I know, why not make them draw things instead?

DrawSomething, a popular mobile and online game by OMGPOP, has taken the digital world by storm. Worldwide, mobile users are connecting with their friends (many via Facebook) and drawing pictures of words such as “swimming”, “magnet” and “katyperry”, in the hopes that their friend will be able to guess the word correctly. This digital take on the popular “Pictionary” board game is great fun and, frankly, rather difficult to put down. Other than the fun factor, what is the real bigger picture (pardon the punn)?

When someone in DrawSomething draws a picture or guesses a word, each is timed and tracked. Pressing the “Stats” button next to one of your “opponents” shows your average guessing and drawing time between the two of you, as well as the colours used and number of words guessed. This is great, but still not the true data-rich point in DrawSomething, for me. What about the drawings?

How many ways are there “really” to draw a word such as “swimming”? Infinite possibilities. How many do we choose? One.

When you think of the word “swimming”, does a stickman swimming through some waves doing the “crawl” with one arm in the air not come to mind as the simplest (and therefore “best”) picture to draw, such that the opponent will guess correctly? This seems to revert to our inner ideas and associations between words and images in their simplest form.

Being able to track this data, with the pre-defined and finite number of words available in DrawSomething, would be an amazing leap forward in data tracking and disecting the human mind and how we perceive the world around us. Not only our perception, but also how we communicate that visually to others. It is said that, after the age of approximately 10 years old, one has “seen” all that one needs to in the world. For example, a tree, when glanced at from a distance, is mearly a tree. Our brain receives the message that “this is a tree” and looks no deeper unless conciously instructed to do so. This theory, coupled with data entered into DrawSomething, could make for an incredible study on the strength of the human mind and how we, as a species, can improve our mental capacity for retention and communication.

With the number of users drawing pictures in DrawSomething every day, I leave you with this… how many people do you think draw something other than the above-described image of “swimming”?

The GROW Academy is an initiative to educate and empower the youth of today through technology. The Bootcamp session covers everything from social media and setting up e-mail, all the way through to search engine optimisation and an internet super-user course, for those who wish to continue on with more advanced studies. The GROW website’s “About” page (built on Canvas and Canvas BuddyPress by WooThemes) has a detailed explanation of the initiative and it’s founding partners.

This year, Jeff and I will be making some exciting additions to our presentation. While code, to some, can seem dry and boring, I can assure you that there’s nothing dry or boring about our presentation. We had such a blast at last year’s Bootcamp and are really looking forward to getting into some code with this year’s recruits.

If you’re keen to get involved with GROW, I’d encourage you to contact the GROW Academy and see how you can help out.

Remember: it’s all easy, and there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

“If X happens, do Y”. This could be replaced with, for example, “if you see a new blog post here, send a tweet out telling your followers about it”.

Enter Ifttt… simply named, “If this, then That”. Ifttt puts the internet to work for you. Offering a wide and ever-growing variety of channels to work with, Ifttt makes it possible to link various services to one another, based on various conditions. For example, when this post goes live, a tweet will be sent out, a status update posted to Facebook and a push notification sent to my phone, advising me that the post has been published.

Why stop there?

You could send an e-mail out every day at 5pm. You could sync up files with your Dropbox or keep an Evernote catalog of all the links you post on Twitter or save on Instapaper. The possibilities are only limited by the channels available and your imagination.

Ifttt is currently in beta and is, I believe, invite only.

I’m excited to experiment a bit more with it and see what it can do. If you’ve got an account or get an invite, there are also a bunch of “recipes” (Pre-made tasks, shared by other users) to help you get started.

Do you have an Ifttt account? If so, what are some of the tasks you’ve put the Internet to work on for you?

“New! Lists. A great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts. (BETA)

Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it. You’re part of a small group receiving this feature, so don’t tweet about it yet!”

This looks like it will be quite an interesting feature to work with. It can also allow Twitter users to follow conversations between various groups of people as well as to create an interesting list (for example, South African bands on Twitter) and to share that list with others who may find it of interest (by the way, check out my first Twitter list).

Twitter lists can, in a way, be thought of as similar to groups on other social platforms. They allow users to follow tweets by a group of users with a single click.

I look forward to seeing this feature rolled out fully and to see how it gets used by the Twitter community.

Internet users of today are part-taking in a social web, connecting and interacting with other internet users on a global scale. This has caused users to want to write more frequently, letting others know what they are up to via status updates on various social networks. In addition to writing more frequently, users seem to be writing less in many respects. Shorter snippets of content, designed to communicate in as simple a way as possible (140 characters, as a popular example) the message that they are wishing to share. Due to this shortened nature of content, users are also sharing more photographs and content of different types, enabling the same level of communication through an alternate medium.

