Skyrim beats out Modern Warfare 3 as most-played game

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was nearly universally beloved by reviewers, and it appears gamers had a similar affinity for the title.

The average gamer played Skyrim for 23 hours in its first week on store shelves and averaged three hours of playtime per sitting, making it the most-played game this year, according to data complied by gaming network Raptr. The game was also the most-played role-playing game this year, beating out Dragon Age 2 with six times more playtime.

Raptr tracks user activity on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Users can find out what their friends are up to on those platforms and chat with them through the service. Raptr also includes Facebook and Twitter integration, as well as support for several instant-messaging platforms.

Skyrim's achievement is quite impressive if one considers that it only launched last month. However, unlike many of the top games this year, Skyrim is designed to keep people engaged for an inordinate amount of time. Completing the main storyline can take dozens of hours, and the sheer number of side-quests allows users to play the game indefinitely.

Looking beyond Skyrim, Raptr found that Modern Warfare 3 was the most-played shooter on the year, with gamers averaging of 20.45 hours of playtime the first week it was available.

The critically acclaimed Batman: Arkham City was the most-played open-world game and Rockstar's L.A. Noire took top honors among new franchises released this year.

"2011 is turning out to be a boon for gamers, and our awards highlight how gamers are investing the most amount of their precious time playing every day," Raptr CEO Dennis Fong said in a statement.

Raptr's finding were based on the total amount of playtime the network's 10 million users engaged in the first week a game was available; total playtime over its first month of availability; and the average play session during a game's first 30 days on store shelves.

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HP tosses WebOS out of frying pan into the open-source fire

 Hewlett-Packard's decision to release WebOS as open-source software doesn't bode well for the future of the project.

There are two common outcomes when companies convert a complicated proprietary project into open-source software. One is that a vibrant community of contributors grows up around the project, expanding its abilities, broadening its popularity, and making it into a better component of a broader technology package.
The other is that the project, tossed over its sponsor's transom, sinks beneath the waves.

I think HP would like the first outcome based on Chief Executive Meg Whitman's high hopes: "By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open-source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices." But I expect the second is more likely.

HP tried shopping WebOS around, but finding the options unappealing, bet on a less conventional direction. But here's the big cautionary tale that leads me to my pessimism: Symbian.

That operating system began as a proprietary project, but Nokia and its backers, presumably seeing the sustained success of the Linux project, took it in the open-source direction. It was too little, too late, though. Developers weren't interested enough in building Symbian.

So even if HP tries to keep WebOS as an actively developed operating system for tablets, for example, it may be open-source in name only. It wouldn't be the first time somebody threw a party and nobody came.
WebOS didn't have a glorious future in any case. HP acquired WebOS with its $1.2 billion Palm purchase last year, but short-lived CEO Leo Apotheker decided to ditch WebOS and the mobile devices it powered. When Whitman took over, she decided to review the company's options, and HP announced the plan today after weeks of deliberation.

HP's promise to keep developers actively working on WebOS sounds more like the plan for the Linux-based MeeGo OS that Nokia pushed aside in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone: The operating system now merely has an "opportunity to significantly improve applications and Web services for the next generation of devices." That's not the kind of statement that tells developers they need to divert any of the attention already devoted to iOS, Android, and possibly Windows Phone, Windows 8, and Blackberry 10.
There are other open-sourcing failures, too. Sun Microsystems switched StarOffice into the open-source OpenOffice.org, but the code base was messy enough and the developers controlling enough that outsiders were repelled. The project muddled along for years, prodding Microsoft Office only as far as opening up its file formats. It was only when Oracle acquired Sun and ran roughshod over the project that some developers cared enough to fork the code base and try to strike off on their own with LibreOffice.
After that, Oracle washed its hands of the affair and foisted it on the Apache Software Project, which oversees many open-source projects. IBM remains interested, but OpenOffice.org doesn't have bright prospects. Sun's Java and Solaris open-source projects were equally fraught.

AOL got farther when it created Mozilla to open-source Netscape's once-proprietary browser. But it took more than half a decade of work before Firefox clawed its way to relevance, and that only happened with a complacent Microsoft that parked Internet Explorer.

