I demo’ed What Happens Next? at the last Bay Area Facebook Meetup at DLA Piper’s office in Palo Alto last week.  There were over 100 people in the audience.  After the panel discussion on monetization, I took the stage to demo What Happens Next?.  Oops!  The laptop connected to the projector is Windows and is running IE.  Our black background did not show up properly.  Good that I have my MacBook standing by and was able to connect to the projector in close to zero time.  Oops! Oops!  Audio!  There’s no audio input to the conference room’s A/V system.  I cranked up the volume on the MacBook and held the microphone real close, but it still wouldn’t pick up.  Darn!  I guess 80% of the people in the room cannot hear the audio from the What Happens Next? video.  Live and Learn: Next time, connect up my own powered speakers.

I asked the audience 3 questions:

1. We do not require “add” of What Happens Next? application to view video.  But “add” is required for users who are going to vote.  Good idea or bad idea?   Audience responses seem to be positive on our choice to not require “add”.
2. How many of you are going to put in a vote after you watch the video? About 10 hands (out of 100) raised their hands.
3. How many of you are going to write your own ending instead of voting for an existing choice? About 5 hands stayed up (out of 100).

After being live for over a week with very light usage, statistics showed that there are a lot more views of the video than the number of votes.  We are rethinking the “wisdom of the crowd” on question 1 above.  Some changes are going to come in the next week or so to address this.

What Happens Next? social video application is up on Facebook directory.  It was submitted late evening of 5/20 and just saw it on “Newest” directory this morning.  That makes it slightly over 4 days, including a Saturday.  Not bad.  Thanks, Facebook!

Just submitted What Happens Next? to Facebook Application Directory. It took a week last time to get The Picture Game listed on the directory. Let’s see how long it will take this time.

Over 3 million views of this Guys Backflip into Jeans video is the work of SF Ad Agency Cutwater (previously known as Chiat\Day).

It’s interesting reading one comment on the YouTube video saying “They need to hire this guy to do some Levi’s commercials.”  I guess they have been hired.

We just rolled out What Happens Next? this morning. It’s is still in stealth mode, but fully functional. Our Episode 1 has the stage set at a presidential debate, featuring the all star cast of Barak Obama, Hilary Clinton, and John McCain. The debate moderator is none other than commander-in-chief, George W. Bush.

Watch the video, and you can vote for one of the available next steps. At least for now, you have to be on Facebook to do the vote. If you don’t like what’s available, you can write your own and submit it. Players can vote and comment on the storyline for the next episode. After voting closes, we continue the story by making the video based on the user generated storyline. Vote now, and tell your friends to vote as well.

Apparently, we are not alone. While we were busy working on What Happens Next?, Microsoft rolled out the Ultimate Video Relay which uses a similar concept. We are flattered by Microsoft never-ending attempts to imitate others good ideas

Just read Hints of iGoogle Turning Into Its Own Social Network on TechCrunch.  That’s cool!

We just made a new release of our site with Google Gadget support. You can now take The Picture Game as a Google Gadget and add it to your iGoogle page.

You can also add this gadget to your webpage. Use this page to configure The Picture Game. You can change the width and height as well as the font size.

As an example, see this Google Gadget page on our site.

Unfortunately, due to how some of the hosted blogging solutions (e.g. wordpress.com and blogger.com) strip javascript from the post content, it is not easy to put this Google Gadget inside a blog post. Users of WordPress (not WordPress.com), see this page for details, and I quote “…sites like wordpress.com have set the tag filter to strip out all use of javascripts in posts…”

Build something fun, let users play with it, and watch it grow. This is why we created The Picture Game. The premise of the game is engaging content where users get to stare at a (very) small portion of a picture and guess what the picture is. Sort of like “name-that-tune,” but for pictures. But where’s the money? We believe that content is advertising, and advertising is content. As we build out this game, it will become a platform for sponsorship and content/product placement. Try this one, see if you can tell what is in the picture.

This other article asks whether Anyone Pays Attention to Banner Ads. People do pay attention, but a lot less than before. In the early days of banner advertising at Infoseek in 1996 (ouch, I’m showing my age here), a clickthru rate of 1% on a banner ad was considered “bad”. Ad banners triggered by keywords routinely draw 2-3% clickthru rate, and clickthru rates of 5%+ is not uncommon. Today, as reported by major Facebook application developers such as RockYou, clickthrus of 0.1% - 0.7% are considered “great”. How the world has changed!

First we have ad banners. Then we have ad blockers. Based on the demise of a great ad blocker such as InterMute’s AdSubtract, I conclude that users have trained themselves to mentally block the ad banners and ad blockers are not needed any more. For advertising to work, it needs to come in other forms.

We recently added the ability for users to submit pictures for new games so users are not just playing the games but creating the games as well. Submitted games can be private or public. Private games are ones where the answer is not likely to be of interest to the general public, e.g. a picture of your kid is probably interesting/recognizable by your friends and families. After you create a private game, you can forward it to your friends and families. Public games are of people, places and things that are widely recognized. Given the possibility of spams, we do review all public games before they are really made public.

Does advertising pollute your fun? It’s possible, but does not necessarily need to be the case.

We are still trying different features and learning about what makes The Picture Games fun for users. One of the “chores” of maintaining The Picture Game is to keep a constant stream of new puzzles so repeat users won’t see the same puzzles over and over again. While it’s a fun job to look for cultural icons, familiar faces, and everyday objects and toss them into the game, it does take time away from the development work. Occasionally, we get puzzles which users will give us the “Huh? Who the … is that?” look. Trust me, this includes one friend who asked “Who’s Jon Bon Jovi?”

Since we have most of the puzzle generation tools automated already, it’s only a small amount of additional work to create a user interface and let the users get in on the action. Here comes User Generated Games, or UGG for short. (No, it’s not about those furry boots from down under.)

Yesterday, we launched a new version of The Picture Game (on Facebook) which allows users to submit photos from either their Facebook Albums or the Internet. User picks a photo (or give us a URL), our game generator suggests four different “crops” (portion of the submitted photo). User tells us what is in the picture (people, landmark, or “thing”), the right answer and at least one wrong answer. We auto-generate more wrong answers if necessary. And a game is created. Creator can send this to their friends and family. That’s pretty much it.

If you have already installed The Picture Game, go try UGG! If not, install application from here.