skannamalai

I feel you, I don't love Taibbi at all, but at the same time, he's not on the NYT's most e-mailed articles list every week. You can escape Taibbi, whereas Friedman is like Sauron's eye, gazing into your soul no matter where you try and hide.

This is terrific. Especially if you share Matt Taibbi's opinion that Friedman's writing is a bloviated mess of half-baked ideas and nonsensical metaphors.

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/23/tom-friedman-stri...

However, I am surprised by the several posters here who feel this is a great approximation and yet also that Friedman is a great author. I am curious how a predictably impenetrable and meandering style is worth reading.

Thanks! I completely get what you are talking about re: the merits of meaningful game features vs just a cheap "gamification" job... something we'll have to keep an eye on as we move forward. This is my first company/product (ever) so it's a bit alarming how many things we've already realized we don't know.

Thank you for your comments, I'm definitely going to check out your firm's site and from a business and personal interest standpoint because frankly it seems like you've thought through at least several things we haven't quite gotten to yet. For example, I hadn't realized (although perhaps intuitive in hindsight) that the context of whom you are playing with/against can effectively curb anti-social behavior like cheating.

sorry, was sick all weekend! So far we haven't worked out anti-cheating strategies, because we haven't really structured the initial challenges around rewards or achievements, but rather around personal interests. As we add more traditional rewards and scoring type stuff (it hurts my soul to type gameification with sincerity) we'll have to start addressing cheating, particularly if we release clients on other platforms or a direct API to our system.

This is somewhat alarming for my team as we've been working on very similar stuff for a while now (albeit for iOS). Oh well, full steam ahead, I suppose.