George Nimeh

Be the rapper, not the wrapper.

Gaming Meets Real Life

Here's the cover article I wrote for Revolution Magazine in September 2011. It's a good primer for my talk with AKQA's Andy Hood at today's Games for Brands conference. 

Click here to download:
RevolutionMagCover_GamingMeetsRealLife_GNimeh_Sept2011.pdf (6.51 MB)
(download)
If you'd like a full copy or want to talk about this topic offline, let me know. As always, you can find me @iboy. 

Liking the new Facebook

Gn_newfacebook

There's always a ton of negatvity when changes are made to popular websites. This is especially true of Facebook, whos users are both numerous and very vocal. Over the past years, Facebook has made tons of changes to their site, some big and some small. 

By all accounts, the new redesign is a big change. The "timeline" is a departure from the current default view, and I suspect many people will react negatively to it just because it's different.

I like it.  

It's clean. It's personal. It's pretty intuitive. And most of all, it places a ton of emphasis on content. Twitter-style quick updates are still very visible, but content like photos, videos and stories are more emphasized than one-liners ... and that's a good thing.

From what I can tell, the global roll-out is planned for 30 September. If you can't wait, there's a workaround posted on Techcrunch.  

 

Unimpressed >> BBC's new beta homepage

Bbc_beta_homepage

I don't fill out surveys very often, but I felt pretty strongly about the new beta design for the BBC homepage. This is the feedback I just left on the BBC website: 

I was hoping to be surprised by new innovation and/or a fresh take on the news, entertainment, lifestyle and other info that the BBC provides. Instead, it looks like someone likes Flipboard and tried (and failed) to import it into the www. Your new beta lacks curation. The date/weather area is static and way too big. The experience feels impersonal. It is plain. It lacks social integration and fails to offer you (the BBC) the opportunity to capitalize on any benefits that you might receive by integrating social media and sharing into the user experience. This is terribly unimpressive. 

You can visit the site and judge for yourself here: 
http://beta.bbc.co.uk 

 

Nielsen :: State of the Media: Social Media Report Q3

Click here to download:
nielsen-social-media-report-q3-2011.pdf (1.26 MB)
(download)

Nielsen has come out with a good report detailing the state of the American social media media market. 

Social media's popularity continues to grow, connecting people with just about everything they watch and buy.
The latest Nielsen insights provide some answers on exactly how powerful this influence is on consumer behavior, both online and off.

Here's an excerpt from Stuart Elliot's piece on the NYTimes: 

Although the conclusions of the report are not surprising, it is interesting to read in “State of the Media: The Social Media Report” just how large a role social media are playing in the lives of consumers.
 
Social media account for 22.5 percent of the time that Americans spend online, according to the report, compared with 9.8 percent for online games and 7.6 percent for e-mail.
 
That makes social media the No. 1 specific category and the No. 2 category over all, behind “other” ways Americans spend time online, among them perusing adult content, visiting retail Web sites and reading about subjects like sports and health.
 
“Social media is becoming increasingly mainstream,” said Radha Subramanyam, senior vice president for media and advertising insights and analytics at the Nielsen Company in New York.
 
As a result, “there’s a need for companies to engage even more strategically in the space” than they already do, she added.
 
The social media brand that Americans spend the most time with, the report finds, is Facebook, by an enormous margin. During May, when the report was compiled, Americans spent 53.5 billion minutes on facebook.com from computers at home and work. (That was up 6 percent from 50.6 billion minutes in May 2010.)
 
“We’ve been seeing that for a while,” Ms. Subramanyam said of the dominance of Facebook in the social media realm. The reason is simple, she added: “It’s an incredibly fun way to spend time.”

Behind Facebook during May was Blogger, at 723.8 million minutes; Tumblr, at 623.5 million minutes; Twitter, at 565.2 million minutes; and LinkedIn, at 325.7 million minutes.

Facebook reaches 70 percent of active Internet users in the United States, the report says, and of the visitors to Facebook, 62 percent were female.

More women than men watch video clips on blogs and social networks, according to the report, but men stream more videos and spend more time watching them than women.