It's possible WebOS could fuel some organic, grass-roots mobile OS project--especially given WebOS' Web-like app programming model--but the mobile OS teams at Apple, Google, and Microsoft are about as far from dormant as is possible right now.

Why ever would a company want to release a once-valuable asset as open-source software that anyone can use for free? Or for that matter, contribute resources to an open-source project at all?
There can be good reasons. One of them is undermining your competitors. If you can build a vibrant community around a free product that your competitor charges for, you can steal a little of that competitor's thunder.

Yahoo, for example, supports the Apache open-source Hadoop project that competes with Google's in-house equivalent, MapReduce, for analyzing mammoth data sets. Yahoo may not have vanquished Google, but Hadoop is catching on widely and reducing Google's competitive advantage by making it easier for rivals to match its abilities. Even Microsoft is embracing Hadoop.

So might open-source WebOS exert some pressure on the incumbent mobile operating systems? I don't think it likely.

That's because the key to relevance in the OS world is apps. An operating system still can be useful to power slot machines, electronic billboards, and factory-floor robots. Old-school phones had all they needed--a dialer, address book, and text-messaging interface. But if you want your OS to shape the future of mobile devices, you need an OS that lets people play games and post status updates. WebOS, open-source or not, lacks that support.

Note that there's already an open-source mobile OS out there today that has plenty of apps: Android.
After Google releases Android versions' source code, academics, Amazon, CyanogenMod programmers, or third-tier device makers sink their teeth into it and build their own versions of the operating system.

It's true that it's not a terribly communal effort, though. Only after Google is finished planning and developing Android internally does it release the source code. Android 3.x, aka Honeycomb, never even made it to the open-source state. Google isn't violating any licenses, but it's not showing much interest in sharing control over Android.

Perhaps WebOS will shame Google into letting some others into the Android party, especially if an open-source WebOS becomes a fruitful proving ground for new mobile technology that shows Google that Android could benefit from a broader perspective.

I wouldn't bet on it, though. And even if it does, that's pretty small consolation for HP.

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Twitter to newbies: Try it, you'll like it

PARIS--Power users have criticized Twitter's new design, but the company made its choices carefully about what to spotlight and what to hide in the new interface.

"When you're trying to simplify a product, you have to make some tough decisions," said Ryan Sarver, Twitter's director of platform, at the LeWeb conference here today. Thus, direct access to direct messages and Twitter user lists got pushed deeper into the interface.

"They are still one click away and part of the product," Sarver said. "We wanted to focus on the main timeline, the ability to connect, and the ability to discover great new content."

Twitter wanted its service to be better for new users, and an empty text box where they can publish a tweet is a bad start, he said. Instead, they need to be able to find content--thus the emphasis on the "discovery" section marked with the # symbol.

"Engagement is getting someone to sign up, to create a timeline" that shows tweets of people they follow, Sarver said. "Eventually they start to retweet, to favorite, then they start tweeting."

The new interface also unifies the experience across the Web, iOS Twitter app and Android Twitter app. People who want to try it can download the mobile versions or sign up at fly.twitter.com.

It's not been well received in some circles. Of the 791 ratings in Apple's App store, the app has 418 one-star reviews. Sarver, though said of the feedback, "I'd say very positive."

Twitter also has launched a new version of its power-user software, TweetDeck, for Mac users. It drops the Adobe AIR software foundation with a native design--but it also drops features some people cared about. Of its 85 ratings, the most common is one star, with 25 people giving it the lowest score.

The service is growing fast. Twitter now has 100 million active users who collectively produce 250 million tweets per day, Sarver said. The company itself now has 700 employees.

Twitter has began a program called promoted tweets last year to let advertisers reach Twitter users. Sarver said the company is happy with the program but is proceeding cautiously, even though it brings in revenue that's essential for a start-up to survive.

"Revenue is like air. You need it to live. But it's not the point of living," Sarver said. "The early numbers from putting promoted tweets in the timeline [are] insane. We have 5 percent engagement compared to display ads with 0.03 or 0.05 percent. We'll scale that up in an interesting, careful way."

The redesign brings brand pages to Twitter, giving companies an anchor on the site beyond just a few words and a list of tweets.

