Google+’s David Glazer To App Developers: ‘I Want Someone To Build a Deck of Cards’

Google+ is still virgin territory for  games and other social applications. At the Inside Social Apps 2012 conference this week, Inside Network’s Justin Smith sat down with Google+ director of engineering David Glazer to talk about what developers can expect from the platform.

Glazer said the company is testing Google+ in three phases: “One, create a great user experience,” he said. “Two, use relationships and identity to activate other Google products. Three, then do that for anyone else who wants to take advantage of that.”
Right now Google is testing the waters with publishers who use the +1 button to recommend and share content.  Said Glazer, “That’s one of the areas that has been getting traction for us.”
There are also a handful of celebrities and news organizations that are previewing Google Hangouts. ”I think the Hangouts API is going to allow people to build a whole new category of applications,” Glazer said.
When asked about these other categories, Glazer mentioned location-based apps and something more basic: “I want someone to build a deck of cards,” he said. “If you and I are sitting here and we had a deck of cards and 10 minutes to kill, that’s it, you don’t need anything else. [As a developer] assume you have a couple people hanging out around an object. People are pretty good at entertaining themselves.”
For the moment, game APIs are still are invite-only. “We didn’t want to get developers on board and then change the rules on them when we have a new policy or a new mechanism,” said Glazer.
Google is also taking the user’s preference into consideration.  ”Before we launched the first few games, we saw equal amounts of anticipation from the community – ‘gee, I hope they allow games’ and ‘I hope they never allow games,’” said Glazer. “We listened to both sides because they’re both legitimate feedback.” Basically, the activity streams will be separated in a way that game activity is hidden for those who aren’t interested and visible for those who are.
This sounds like the opposite of Facebook’s plans for games. In a panel discussion on Wednesday, Carl Sjogreen, Facebook’s director of product management said, “We want to move to a model where, fundamentally, the integration point in the app is to take the action and add it to Facebook in a structured way.”
At the same time, access to a player’s identity and social connections will play a large part in distributing Google+ throughout the network. Said Glazer, “The obvious insight is that people care about other people, so that should be baked into what you do while you’re online.”
A similar philosophy applies to developing apps for mobile devices like the Android and the Kindle Fire. “Mobile is obviously growing faster than the rest of the web,” said Glazer. “Therefore I think Google+ will see a lot of traction on mobile devices.”
But the devices are just means to an end. “We think about any new feature in the product and think about the mobile web, desktop, native application,” Glazer said. “We’re aiming for capabilities across all of them.”
Platform monetization was built for both comfort and speed. “The only time people notice it is when something goes wrong,” said Glazer. The games will be available both in Google+ and on the Chrome Web Store, and the Google wallet makes paying for the products more like using PayPal.
Brand pages aren’t a priority right now, but in terms of advertising, “Google is perfectly happy to help people use ad money to reach their audience,” said Glazer. “We’re pretty good at that.”

13:00 by Robert dawne · 0

The Facebook Platform Roadmap in 2012

For Facebook, 2012 will be the year of the third party app. News, videos, and songs streaming down your newsfeed are just a “small taste of overall vision,” said Carl Sjogreen, director of product management for Facebook at the Inside Social Apps Conference.  The focus for the coming year will be on enhancements to Open Graph, mobile and games. Facebook recently reinvented the user profile as a timeline of major life events rather than a static “about me” page. The social network also extended the Open Graph platform for third party apps to include things like Spotify playlists on users’ tickers, newsfeeds, and timelines. Said Sjogreen, the apps are “a way for you to tell your story and to discover new things.”
Each of the activity streams serves a different function. According to Sjogreen, Timeline and Ticker are on opposite ends of the spectrum. “Timeline takes everything in your life and make it digestible,” said Sjogreen, and focuses on a user’s general interests and hobbies. “Ticker and Newsfeed are much more about what’s happening right now.”
In particular, Timeline favors apps with longer-term engagement, like Spotify, where users can say something like, “Hey, I listened to these artists the most this month using this app.”
With games, Facebook can take activities like high scores and other achievements to populate users’ newsfeeds while they play. On Zynga’s “Words with Friends,” for example, players can share their highest scoring words or the words they play most often.
Because games are inherently social, Sjogreen encourages mobile developers to create Web-based rather than native applications in order to make them available to more users. “I want to play ‘Words with Friends’ with my mom,” he explained. “I don’t care what platform she’s on. If I can’t play with her, it’s not a useful application to me.”
Facebook is working on making it easier for developers to integrate their apps with Facebook using a single API. Right now, said Sjogreen, “We are trying to figure out which [connections are] going to be the most meaningful for developers, and which we are going to want to build richer experiences around.”
Added Sjogreen, “Games are a shining example of how Facebook integration and social design can really be transformative for an industry.”

10:02 by Robert dawne · 0

ISA 2012: Facebook, Apple, Google – Which Platforms Hold the Most Opportunity in 2012?

Today at the Inside Social Apps Conference 2012 in San Francisco, game developers discussed which platforms hold the most promise in 2012.
Kevin Chou, CEO and co-founder of Kabam felt that the popular Facebook platform has become more challenging because ad prices have gone up 18 percent and because Facebook’s payments platform, Facebook Credits, charges a 30 percent revenue share. “We thought that conversions would go up and be around 15 or 20 percent, but it turned out to be around 5 to 10 percent, meaning that we’re taking a 20 percent net tax,” he said.
Jens Begemann, founder and CEO of Wooga has seen his user base grow to 40 million monthly average users, which is three times as many as the company had a year ago. The European game developer recently launched “Diamond Dash” and “Magic Land” on Facebook, and has been very happy with overall growth on the platform.
Bengemann also noted that the performance-based model is better than having to pay development costs upfront. Besides, no one seems to complain about Apple’s iOS taking 30 percent of the proceeds. ”It’s really Apples to Apples,” he quipped.
Added Anil Dharni, co-founder of Funzio, ”We have seen amazing uptake on the iPad.” Apple has an advantage over Android because of the user experience on the iPad tablet. “We are hoping Google figures out the tablet soon,” he said.
But John Spinale, the senior vice president of social games at Disney, has seen “incredible revenue growth on Android,” he said. Although the current focus is on Facebook and Apple’s iOS platform, the company is placing strategic bets on Android and Google+. ”Android is a little bit unwieldy and has more overhead,” he said, “but the revenue is meaningful enough that it’s worth the pain of doing.”

14:41 by Robert dawne · 0