In addition to the above, various features are become more common-place on social networks, such as a stream of updates by users to which you are connected, as well as status updates and connecting with other users in the first place.

Enter Tumblr.

Tumblr, as mentioned above, enables users to share information of various content types with other users. Reblogging (similar to retweeting on Twitter), a content stream of posts by friends and a custom page theme are all built-in features. Users are able to setup a free Tumblr blog (hosted by Tumblr as well), which can be up and running in under 10 minutes. Tumblr posts can also easily be shared via Twitter at the click of a button.

With new features and updates to the system released on a regular basis, Tumblr is also showing signs of progression.

From a developer’s perspective, the Tumblr API is clean and easy to understand. This enables the reading, writing, updating and general management of one’s Tumblr blog from an outside resource, such as your WordPress blog.

Therefore, in conclusion, if you want to write and don’t need a huge blog (or don’t know how/want to go through the process of setting one up), get yourself a Tumblr blog. After all, it’s the next big thing.

For those unfamiliar with the feature, it allows Twitter users to mark a tweet as a “favourite” for viewing at a later stage… kind of like an archive.

Twitter’s “Favourites” menu has sparked the above questions in me for a while now. I imagine that everyone’s use of the feature is slightly different. I use the favourites menu almost as a bookmarking facility, allowing me to make notes of tweets via my mobile (for example, a tweet with an interesting URL) which I can then go and read when I’m at a bigger screen.

There’s an interesting post and some cool comments on the Twitter “Favourites” menu over here on the Twitter help portal.

How do you use the Twitter “Favourites” menu, if you do?

NetProphet 2009, for those who don’t know (or those South Africans who’ve been living under a digital rock for the past few weeks) is a conference that was held today for the first time, hosting online media professionals, discussing the possible future of the internet, how users will embrace and interact with technology and various niche topics within these realms. Speakers on the bill included Arthur Goldstuck (Intelligence Magazine), Herman Heunis (CEO at MXit), Hannes van Rensburg (CEO Fundamo), Mike Stopforth (Cerebra, Afrigator, 27Dinner), Dave Duarte, (Huddlemind, Muti, 27Dinner), Peter Flynn (SaaS), Henk Kleynhans (Founder of Skyrove), Andrew Smith (Live Alchemy, Yuppiechef) and Charl Norman (Blueworld Communities)… a full line-up, if ever there was one.

Not only was the conference organised and co-ordinated with the utmost professionalism, not only was the speaker list incredible, and not only was the venue amazing… the entire conference was free to the delegates. All costs were covered by various sponsors (Innovation Fund, White Wall Web and RSAWEB being the silver sponsors).

I had a thoroughly enjoyable day at NetProphet 2009. I enjoyed all the speakers, in particular Dave Duarte, Mike Stopforth, Henk Kleynhans and Andrew Smith. Thanks to everyone involved, all the speakers and to anyone and everyone who in any way played a role in NetProphet. Here’s to many more NetProphet conferences in the future.

According to the blog post, the competition works as follows:

“Entering is simple. All you need to do is:

1. Post a link to this competition – either on your website, or via Twitter
2. Leave a comment, letting me know where you posted the link!

The competition will run for one week, and we’ll randomly select three winners on Wednesday 6th May. Good luck!”

Tweetie looks like a really awesome Twitter client for OS X. I’ve tried several (I’m currently using the latest beta version of Lounge) and Tweetie looks like an application I could see myself using. Good luck everyone.

Earlier today, the team at Zoopy.com, a South African social media community, launched a new campaign called “Framed“. This campaign enables users to prank their friends, neighbours, family or random strangers (be nice) and upload their videos onto Zoopy.com (tagging them “Framed”, ofcourse), while the Zoopy community users rate and comment on their pranks. According to the website, “The top 5 pranksters will win R15k, R10k, R5k, R3k and R2k! 5 random voters will each win R1,000 Look & Listen vouchers!”.

Visit “Framed” over here. Now play nice, people.

Gatorpeeps has some really nifty features, including hashtag (#) communities, allowing easy categorising of “peeps” (“tweets” on Gatorpeeps) as well as streamlined searching on various topics through these hashtags. The service is automatically available to existing Afrigator users (a convenient aspect to encourage existing users to adopt the service), and has a clean and clear interface for working your way around Gatorpeeps.

I’m excited to see the progression of this service. Many kudos to the Afrigator team on an awesome job of Gatorpeeps. One feature I would like to see on the service would be more Ajax-like functionality (for example, loading the @username into the “peep” box without reloading the page). This is not so much a feature as much as an enhancement. All in good time hey.

For more information on Gatorpeeps and what others have to say about the service, Bandwidth Blog and Mike Stopforth’s blog have posts discussing the service.

See you in Gatorville!