When I was in high school, no one used the internet but geeks. In fact, when it came to the internet in a lot of ways I was abnormally ahead of the curve. But when the teenager crowd was ignoring the internet, the thirty year olds were well versed in its ways. In fact, towards my senior year the new big thing that was just becoming popular among the older crowd was Instant Messaging, in particular ICQ. I was on it with the rest of the older people of the internet while the teens were just beginning to look at the internet, if even that.

A few years later, my now best friend met me on ICQ. She is a good four years younger than me and as it turned out the ICQ bug had finally caught up to teenagers and it was the main way that teens were using the internet at the time. Meanwhile many from the older crowd had caught onto a new website that was pioneering the web at the time, Myspace. Teenagers of course hadn’t caught on yet, but it didn’t take them long to jump on that bandwagon as well.

Sooner than you know, the “elderly” of the internet had moved onto Facebook. During my times of college, it was a well known fact that when a potential employee applied at a new job, the employer would do their homework and check the web, but the site that they would check out these new people wasn’t myspace, it was Facebook. Why? Because if you wanted to be a serious professional, you had a facebook page to suit.

Now it seems right that while the grown ups have moved on to Twitter that the teens have moved into Facebook as they leave. However, it seems completely off to me that the teens wouldn’t move on to Twitter at some point. Twitter being completely geared around the cell phone and text messaging seems to go hand in hand with the culture of modern teen life. It is actually kind of odd that it is adults who have found twitter, this actually seems to be a trend that you’d think was made for teenagers. But it isn’t.

I think this is an interesting thought though. In so many ways, it is the teens who have always dictated fashion, style, music, and yes even technology of the country. But in the internet, I don’t see it. It is reversed for some reason. Maybe it is because those who embrace this technology as children and young adults are branded as “geeks” or “nerds.” As adults, these same people are often thought of successful and it is this difference that creates the model for the internet trends and explains why it is that teens remain behind of the curve.

I don’t know whether the next trend for teens is going to be Twitter or not for sure. I find it likely that it will be, but who can say for certain. I think the only competition for it is Google Wave, but I have a feeling that like previous internet fads, Wave will find itself a lot of 20-40 year olds all the while teenagers will find the beauty that we currently know is Twitter. It seems likely that teens won’t understand Wave until the older people of the web have grown tired of it and moved on.

The game itself is fairly droll. You complete tasks for experience and money, you use the money to buy equipment to give yourself better ability to finish the tasks. And getting the experience allows you to unlock new equipment and tasks that you can do to continue on the rest. They basically took the worst MMO quests and made them the main stay. Except, you don’t go anywhere to kill 5 rats. You click button, the mission either fails or it is completed and you do it again until you level. Once you level, you buy more stuff and go and complete the next quest on the list which gives slightly more xp and slightly more money.

There are a couple change ups to the game to keep interest going I suppose. You can purchase safe houses which will in turn give you money back, kind of like a savings bond or something. There are three degrees of risk which I’m not entirely sure what that means, I suppose every now and then a high risk safe house won’t pay you, and usually a low risk one does. I never notice though, took a few days just to realize that it was paying out. Another thing you can do is put your money into a swiss bank account which makes it safe from other players taking it at a 10% fee.

That brings me to the only thing that makes the game even remotely interesting, and that is the assassination attempts. You can go and find someone that you don’t like in twitter that is also playing the game and attempt to assassinate them. This will steal some of their money, equipment and give you experience if you are successful. If you are not, you are the one that loses money and equipment, not them.

How does Twitter factor into this?

Now the obvious question becomes, what does this have to do with Twitter? Not much really. Twitter does play a factor. The number of followers you have gives you more base spies in your game. The number of twitter friends that you have that also play Spymaster gives you spymasters as allies. Yay. These spies and spymasters will help you defend when someone tries to assassinate you. The more you have the more protected you are.

The second thing they do is that you need more spymasters in order to better tasks. For awhile, I was stuck at 7 spymasters which unlocked a level 12 task. As you can imagine once you get to 15 and 16, the experience that you are getting from that level 12 quest slows down dramatically. Even worse, at a certain point that task will go away because you’ll only have the latest four tasks unlocked at any given time. So theoretically, if you don’t have many friends who play the game,  you will get stuck at a very low level. At that point, the only real option left to gain levels is to start trying to assassinate people which with so few spies and spymasters means that you aren’t likely going to win those fights often. All this is really going to do is reject anyone who is honestly trying to get in the game which really means this is bad game design.

Where are the Spies?

The other question, is what does any of this have anything to do with spies? Not much really. I mean, yeah spies will kill each other from time to time, but spying really is more about info gathering and I don’t really get a sense of that being the case here. Furthermore, everyone can kill everyone. Even though that you have British, Russian, and American spies, you constantly have British vs. British assassinations and what not. They could have made a nice system here but they chose not to and went all out.

Really the game itself isn’t much of a game, and seems like a vain attempt at trying to make a game out of twitter even though the game has little to do with twitter. The reliance on friends in twitter to do quests almost seems as a realization by the designers that they had nothing and needed to tack SOMETHING onto twitter. What this game really shows how to do well I think is how to use advertising on twitter in a game, or really anything for that matter. The whole reason I have so many spymaster messages on my twitter account was done because you get money bonuses for having more types of announcements, and I only chose half of what you could do! This game is actually doing something I was talking about for real MMOs a month or two ago, except there really isn’t a game here. And you know what happened? A whole boat load of people (myself included) got interested in it. Imagine what a real game could do.

Twitter: Obviously my first entry should be Twitter as it is what got me started on the whole thing in the first place. Twitter acts as a good complimentary blog for this blog. Allowing me to add small mini-posts that are of often unimportant, but sometimes humorous, events in my life. It also lets me post something that I may completely forget about later. The thing I think makes this service work is really the cell phone support. Having the ability to make a small post while I’m out actually doing stuff is really nice and really integrates my blog into my life much further.

