Overclocked

After three hours of tarmac hell in Houston, I’m finally here at SXSW just in time for the last panel of the day. I’m sitting with Mike Krempasky in a panel on World of Warcraft and gaming featuring Joi Ito. Hey, if you can’t learn new things…

5:04 — They’re talking WoW vs. Second Life. I’m liking WoW already…
5:05 — You can play WoW videos inside of Second Life.
5:06 — WoW features lots of addons (threat meters, chat windows, etc.)… it’s a huge dashboard while you’re fighting. Not unlike Firefox. It’s MMRPG meets project management.

5:08 — OK, I’m lost already.
5:09 — Soldiers in Iraq say this WAY AHEAD of the kind of instruments they have in combat. Photo coming shortly… Way ahead of enterprise project management software.
5:12 — Video of this presentation:

5:13 — Second Life is simulation, WoW is metaphor. Second Life tries to imitate real life (not very successfully IMO); WoW has nothing to do with real life — you’re not learning direct knowledge about how to do stuff; you’re learning certain values (teamwork, getting rewarded for good work, etc.). It’s implied this is more fulfilling than SL.
5:18 — The second panelist (I’ll pull up his name here Justin Hall) says he doesn’t play WoW. It takes over your screen; it’s all consuming.
5:18 — His MySpace page.
5:19 — He’s talking about software that tracks experience points — from spyware to Last.fm. How to apply this clickstream data to life online?
5:21 — There’s no way to do this systematically… how do you aggregate all your del.icio.us stuff, all the pages you’ve visited. It’s not easy. He has to manually code something that tracks it all. Sounds like a lot of work.
5:24 — It’s a Firefox sidebar. Sounds like Attention Trust.
5:24 — Joi asks what’s multiplayer about this. “It’s multiplayer because it has leaderboards!” I think he’s having some fun with us at the end of the day. I think this is related to gaming… somehow.
5:27 — Third panelist — who apparently does not have his own website — talks about how the boundaries between games and applications are dissolving. Apparently so, judging by the panel thus far.
5:30 — Games are how you imagine controlling a task in the virtual space. Good definition.
5:31 — Flickr evolved from a game.
5:30 — There is an app that’s Total Information Awareness for the Web. It publishes the contents of your frontmost window to the Web. We will know what everyone is doing all the time. (Umm… no thanks. -ed.) Here it is.
5:35 — Europe and Japan are way ahead in terms of recording every step of your life. It’s called texting. Applause line: Maybe these mobile devices are for more than just conference calls.
5:37 — Ito: This goes back towards an unhealthy attitude towards play in the U.S., which says it’s just for kids. Hence business software sucks because we don’t apply the lessons of wargaming.
5:39 — Ok, the hippies have officially taken over.
5:42 — How gaming meets productivity. Apps that reward employees for staying out of their email for at least 15 minutes… presumably so they can get real work done.
5:46 — Twitter is real big here.
5:52 — This panel has been hippy-dippy (particularly the Q&A) — but it seems to me there’s some value to introducing social/gaming elements into productivity software. Maybe it’ll make to-do lists sticky.
5:56 — A questioner stands up for seriousness and hierarchy and The Man. You don’t want your EMT to have a playful attitude. “I don’t see cops getting real playful.”
6:03 — No one is talking about the logical endpoint of tracking of your every move through passive MMRPG. Advertising. It’s AdWords on crack.
6:08 — On Twitter, Rex Hammock who is sitting a few rows in front of me calls this panel “disruptional… beyond great.”

After an intriguing initial pop, Daylife has dropped back to an audience share that would indicate something in the range of 10,000 uniques per day. Will they be able to monetize this?

This chart shows the sharp fall-off after their initial launch in early January, in comparison to the social news darling of early 2006, Newsvine.

There are two problems with Daylife’s model.

One is that they’re trying to make reading news into a lifestyle thing. Their scroll of massive pictures with headlines (which they’ve now shelved) was pretty to look at, but didn’t get at the essential news reading experience most people want — to consume (or scan) good content with brutal efficiency.

Their topical pages are just more along these lines. They don’t have a “hard news” feel to them at all. Feel-good quotes from primary sources along with photos and charts figure prominently. The actual news seems to be secondary. It’s like a news site designed by the folks behind Flickr.

Daylife is news aggregation rather than hosting. They’re going at Google News (which I’ve never been a huge fan of) and not Newsvine or Yahoo! News. This will be a limiting factor in their growth. The people who use Memeorandum and navigate through topic-based verticals to get their news are the uber-specialized power users. Their goal is to digest a lot of news about a very specific topic very fast. Sure, your CPMs will be higher but you’ll never get six-figure audiences with tools like these. That’s because that’s not how most people consume their news. They scan AOL or MSN or Drudge for interesting stories choosing a la carte from an editor-generated smorgasbord. If you’re using a tool like Daylife or Google News, you’re more likely to be an information distributor looking for everything that’s said about you than a general-interest information consumer.