INSEMTIVES » badges

Visual Studio Achievements Program Brings Gamification to Development (via technet.com)

gtorodelvalle — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:52:10 +0000

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

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:18:24 +0000

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 Badges (via googlesystem.blogspot.com)

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:33:13 +0000

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

Gamify your tool in a thoughtful manner

Martin Stein — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:28:37 +0000

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:

What Is Your Core Experience?
Know Your Business!
Know Your User

CrowdTwist, powering loyalty everywhere

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:23:44 +0000

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/

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Points: Topguest Hooks Up With Instagram (via techcrunch.com)

gtorodelvalle — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:53:34 +0000

Everyone loves loyalty points. But it’s often a pain to get them because different companies all have their own programs that require you to remember numbers. Topguest’s goal is to unify that experience by letting you earn points simply by checking-in on social networks like Foursquare and Facebook. And now they’re adding a new layer to the mix: Instagram photos.

Yes, beginning today when the integration goes fully live, you’ll be able to earn reward points at venues around the world simply by taking a picture and sharing it on Instagram. This may mean hotel points, air miles, or other benefits at the over 10,000 places Topguest currently works with. All you have to do is link up Topguest to your Instagram account (via their new API) and make sure your picture is geotagged at the venue.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/27/topguest-instagram/

New paper “Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective”

gtorodelvalle — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:30:52 +0000

Representing achievements as badges or trophies is a standard practice in online gaming. Awarding badges has also become a key ingredient in “gamifying” online social media experiences. Social systems such as Foursquare, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia have popularized badges as a way of engaging and motivating users. In this paper the authors deconstruct badges and present five social psychological functions for badges in social media contexts: goal setting, instruction, reputation, status/affirmation, and group identification. They argue that future research should further explore these five functions and their application in specific contexts.

You can get the paper at http://research.yahoo.com/node/3469

Brightkite Gets Down To Badges (via TechCrunch.com)

gtorodelvalle — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:27:16 +0000

It seems that, although there are many opponents to the badge-oriented mechanism to involve users, considering it non-sense (see the comments on the TechCrunch’s blog entry), badges are an effective mechanism to get users participating. The point seems to be adding value to the “simple” fact of badge gathering.

You can read the whole article at http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/brightkite-badges/