Profilactic: This one pushed me further into the social sphere. It is basically an aggregator of all your social services. What really makes it nice is that it has support for a ton of sites, including just basic RSS feeds. Their current touted number is 180. I found a lot of these cool services on this particular site. But they also have a wordpress plugin which allows you to display all the info from all your social sites onto your blog or website. This means that I could post a picture on flickr or a video on youtube, and you’d be able to go to my lifestream and see what exactly I’ve been up to. It really makes stalking much easier!=P One thing I really dislike about this site is that while it touts 180 supported sites, this isn’t nearly true. Many of the “supported” sites are nothing but a link on your profile. Some say they are more, but the amount of support is minimal. Such as ask500people, which it fully supports but doesn’t actually update anything for it unless you post a question (at least that’s my guess). There are similar sites like this, that you must make a post for something very specific in order for it to work and sometimes it is difficult to figure out what.

43 things: This was actually a lesser known service that I found, and one of a conglomerate of other services they provide (43 people, 43 places, all consuming, and best lists). But this one in particular was one which allowed you to do something new. It allows you to create goals or life lists and share them and their progress with others. This is really an amazingly cool idea really (in a way it goes together really well with 43 places too). So what I can do with this is say something I’d like to do before I die is go to the Amazon rainforest, well I can enter that on the list, and it will keep track of what I want to do. In addition, it will show you others who are also trying to do this and allow you to comment on it. So I got a “Lose 20 lbs.” goal, I can go on, see who else is doing it and add an entry to it to say that I lost 5 in the last month. A really cool service, and I hope they continue it and find success.

Ask500People: I’m not really sure if this qualifies as a social service in the same vein. It is essentially a polling site, where you can enter polls or answer them. It is very flexible and shows who has voted for what and where they are from (using google maps) and allows you to comment on polls. It isn’t a hugely original or innovative idea, but it is nicely put together and there are some fun and interesting questions. My main complaint is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to track how you’ve voted or anything. I’d like you to be able to look at someone’s profile and see how they vote, and perhaps find people of similar interest in that way.

Change.org: In a way, change.org is kind of like 43 Things for a global betterment. It allows you to find causes, and follow goals to achieve those changes. It lets you post both goals and causes. It also allows you to add organizations that help causes as well and you can follow them, donate to them, and create groups to collectively donate. It is a nice site. I enjoy looking through it and it has also given me good ideas on how I can better the world through changing my life. It doesn’t seem to have a clear way to aggregate this stuff to post on my site, which would be a nice touch, but still it isn’t a big deal.

Clipmarks: An interesting idea, that I’m not entirely sure how much I will use. Instead of bookmarking a site, this allows you to basically bookmark a part on the site. Clipmarks will save it to their site for you or your friends to view. So it is like an online clipboard. If you see a picture, text or video you like, just clip it and you’ll save it to clipmarks. Again though, not sure if I’d use this much.

del.icio.us: Not a new site by any means and I’ve had it for quite awhile. But did get reminded of it, and downloaded a plugin that will save bookmarks to delicious easily from my browser by just bookmarking normally.

Digg: I really don’t particularly care for Digg anymore as it has gotten overcluttered by stuff and flamers. But if you are looking for a site that allows users to choose what in the news is important, this is still the best. It is just too bad that it is almost exclusively 10 best or 10 ways or 10 weirdest posts…

Flickr: Again not new, won’t talk much about it. I actually am starting to really dig Google’s Picasa but the fact remains that this site still has a lot of advantages over Picasa. You can easily post pictures via cell phone, and then embed people’s pictures on your website easily (not unlike youtube for pictures). These things Google has yet to implement for some reason, and I think is holding Picasa back because interface-wise Picasa is just miles ahead of Flickr.

Friendfeed: Another version of Profilactic but doesn’t support as many different utilities. Actually this one is much nicer, and does indeed have a feed for your site. But you can’t customize the feed as much as I’d like and as such I’m not totally sure about this one. I think this one has a lot of promise however, much more than Profilactic has.

Minta: Yet another Profilactic version. Minta seems the earliest in development as there isn’t a lot you can do with it yet but shows the most promise. The interface design is the best, and they already have a decent support for various services. What it seems to lack so far is the ability to put your inta onto your blogspace so people can check up. You also can’t look at other people’s profiles like other services allow. This one is just you and your friends. There is an RSS feed so I think with a little more work you could output this to your blog, but this one like I said seems to be the least developed and hopefully these features get fully integrated soon.

Orangutag: With this one, you add in the shows you like which ones you are watching and it tells you other people with similar interests and it also updates you when a show is on the air. I like the concept of this one, and I think they could later add in movies as well to really get into it. But right now it suffers from not really working well. After I registered and verified my email, it refused to let me log in for a day. This morning it works fine but it is obviously a glitchy service.

Wakoopa: I think this is kind of cool because it is a program that keeps an eye on what programs you use and then comes up with graphs and such for your computer usage. It lets you share this info, and review programs that you use, and then it tells you programs and people you might like based on what you use.

Youtube: Again, everyone knows what this is. Again a ton of copy cats. Again, no one is as good as the original.

That isn’t the only change though. I’m also now trying out posting on a new firefox add on called scribefire which allows me to make posts without visiting the sites. This is to just make it easier for me to make posts on the site and at the very least is kind of interesting to do.

On the underbelly, I’ve updated my theme to work with wordpress 2.5. So if you were having problems accessing parts of the site before, this should be fixed. I’m also looking into a few more features to really fill out the site. But hopefully everyone enjoys these additions at the very least.