Let me explain, some parts of this, I have been working mostly as a UX strategist and growth hacker for a lot of startups and somehow I ended up leading a small social media consultancy and helping a lot of brands. (Don't ask me why - I have no idea - it just happened).
Facebook has always been a very weird communication medium, it's the only algorithmic communication medium that people actually use. One truth about this is, that 99% of all brands and companies are not able to use this, because optimizing your communication and ads for an algorithmic model is too complex. Brand Communication has always been quite simple: Find some values you want to attach to your brand, find something creative that sticks and mix these values and your brand... then publish.
Facebook is insanely complex, because you have a third layer: find something users want to interact with. Now you have three layers and those three are mutually exclusive for many brands. A Toilet paper company may find some ideas people want to interact with, but those ideas will probably not match their idea for their brand or values. And even if a brand finds a sweet spot between those three coordinates, they have to use right technique and be insanely creative to stay in that spot.
This is something brands and companies are learning very very slowly, so Facebook is not really changing anything in a way, it's just adapting to the situation.
I actually think that the way the game works. Throwing you back to the home screen every time you loose, makes it more likely that users write a review. They are already outside of the game.
Sorry, totally wrong. I'm in Germany I know at least 20 people who read HN. I know a lot more who have heard of Dustin Curtis and the AA redesign. You don't understand the global impact of HN and a networked society.
There are actually a lot of companies with more than 100.000 employees... I think it's just natural that there aren't more... you need a very big market for them
Now that's only an option, if users understand what will happen and why they should change this setting. "Manage Back Button" is not an understandable option. So instead of solving the problem you just defered to the user. That's not design, that's just lazy.
You could try mood based ads. Very difficult to sell to an advertiser, but it could have some interesting applications. I wonder if depressed or happy people buy more.
The desire for personal immortality is the oldest known human desire, it's written down in the oldest story we know http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh, or still standing in the pyramids and similar burial places all over the world.
What's lacking in Berlin is technology. There are a lot of interesting startups when it comes to commerce or media but not many who can you impress you with their technology. And it lacks the investors that will invest in a high risk technology venture.
If I could guess, 100% of the people are male. Polyamory is usually one guy and more women and is usually quite the sexist thing. Seeking life extension is at the current point of science not really rational.
Here's the story of a so called social media expert: My story. I've been working at various online projects, startups and agencies since 1998 (or 1999 I'm not sure). For the last 8 years I've mostly done consulting in the UX area and some related strategic areas (product development, focus, features...). More and more communities came to me with questions about their features , their UX issues and how to build communities. Since UX social design is pretty interesting, I was happy with that, but then something changed. In the last years more and more brands came to me and asked for social media advice, at first I resisted. I gave them advice, but I didn't see it as a strategic opportunity, by then we had grown to a small consultancy and I saw no moat or specific knowledge we could use.
Because ... well after all Social Media is easy isn't it? It's just using Facebook and Twitter and nearly everybody can do it. I'm a hacker (a nontechnical hacker who knows what lisp is and how to get a database to scale) i thought marketing is stupid, I want to work on cool stuff.
But something happened in the last 2 years, I analyzed how the behaviour of users changed. I helped building brands on social media. I saw the difficulties of people that had active and succesful twitter accounts in developing a succesful strategy for a a company.
I now see Social Media Consulting as a central part of our business and we have a moat, it's knowledge. Managing a Facebook Account with 1.000.000 likes is not easy and it has nothing to do with using Facebook as a personal tool.
The term social media ist still stupid but I no longer have a problem calling myself a social media expert. Expertise is a relative term even a local Social Media expert with 800 followers might be perfect for his clients.
Using social platforms for strategic communication purposes is not easy.
I actually like the german site http://www.spiegel.de/ . News website design has gone a completely different path in germany and i think this path is more weblike, it's a stream and feed of news. The way news sites are designed everywhere else is too cluttered for me.
Well, deflation can be the worst problem any economy can have. If my money is worth more if I don't invest it and just hold onto it, I'm not going to invest anything. This is actually a situation that killed several medieval economies, there was just not enough currency to go round. Our modern western economy is worth a lot more than the combined gold supply of the world, so if we want to have a working currency we have to print it. Now the remaining question is how much to print, you can never print exactly the amount you would need to get 0% inflation, so you have either inflation or deflation. Since deflation makes investment worthless and kills your economy, inflation is the way to go. If no money is printed you have deflation there is no way to have a growing economy and not increase the monetary supply.
I actually met him at the start of this (Erlangen), it feels even more weird if you think about how much data you can correlate if you have more than one persons data. This could be big - you will probably get millions of funding even pre launch.
Facebook has always been a very weird communication medium, it's the only algorithmic communication medium that people actually use. One truth about this is, that 99% of all brands and companies are not able to use this, because optimizing your communication and ads for an algorithmic model is too complex. Brand Communication has always been quite simple: Find some values you want to attach to your brand, find something creative that sticks and mix these values and your brand... then publish.
Facebook is insanely complex, because you have a third layer: find something users want to interact with. Now you have three layers and those three are mutually exclusive for many brands. A Toilet paper company may find some ideas people want to interact with, but those ideas will probably not match their idea for their brand or values. And even if a brand finds a sweet spot between those three coordinates, they have to use right technique and be insanely creative to stay in that spot.
This is something brands and companies are learning very very slowly, so Facebook is not really changing anything in a way, it's just adapting to the situation.