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SGN Hires New CTO for Accelerated Growth Posted: 18 Feb 2009 03:06 PM PST Social gaming company SGN is announcing the appointment of Eric Huynh as its new Chief Technology Officer, as well as the company’s new President of Engineering. With a successful year in 2008 and plans to expand its network approach to social gaming and advertising across social networking platforms and mobile devices, SGN is gearing up for a major push towards reaching the next level. Huynh’s appointment is evident of SGN’s plans to ramp things up, with a large focus on the technology behind its products. Huynh has worked with startups before, as the founding CTO of Gameloft and the founding CTO of Ubisoft. He is joining SGN from Vivendi Games (now Activision/Blizzard), another video game company with a global presence. Having worked with Gameloft, which had a distinct focus on mobile gaming, as well as other companies that gained global reach and were dedicated to socially-oriented web games, Huynh will be bringing a great deal of experience with him to SGN. This is particularly important for SGN as it looks to take advantage of its dominance on social networking platforms like Facebook, and mobile platforms like the iPhone’s. In Huynh’s new position at SGN, he will be overseeing product development and research of games across both of these platforms, along with defining technical standards among other initiatives to accelerate production of games on SGN. That’s quite an undertaking, especially as SGN’s rate of product releases is already faster than what we see from similar platforms. SGN has used rapid releases to become a front-runner on most platforms where its games are present, all of which take advantage of a particular platform’s unique capabilities. Many of SGN’s iPhone games, for example, use the accelorameter, which became a central feature for the device’s overall gaming experience. Just last week SGN launched its new Mafia game series, which came on the heels of the settlement regarding the MobWars game for the iPhone. Despite seeing such disputes, SGN has continued its growth efforts and was one of the first to successfully implement a network-atop-a-network approach given its method for game delivery through platforms like Facebook. It will likely be a company like SGN that better provides a seamless experience between platforms like the iPhone’s and Facebook’s, and the technology behind SGN will be at the core of this particular initiative as well.

Interview With Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis Posted: 18 Feb 2009 02:07 PM PST Today I had the opportunity to interview Tim Schigel, the CEO of ShareThis, about the new ShareThis service they released today and what the future holds for the company. We had an interesting discussion about the future of sharing and how Facebook and Twitter are gaining traction at the expense of other “sharing distribution channels”. ShareThis has few competitors aside from AddThis which was recently acquired by Clearspring Technologies, the McLean, Virginia based widget platform company. One of the most interesting things that Tim mentioned was the future release of an API which grants developers access to information about what users are sharing with others. As more content distribution channels open up access to their “sharing information”, I personally believe it will put more pressure on companies like Facebook to open up access to this type of information. While Tim couldn’t speak about the number of users that have accessed the ShareThis widget, he was willing to share that the company has over 80,000 publishers active using the widget. While a couple hundred thousand have added the widget, only 80,000 are receiving any form of measurable traffic. The rest of the publishers are far down the “long tail”. We discussed a number of other issues related to the future of sharing on the web which you can listen to on the podcast below. I’ve also embedded a video of the updated ShareThis button below. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

New Found Uptime for Twitter Leads to New Features? Posted: 18 Feb 2009 01:20 PM PST Social networks that suffer from downtime often have a slew of frustrated users to deal with, and that can be a huge hindrance to a given network. Pingdom recently released the stats for 2008 downtime across the top social networks, and the findings aren’t all surprising. MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Hi5 and Imeem saw the highest rates of uptime, while Twitter saw the most downtime of all the major social networks. Friendster had the single most disastrous episode of downtime, with 23 hours of inaccessibility over the course of 3 days. But LinkedIn has also witnessed an increase in downtime, which happens to be the complete opposite of what we’ve seen with Twitter. As Twitter finally took care of its own server issues, the site has seen a decrease in downtime. It’s also important to note that both LinkedIn and Twitter have seen significant growth in the past year. Pingdom hints that LinkedIn’s growth could be a contributing factor to its downtime, as the company copes with the rate of growth. Twitter, on the other hand, struggled with its growth and its correlation to its downtime from early on, and has seen a great deal of growth and success since fixing the problem late last summer. I’ve always found it rather fascinating that Twitter was able to retain such a large and active user base despite its perpetual downtime and related issues. But looking at the nature of Twitter and its users it becomes rather evident that the recurring sight of the fail whale became a shared experience in itself for Twitter users. Now that we don’t get to see the fail whale as often as we used to, Twitter is taking complete advantage of its new found uptime in order to introduce new features. This has also become more evident in recent weeks, as Twitter received tens of millions in additional funding, and has found itself in direct competition with the likes of Facebook (speculatively fueling the feature fire). LinkedIn, on the other hand, could attribute some of its growth to the increase in layoffs, as many flock to the professional niche network to leverage friends and colleagues for finding a new job. These growing pains could certainly be causing some of LinkedIn’s downtime, which is often par for the course. What’s also interesting is the similarities in Twitter and LinkedIn’s growth trends, though Twitter is growing at a higher rate than LinkedIn. This is typical, as Twitter is a smaller network, but notable as downtime for Twitter and LinkedIn are moving in complete opposite directions from each other.

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