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Welcome to the decade of games

Seth Priebatsch, the 21 year old of TED fame, wrote a great post earlier this month for Harvard Business Review blogs on the topic social games and gaming mechanics. It's very similar to his TED talk, so it's worth a read:

For those of you still trying to wrap your head around the meteoric rise of social networking over the past decade, this post might hurt a little bit. Because just as you and most of the world were getting a handle on it, the decade of social abruptly ended.

I don't mean that we will stop using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to share with our friends, colleagues and families. In fact, quite the opposite is true, our combined usage of these social networks will continue to increase. Rather, the decade of constructing the social layer is complete. The frameworks that we'll use to share socially are built, defined and controlled. Construction on the social layer ended with the launch of Facebook's Open Graph protocols over the last several months. All the interesting social stuff that will occur over the next decade (and there'll be lots, I'm sure), will exist within this predefined framework built and controlled by Facebook. In short, the decade of social is over.

What's taking its place? The decade of games.

Earlier this year when I was researching and writing the 2010 Melcrum social media report, it struck me how little significant innovation there has been in the the social media space since the launch of Twitter in late 2006.

Social media is very well established now. The major companies are established (you could say Facebook is the Google of social in that sense). Social sites and services are normal, the functionality is everywhere, and the absence on a website or intranet of some kind of social functionality is more surprising than its inclusion.

The age of social media being the biggest thing since sliced bread is definitely over. Done. (Did you or your organisation miss the boat or catch it?)

Only time will tell if the next decade really does become the decade of games, as Priebatsch is stating. But I'm very inclined to think he, and many others talking about the topic of 'gamification', are absolutely spot on in their thinking.

[Seth Priebatsch - HBR blogs]

Bill Gates @ TED

I just watched this video interview of Chris Anderson (Wired) and Bill Gates at TED last week and highly recommend it. For some reason I found it more interesting and engaging than Bill's actual talk (also available on the TED site) even though his talk hit on very similar points.

It's amazing to hear Gates explain the correlation between improving health and reduced population growth, something I definitely wasn't aware of before but makes absolute sense when you hear the facts and reasoning behind it.

I'm looking forward to all of the TED talks being posted in the next few weeks and months, and also hearing more from Steve about some of the TED experience that's not conveyed just by watching the videos.