Boring website? Step on up to the Heyzap (YC W09) Social Games Bar | Hacker News Reader

Boring website? Step on up to the Heyzap (YC W09) Social Games Bar

games.venturebeat.com

41 pointsimmad15 comments

What a strange idea! "My website is boring, so I'll add something to distract people from my content to make it less so?" Seriously?

How is it different from just opening a game in another browser window, and why would users keep coming to my website to play the game instead of some centralized location?

Hey, it worked for Facebook :P

True, but what worked for Facebook/Zynga will not necessarily work for Joe's homepage/Heyzap.

Facebook is a destination for people to socialize and sometimes play with their friends, so games there are complementary goods.

Most other sites (news, personal finance, technical documentation etc) have different objectives, and it's not clear why games will be complementary.

Bit of a head scratcher for content owners as you point out. It would however make a nice bullet point for considering a web site: if you're considering HeyZap, you have a problem.

Unless you're running a casual forum, in which case it could be another thing for people to discuss and compete about.

Valid point.

A lot of websites are out there for people to Socialize, interact with content and have fun on (outside Facebook.com). Those are the main target audience for embedding Games.

The user does not leave the website, can leave the games when they want and return to the site. Makes the experience similar to Youtube embed of videos.

An alternative view (which I got from listening from watching an interview with of the founders) is that HeyZap is more akin to "what comics were for newspapers". That is, online social games could be ubiquitous with the online experience the way comics are in newspapers.

HeyZap seems to be providing additional tools and platforms for enhancing the online games experience while being increasingly less intrusive on the experience of enjoying the content (why flip between tabs and sites when you can pop up or close a bar at the bottom like GChat?)

Online newspapers/blogs should definitely consider a feature like this. It could be really helpful in getting users to visit more often if they start designing their time around reading a few articles and then playing games for a bit.

"So the bar, which sits at the bottom of a website, is a new, less intrusive option to use Heyzap."

Arguably so. However, I've always found bars like that to be much more intrusive than a little widget towards the side of a website - one can't just scroll past them, and my eye is drawn towards things which stay the same as I scroll but which aren't normally there - which is really irritating.

I think it's cool to have a widget that you can embed within your website, just like you embed a youtube video... but it looks like with heyzap, when they play a game, it lightboxes and obscures your website - they may as well have been redirected to heyzap to play it.

Do heyzap do a small game widget that sits within the page?

Yes we do in various sizes:

http://www.heyzap.com/publishers/get_started

The lighbox only happens when the user is in the middle of the game, which we thought was reasonable to avoid them clicking out by mistake and ruining the game. Happy to hear other alternatives.

So as soon as they click "Play", it opens a lightbox and hides the rest of the site. Is there any option to just have the game play within the widget area? I think it'd make for some more seamless integrations into existing sites.

The bigger widget plays within the widget area (the 650px+ widgets).

Game need certain real estate unfortunately.

Ah ok, hadn't tried that size. Thanks for clarifying.

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