson says. “They’re getting attention because these are the types of games that are, so far, the easiest to monetize.”

He thinks real opportunity exists for better, deeper games. “There’s a larger question from a game-design point of view: What else is possible in this giant, new space? There’s a lot more that’s possible, and we’re just at the beginning.” Indeed, as hardcore strategy games declined in sales, strategy players naturally turned toward the web for their fixes, making games such as Travian and Ikarium popular before Facebook gaming was even on the map. “This is going to mean something for every genre,” Johnson says. “And it’s definitely going to mean something for strategy games, which is why I’m interested in it.”

That sense of potential, of being on the ground floor of something really interesting, seems endemic in the small cadre of designers focused on the next generation of Facebook games. Even Studio Director Henrique Olifiers of Playfish, already a leader in social gaming, thinks all of the games to date have been nothing but a prelude. “Judging social games by the current state of affairs is a little bit dangerous,” Olifiers says. “The games we have now aren’t the games we’ll have in a year’s time. It’s all new.”

But what will those games look like? Will they be traditional strategy games with a social twist? Will designers simply create more score-chasing virtual-arcade games, like PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz? “I haven’t seen a silver bullet, a genre-defining social game,” Olifiers says. “But I think it will come soon — something that changes the landscape completely — as soon as designers start figuring out the deeper emotional drivers when players engage with specific mechanics. We can explore things more with trust. things can be much more collaborative when you are playing just with people you trust. Nobody’s done it yet.”

this opportunity for deep, meaningful collaborative experiences is what’s brought Sid Meier, the godfather of modern turn-based strategy games (Civilization, Colonization, Alpha Centauri), to Facebook. Meier has jumped in with both feet, announcing that his next project for Firaxis is Civilization Network, a massively multiplayer, free-to-play persistent version of the franchise.

“The killer app in Facebook gaming is cooperative play,” says Meier, who seems giddy to be playing in the social sandbox. “That’s the secret sauce.” Meier agrees with Facebook’s Davis that single-player gaming is essentially a result of technological limitations. “Civilization always felt like a huge experience; it’s all of civilization, for goodness’ sake. That’s got to mean a lot of people, right? but we had 4,800-bps modems, so it was pretty hard to get a co-op experience.”

And Meier insists that this shouldn’t water down the brave new world of Civilization. “The experience gets blurry. Is playing FarmVille playing a game? Or is it something to do between checking your e-mail and reading the new York Times?” he asks with a chuckle. “Our idea is not to try and make another Facebook game but to make Civilization for this new technology. this is a new arena, a new playspace, and we’re still learning. We’re trying something new and not trying to fit an existing genre of Facebook games.”

At age 55, Meier seems like a kid who’s just received the keys to the candy store. “It’s a lot of fun!” he says. “We’ve got cool stuff going on, and we’ve got some dreams. So wish us luck.”

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A little-known white-label mobile social network company is suing Google and Facebook for patent infringement. Wireless Ink, maker of Winksite, claims it owns the intellectual property for enabling users to join social networks from their mobile phones through a patent awarded in October 2009.

Wireless Ink claims the two companies had to have known about the patent, the application for which was made public back in 2004, “given the time and resources defendants have invested in their desktop and mobile Web sites as well as their strategic importance,” Bloomberg quotes the complaint as saying. Facebook has said the suit is without merit and Google said it’s busy reviewing it.

Wireless Ink is reportedly seeking cash damages and an injunction against use of the technology. You’d think — if the patent is found valid — the company would license it out, given that mobile sign-ups are compelling, and increasingly so as handset browsers become better and social networking reaches into regions and demographics where PCs are less common.

Here’s the patent in question: “Method, apparatus and system for management of information content for enhanced accessibility over wireless communication networks.” the lawsuit, filed in new York, does not seem to have appeared yet online as a public court document.

Facebook and Google also like to register IP themselves; most recently, Facebook was awarded a patent for its news feed, and Google a patent for location-based advertising.

Image courtesy of Walknboston on Flickr.

Ecommerce companies favor Facebook and Twitter for marketingUpdated: 2010-03-10

Ecommerce companies most frequently use Facebook and Twitter in their digital marketing campaigns rather than other popular social networking sites such as MySpace, according to the Wall Street Journal. Even as average time spent using Facebook and Twitter has fallen in recent months, the sites continue to grow in terms of total users and the demographics of users.

As both media continue to add new capabilities, like Facebook’s gaming application Farmville, users are turning to them for purposes other than networking and keeping up with friends, classmates and co-workers. The increase in Facebook’s popularity outside its original target audience has also made it especially viable for ecommerce digital marketing campaigns because companies can reach several different age groups with a single advertisement.

“Users 35 and older are spending more time on social-networking sites, while the younger are more mobile based,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “So the average age of Facebook users is increasing, with users 55 and above growing the most rapidly, but the inverse is true for Twitter where the most rapid growth in the 2-to-11-year-old segment.”

Facebook may soon become a leader itself in ecommerce as it is rumored to be developing an application that involves the actual transferring of money from user to user.

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No tweeting or status updates in court or deliberation rooms. Judges have been increasingly instructing juries to stay off Facebook and Twitter — and don’t use the Internet to investigate the cases, according to Joseph Rosenbaum, a Reed Smith partner, who chairs the firm’s global Advertising Technology & Media Law practice.

Social media and access to search the Internet from anywhere have begun to change the rules in the U.S. court systems. County and city courts have begun to post rules outside each courtroom instructing people not only to turn off their mobile phone to eliminate the noise from obnoxious ringtones, but to keep people from writing blogs and posts.

Judges have started giving juries instructions to stay off social network sites. as jurors come on to the jury and during the trial, “judges have begun to tell them they cannot surf the Web, do their own independent research and communicate with others via social media,” Rosenbaum says. “They take the ‘don’t communicate and don’t read the newspapers’ language we use to hear and moving it into the digital age.”

some courts have contemplated banning bringing mobile phones and personal computers into courtrooms, Rosenbaum says. while today a ruling might get thrown out of court if someone tweets or blogs during a trial, at least one state has considered taking criminal action against the jurors.

Rosenbaum says some judges find it useful to explain to the juror why they should not do their own research on the Internet. Previously, the judge would say “you can’t communicate with other jurors, don’t read the newspaper and don’t discuss the case.” Judges have begun to believe that if a juror understands why the rules exist, there is a greater likelihood they will comply.

Social media has changed the way the U.S. system of justice works, Rosenbaum says. “There are sophisticated rules of evidence designed to protect plaintiff, defendant, prosecutor and accused in situations where evidence needs to be introduced that’s admissible, such as hearsay,” he says. “The reality is people don’t appreciate why these rules exist and that the rules are in place so that only admissible evidence is used to determine the outcome of the case.”

the State Bar of Wisconsin points to a state court in Arkansas that overturned a $12 million verdict because a juror used Twitter to update his followers during the trial, including tweeting: “So, Jonathan, what did you do today?” Oh, nothing really. I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money!”

Jurors are not the only ones tapping into social media. Social media can damage the credibility of witnesses. Lawyers are increasingly using MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to gather evidence about cases and people testifying in them. for instance, a witness in a drunk-driving case could lose credibility if a video on YouTube surfaces of the person with an open can of beer getting into a car. Rosenberg says society stands at the tip of the iceberg. the U.S. courts will continue to pay more attention to status updates, tweets and real-time streams on Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo.

The American Bar Association tried last year to address some issues introduced by social media. they focused on using social media in court cases for evidence, but not the issue of jurors using social media in the courtroom, according to a spokeswoman.