"We don't call them brand pages, because those same features will be available to all users at some point," Sarver said. "We're starting with a few advertisers now."

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Twitter redesign hands-on: What to expect in mobile apps, Web

Twitter is also rolling out its first branded pages, which--not to put too fine a point on it--look like a blatant borrowing from the Facebook playbook. (See above for one major example.) Twitter, of course, isn't entirely a tool for geeks. Its role in the Arab Spring has been well documented, and it's delivering hundreds of billions of tweets every day. But it's also still searching for a meaningful business model to justify that $6 billion private market valuation. (It's raised $800 million to date). Jack Dorsey, Twitter's executive chairman, spoke at the same conference where I met up with Parker. At his panel, he said Twitter's business model was based largely on "serendipity." The new Twitter promotes "simplicity meets serendipity," which, at first glance, looks terrific from a user's perspective. The implied business message, however, is that it's dialing back on the serendipity part.

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Why Twitter is becoming more like Facebook

Twitter's redesign today has one major goal: To get the microblogging service out of Facebook's shadow. And whether Twitter execs are aware of it or not, in so doing they're taking advice from Sean Parker--the founding president of Facebook, who might know a thing or two about social media. Mr. Parker about Twitter during a conference last month in Tucson, Arizona. Parker was late to join the Twitter bandwagon. He blasted out his first tweet--an apology to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg--in early October. "Sorry Zuck, I had to do it eventually," he wrote. Parker, being Parker, quickly amassed more than 100,000 followers, and today that number has climbed to almost 345,000. Still, Parker told me he wasn't sold on Twitter. He wasn't convinced all those followers meant much, or that they were even human beings. Were his followers really paying attention to what he tweeted? How would they even see his stuff? Parker's complaint is one I share and hear often: The river of tweets rushes by so quickly--especially if you're following several hundred people--that it's way too easy to miss the stuff you might care about most. The way Parker saw it, Twitter had only one way to fix this looming problem with what the business types like to call reader "engagement." Twitter's new look "They need to become more like Facebook," he told me. And now that's exactly what Twitter is trying to do with its overhaul. It's wrapping its new look and feel around your "home" page--itself a Facebook-like development. Twitter was never an intuitive service. It felt like something built by engineers, with a "bolted-together" feel that makes it way too difficult for many people to get started on their own. In fact, one of its most useful features--the hashtag, which lets people target their tweets to specific topics--was developed by users, not the company. (Still, the meaning of many hashtags--#NCT, anyone?--often remains obscure until you look them up.) So today Twitter did something seemingly small but very smart. It's killing off the word "hashtag" and replacing it, high on the home page, with an English word: "Discover." More importantly, Twitter is adding some intelligence to the "discover" feature that should help improve engagement. Click on discover, and Twitter promises to deliver a useful steam of customized information. Photos, too, are key to the new redesign, and that's another area that Parker told me he thought Twitter needed to work on. A big part of Facebook's appeal--and something that keeps users coming back and sticking around--is that it's an easy place to share and store your photos. Previously, photos were anything but easy to tweet, and when you managed it, they'd just turn up in tweets as abbreviated links to some photo-hosting service. Now photos appear neatly as part of a tweet. One click and they open up as part of the message. And it's all tied to your home page as a way to make it all easier to use and, more important, to up the odds you'll hang out a while.

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Twitter, Facebook, Google+: Three-way brand page shootout

Twitter has finally joined the modern world of marketing and branding by rolling out support for company brand pages in its redesign today. Facebook got here first, of course, and Google+ joined in more recently. So if you're a marketer, you've got to be asking, what's the best platform for you to focus on? Let's find the winning services in the important areas. Reach: Facebook Facebook wins this one, hands down. With a reported user base of over 800 million, if you want to put your brand on the platform where users are--and where they're talking to each other--Facebook is the place. Twitter is likely in second place, probably with about 10 to 12% of Facebook's user base (depending on which sources you believe) but its social reflection model (retweeting) makes it more powerful than the raw numbers would indicate. Google+, no matter what the numbers say, is new, is seen as the social network for geeks, and doesn't have the breakout appeal of the other networks. You can't say, "Find us on Google+" in an advertisement and expect people to know what you're talking about.

