Posts Tagged ‘badges’

Since last Wednesday (18/01/2012), developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio have a new way to highlight their skills, get recognition for the amazing work they do every day, and add some competitive fun to the development day by means of a new plugin called Visual Studio Achievements.

You can find all the information at http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/01/18/visual-studio-achievements-program-brings-gamification-to-development.aspx

Achivy adds some fun and gamification to your social life. Add Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Gowalla , Flickr, Stackoverflow, Klout and many other applications to your profile to see how many achievements, badges,scores you have and follow your progress. You can keep up with your friends, and see the other people’s achievements and activities – achivies.

Achivy provides you to see your and your friends’:

• Achievement “badges”
• Achievement levels and scores
• Top and recent users for all applications
• Progress bars and analytics to see how close you are to complete your tasks that encourages you to earn new badges
• Challenge with your friends
• You can even have some gifts and join loyalty programmes.

They will be releasing their API (http://achivy.com/c/api) soon

Google News added a feature that could encourage users to read more: collectible badges. “The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends,” informs Google.

While this feature could encourage users to visit Google News more often, the main purpose is to find people that know a lot of things about certain topics. “Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are,” suggests Google.

Instead of manually adding your favorite topics to your profile, you could add Google News badges. It’s one way to show your expertise and it could be useful if Google plans to integrate Aardvark with Google+ and launch a social Q&A service.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-news-badges.html

Really interesting article on gamification of start ups:

Beyond Badges: 3 Smart Ways to Gamify Your Startup

About the author:

Rajat Paharia is the founder and chief product officer atBunchball. You can follow him on Twitter @Bunchball and read his blog

According to the article the main questions for gamification are:

1. What Is Your Core Experience?
2. Know Your Business!
3. Know Your User

CrowdTwist powers loyalty everywhere. Their next generation loyalty platform allows users to earn points for any activity they do online, both on your site and wherever else your brand lives (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube). Users compete against themselves and others to prove dedication to your brand and move closer to earning unique rewards, prize packages and discounts, all the while driving significantly more engagement, brand interaction and revenue. CrowdTwist’s loyalty software is able to unify your disparate online presence into a singular, revenue-driving platform.

The Internet is a vast landscape and your audience spends their time in many different places. CrowdTwist’s activity engine intelligently tracks consumer interactions with your brand both on and off your website (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, iTunes, Ticketmaster, Amazon, etc.) like consuming, creating & sharing content, commenting, playing games, purchasing, etc. This system encourages increased engagement while driving rich data into their Control Center.

Proprietary CrowdTwist software and algorithms manage activity priority and point values to keep users coming back again and again to earn points. User levels and badges are awarded based on their number of points and evolving engagement activities. These points can then be used for real world rewards and discounts, not just a virtual good.

You can find all the information at http://www.crowdtwist.com/