Introducing new people to old things
When new people join an organization, company, or group of people, it is the job of the existing folks to bring that new person up-to-speed. During this process, the old-timer has a choice to make regarding their attitude in this indoctrination:
- “I love it here and everything is awesome”
- “Things here are cool, but here’s some sour points”
- “This place sucks”
When I’m the old-timer in a scenario like this, I tend to always fall into the second group of people. Why!?
It doesn’t seem to even matter how I actually feel. If I’m more honestly in the first or third category, I still pull myself into this category that has mastered the soft touch. I don’t know if this is because I’m putting myself in the new person’s shoes, because I’m reevaluating my own personal thinking, or something else.
In a job interview, if someone asks a question such as “what is the typical project life-cycle like around here?” — a very excellent question for an interviewing developer — I tend to answer at length rather than quickly. “Typically, the turnover is pretty quick. But some projects can run long because of client delays. It’s like this one project I’m on…. or this other one I’m working through…. or this one we had a couple months back…. yadda yadda….” At a time when I should be upselling and singing the praises of our lifecycle I tend to fall back into this reality-stricken middleground.
This is even true of when I’m the new guy, too. I always straddle this in-between spot of not getting my expectations up or holding back in my degree of excitement. This has been very noticeable in the past few months as I’ve met new people and explore new things in San Francisco.
I want to be cordial and friendly and interested, and I temper my highs and lows in order to do this. Maybe this makes me more accurate on the overall. Or maybe this just makes me boring.
It’s A War Out There
If you’re like me, you’ve had the pleasure recently of ticketing your friends, skirting the law, and earning new cars and badges in Parking Wars for a bit of time, now. For the record: I’m nearing $750,000 in the app and am fending off charges from friends of lesser value while trying to climb ever-closer to friends that have more bank. It’s addictive, this game!
That’s why it was fun to see this when I tried to park my cars a bit, just now:
It was maddening, to me, to not be able to move and shift fake cars around on fake streets run virtually by my real friends.
(All usage figures used below from Adonomics reports, April 2, 2008)
When a social networking application can become this addictive and enticing, it’s a seriously great score. It’s impressive. There have been studies that say an application — game or otherwise useful utility — has somewhere between 30 seconds and one minute to impress (or annoy!) the average Facebook user before they decide to uninstall the application. As most of these applications are attempting to leverage some sort of advertising angle, it’s a very make-or-break medium.
While I can’t confirm with numbers that A&E is seeing an uptick in website traffic or viewership for the television program the game is modeled after, I can confirm with numbers that the application itself is proving to be one of the most engaging and actively-used applications in the Facebook realm:
Over 90 thousand people use Parking Wars every day. That’s nearly one-third of all of the 300 thousand plus people that currently have it installed. Somehow, in this realm of shortened attention spans, the folks behind Parking Wars have found a way to get one in every three of their users to return every day!
That’s unheard of. Well, not entirely. Let me give you an idea of how Parking Wars compares to some of the other top applications on Facebook: it ranks #64 in daily engagement (that one-third of people come back every day makes for a very high ranking) and is #498 in total installed user base.
While being barely in the top 500 might seem unimpressive, you should realize that being #498 out of #21,848 is a big feat. It’s right above “Are You A Bitch,” right behind “Which Hollywood Superstar Are You?” and interestingly close to an application my company has developed - Smarty Pants (which sits at #518 with 285,000 total users, 8,550 of which come back every day).
As companies, advertising agencies, and marketing folk attempt to get a handle on how powerful social networking can be, they should observe applications like Parking Wars. There’s interesting pulls that keep users checking daily, whether it be defending themselves from ticket-happy friends, attempting to get the most money for their actions (it’s all virtual dollars, sadly), or just going in a punishing their friends for parking a black car in a yellow cars only zone.
If Parking Wars doesn’t quite end up driving viewership to their television programming, it at least will go a great distance toward improving their brand image and introducing the A&E brand to the younger demographic available of Facebook. Perhaps in the near future they can find even better ways to pull people like me out of their daily routine to check a social networking application every so often. Good work if they manage it!
I’d Like to Think in Heaven… (#1)
I’d like to think that heaven is the place where your best dreams come true. If you want to sleep all day, you can. If you want to curl up and watch a movie on a cold, rainy day with your girlfriend and eat grilled cheese and tomato soup, you can. If you want to play Hungry Hungry Hippos or Candyland with your Mom and Dad, you can. If you want to meet some famous or amazing person or family member you never met in life and just hang out all day, you can.
You can do whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be fancy or perfect. It just has to be comfortable.
Looking back through some old photos of my fabulous friend Leslie’s, I realized I’ve catalogued thoughts like this, before. Case in point: Rockin’ 305. From early 2006:
And my comment below it:
Dancin’ it up in 305 with a hotdog in my mouth and friends by my side. A duplication of times like this would be a contender on my list of “things that occur with regularity in heaven.”
I still believe what I said. And looking through those pictures gave me serious pangs of homesickness.