2009 June 02 | Alec Saunders

Spymaster took off like a rocket over this past weekend. A little bit of hype, plus the desire to be playing with the cool new thing, and boom… you’ve got an instant hit. There was a dark side, however, in the way that it used Twitter to communicate with users and recruit others to the game. The Twitter audience is not the Facebook audience, and many Twitter users reacted negatively. Even those who tried it, rapidly abandoned the game.

Yesterday I started seeing the first signs that the Spymaster phenomenon might have peaked. I had a busy day at work. In the morning my circle of Spymasters was 78. By the time I checked it last night, it had shrunk to 62. This morning, bit.ly showed that users clicking on the Spymaster links had flat-lined from Sunday to Monday also.

What can you learn from Spymaster’s experience?

Pick the audience that you’re targeting your viral experience at carefully. Spymaster chose the Twitter audience, but they might have been better off chasing Facebook users.
Make sure there’s enough product to engage the customer without turning on the viral engine first. A lot of folks, myself included, concluded that Spymaster was dull. While beautiful to look at, the gameplay wasn’t engaging enough. Virality alone can’t drive an application to success. Success requires that all of the elements that make for an engaging game, or useful application, be there already. Virality is simply a way to drive down marketing costs. The Spymaster team could have chosen to spend an a little more time developing more engaging game play and profited more from the viral wave they created.

The Spymaster team already understands both these points. Developer Eston Bond commented here yesterday that “we are literally only three weeks into the development cycle and on our first shot at having ever built an online game. I’m sure the team and I still have a lot more to learn about compelling gameplay, and at the end of the day it’s going to be the players that help shape its future.”

Full marks, Eston.

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I had a good chat with Jeff Pulver last week. We were long overdue. Since the beginning of the year, Jeff’s been a whirlwind announcing no fewer than 4 events in the last six months. Among the many things we discussed was his recent HD Communications Summit. The event itself caused a stir. Afterward, Jeff was on fire, talking about the people that had shown up and the enthusiasm for the technology.

Anybody who has ever experienced a Skype call will identify with the benefits of wideband audio immediately. By increasing the spectrum of audible frequencies from the extremely limited capabilities of today’s telephone systems to something more akin to an FM radio, the experience becomes more engaging and less fatiguing.

So far VoIP has been about cheap minutes, and not much more. The VoIP “industry” (as opposed to the communications industry) has been a giant arbitrage play pitting toll based minutes against bandwidth. Jeff thinks that HD voice could change that. Now others are coming around to the same viewpoint. IDC’s Rebecca Swensen was quoted by VoIPPlanet.com saying: “Originally, cost was the number one reason businesses moved to VoIP, with features and functionality becoming a distant second and third. Now, features and functionality are running a tight race with costs for first place.” And according to a recent survey by Global IP Solutions, fifty-seven percent of those surveyed felt that conference calls would be the biggest beneficiary of HD Voice.

Welcome news.

Today’s 3Khz audio standard dates back to 1937. In an age of crystal clear video, and concert quality audio, all streamable across digital networks, it seems inconceivable that we wouldn’t want more from the telephone.

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