Skip to content
Technology & Innovation —

New Ways to Drive your Web Behavior

Start-up Badgeville is launching a new product called Social Fabric that aims to go beyond gamification to give companies more ability to drive user behavior.
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

What’s the Latest Development?

Start-up Badgeville, which adds gamification features to websites in ecommerce and web publishing, is launching a new product called Social Fabric that aims to move beyond gamification to provide a broad layer of social networking features on websites. CEO Kris Duggan said companies would not be buying gamification but “the ability to drive user behavior.”

What’s the Big Idea?

The idea with Badgeville is, ‘What happened while I was away?’ and, ‘Who was doing stuff that I care about?’ “We’re creating those same kinds of experiences using social and game mechanics.”  In essence Badgeville is turning third-party sites into mini-Facebooks, with many of the features of Facebook. Duggan says website owners want more than just “Likes” and shares that simple Facebook’s integration provides.

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people
Related
A Virtual Shock To The System: New Paradise Laboratories
Recognizing that technology is here to stay, and that how we live online is increasingly how we live, a new kind of theater company in Philadelphia is trying to translate the danger, intimacy, and intensity of offline experience to cyberspace. 
Guest Thinkers
Happy New Year
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth). Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay. Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
Up Next