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Posts Tagged ‘keep-it-simple’

By now you either are addicted to Spymaster, or absolutely can’t stand it. The viral Twitter-based game in which you do spy-like things such as “assassinate” your followers is a great time-waster. But it’s also drawn some criticism as being “spammy.” That isn’t stopping the team from pushing the game forward — first, by finally opening it up to everyone today, and second with an upcoming iPhone app.

The iPhone app, which we’ve obtained some mock-ups of, should be out “in the next few weeks,” co-founder Eston Bond tells us. Those familiar with the game should feel right at home based on these pictures. The “Strategy” and “Tactics” menu options along the bottom are just ways to better organize features, we’re told. The creators are also working fast to get a bunch of new features in the game. The iPhone version will be available for free.

The rapid growth of Spymaster on Twitter — it was a top trending topic for several days after it launched — has already spawned a series of similar viral games. As many have been quick to point out, this is similar to what happened early in the life of Facebook’s Platform as well. But Spymaster was able to do this based on an invite-only system (something which also caused some controversy), now with it open to the public and going mobile, we could be in for a second wave of Spymaster fury.

Just as with the aforementioned Facebook Platform, Twitter is going to sooner or later own up to the fact that it is now a platform and must take measures to allay concerns that viral applications will take over the network. Plenty of people have told me that they don’t want to see Spymaster messages in their tweet stream, but would rather not unfollow people who they still consider to be friends. If there was just a way to filter out those message — and yes, some third party Twitter apps have a way, but this needs to be built into Twitter eventually — then everyone can continue to go about their business.

I realize filters may slightly muck-up the “keep it simple” mentality, but Twitter is getting too big, we need it. Games like Spymaster that are fun for some but a burden for others shouldn’t suffer because Twitter has never been good at the whole “new feature” thing.

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When Mogulus launched in 2007, few people understood its name. Most people still don’t because, quite frankly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or I should say, didn’t make a lot of sense — because beginning today, the service has been completely rebranded as something much more obvious: Livestream.

Mogulus is making the change because it feels like the entire field of streaming live video on the web is on the verge of exploding in popularity, and it’d be hard to find a better name to take advantage of that, as CEO Max Haot tells us. Naturally though, this change would not have been possible without the killer livestream.com domain, which Mogulus acquired recently. Haot wouldn’t tells us how much they paid for the domain, but you can bet it was a very pretty penny. [Update: Domain Name Wire claims it sold for $100,000 - thanks Jeremy]

So now Livestream moves forward. Having just launch its super simple Procaster tool that allows for one-button streaming over video over the web, the first tool Livestream will launch is Broadcaster. It will offer the same one-click simplicity, but will do so completely over a web browser, without any software needing to be downloaded (which you need for Procaster — which is also more powerful).

Mogulus has seen some good growth over the past year in terms of visitors to its site, according to numbers from Compete. I suspect that will rise greatly with this new domain. But it’s the features that make users stick around, and this move to one-click publishing is a good idea — keep it simple, stupid, and all that. Haot also notes that Livestream has over 1,000 paying Pro members, the premium service it launched last year.

So what was Mogulus going for with that name? Well, as you can kind see in the now old logo, it was Mogul-us, as in “anybody can become a media mogul,” Haot says. Yeah, Livestream is much, much better.

Disclosure: Mogulus advertises their Procaster product on this site.

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