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Source:Valleywag

The dreaded marketing doublespeak so freely strewn across the Web is now invading your videogame consoles. Game developers are eyeing the market for cheap, fun “casual” games — the kind you play on a Nintendo Wii, as opposed to the graphics-laden shoot-’em-ups favored on Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation. To tap into that market, they’re becoming fully buzzword compliant: “social networks,” “crowdsourcing” and “user-generated content” are just some of the meaningless shibboleths that have jumped from the Web to the gaming world. BusinessWeek dubs it “Game 2.0.” Please, somebody, frag me now.

The success of massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft is driving game-makers to produce more online worlds — but, of course, they’re drawing all the wrong lessons. Sony’s Home for the PlayStation 3 is a social network-cum-virtual world akin to Second Life. Startup Areae is taking tips from MySpace and YouTube to build virtual worlds on the cheap. And Acclaim is using “crowdsourcing” — relying, in other words, on users instead of expensive professional designers — to design a new massively multiplayer online game.

Blunderful. This is clearly what gamers have been waiting for: Immersive experiences with the production quality of a MySpace page and gameplay as thoughtful as the comments on a YouTube video.

Source:Valleywag

Competitors’ efforts have failed to dent Google’s search market share. A survey of customer satisfaction paints a different picture — which just goes to show you that it’s not, as Google likes to claim, all about the users. The newly released American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) from the University of Michigan has Yahoo regaining its lead over Google with an increase of 3.9 points, while Google fell 3.7 points. ACSI attributes the improvements to Yahoo’s ratings to well-received design and feature enhancements. Ask.com experienced the biggest improvement, jumping 5.6 points, leaving it tied with Microsoft’s MSN.

ACSI researchers attributed Ask.com’s gains to its visual presentation and more advanced integration of topic-specific search results. Meanwhile, Google’s basic, utilitarian design — the hallmark of its appeal in the past — has become stale and in need of a refresh, analysts suggest.

It’s all well and good to try to dissect reasons for the gains and losses in customer satisfaction. But unlike, say, the car industry, where ACSI scores are closely watched and touted in marketing, it’s hard to discern any connection between ACSI’s measures of customer satisfaction and the Web companies’ market success. Web users choose search engines more by habit than anything else, and the Googling habit is well-ingrained. And advertisers make ad buys based on traffic and results, not customer satisfaction, making these results little more than a feather in the also-rans’ caps. (Table from American Customer Satisfaction Index)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 3:35 pm and is filed under search, google, microsoft, yahoo, MSN, Top, Ask.com, ACSI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.