Flexibility: Facebook Facebook, again, wins on this front. A brand manager can make a Facebook page that does almost as much as a regular Web page, and with the added bonus of having a "Like" button in a standard position to encourage social sharing. Facebook also lets managers create nice lists of related Facebook pages in the left-hand navigation. Neither Twitter nor Google allow you to dump huge blocks of HTML into brand pages. Google+ does, however, have more post types than Twitter. A string of photos or embedded videos can make a Google+ brand page look like a photo album. Twitter brand pages are, not surprisingly, lists of tweets. Brand managers can pin a single tweet (with an image) to the top of the stream, but the rest is just text and links. Design: Twitter While Facebook offers the most flexibility of design, giving managers access to the whole middle of the page (see Best Buy), Twitter allows its brand users to do a far better job of reinforcing their company's aesthetic. Twitter gives managers the capability to change the color scheme of the entire brand page, as well as put in their own header art and background image. Check out these early examples of Twitter brand pages: Heineken, Dell, and Pepsi. They all share the same locked-down template, but reflect their corporate designs effectively. Google+ allows designers to change company logo and header art, actually five little squares of header, but nothing else. The limitation can be used to good effect (Angry Birds) or mitigated through a mostly-white design (Hugo Boss).

Interaction: Facebook/Twitter tie Facebook is all about the Like. Some brands have millions (Best Buy has 5.5 million). These Likes are valuable, as each represents social network reflection out to, potentially, millions more people. Facebook also makes it easy for brands to bribe users, by restricting content or features to users who have Liked their pages. Twitter's interaction is about two things: The Follow and the @ Reply. While the Follow is the Twitter equivalent of the Like, a personal endoresement of a sort, Twitter's large and plain inclusion of the reply box on its brand pages encourages users to send public messages to and about brands. The reply box is somewhat misleading, though: It says, "Tweet to..." instead of "Tweet about..." But it looks like an effective way to get users to reinforce brands by posting items with their Twitter handles in them. Google+ interaction design is a bit of a mess, in comparison. The main interaction points are the +1 and "Share this page" buttons, but I wager that most users don't know the difference, and they're right next to each other. Users can also comment on individual items on a Google+ page, but these will not have the same social spread as the stronger overall brand mentions that Facebook and Twitter have engineered into their designs. Mobile: None of the above Each of the three services presents a constrained view when called up on a smartphone. Designs are removed, and any HTML elements are stripped out and and replaced with lists of posts. The services look much the same, in fact, on claustrophobic mobile devices. They all become just lists of updates, with easy access to their platforms' primary social activities: Likes andcomments on Facebook, Retweets on Twitter, and Comments on Google+. None of the services offer brands a good, customizable mobile experience. The winner Facebook is where the power is, but Twitter's clean design and interaction model makes it an attractive and necessary secondary platform for marketers to work on. Google+ doesn't have the features, reach, or clarity to compete with these two power players yet. However, the clear and best course of action for a marketer or brand manager is to establish a presence on each platform. They can even reinforce each other to good effect. Pepsi, for example, lists its Facebook page as the go-to link in its Twitter profile.

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AT&T throttles speeds for heavy data users

AT&T is apparently making good on its promise to cut back on speeds for heavy data users. Posted by tech enthusiast site CultofMac, a text message sent by AT&T to such a user says that "Your data usage is among the top 5 percent of users. Data speeds for the rest of your current bill cycle may be reduced." The data restriction policy comes as no surprise. AT&T had announced back in July that it would throttle speeds for heavy data users starting on October 1. The policy affects only subscribers who still have an unlimited data plan. Those with limited data plans who go over their allotment are simply charged for the extra data. AT&T has not made it clear how much data you'd need to gobble up to appear in the top 5 percent, but the carrier has said that such users consume around 12 times more data than the average customer. Responding to CNET's request for comment, an AT&T spokesperson promised to provide further details on its data policy. News that the policy is being implemented comes at a time when AT&T is seeing increased sales thanks in large part to the iPhone 4S. The company announced yesterday that it expects to reach a new record of more than 6.1 million smartphones sold in the fourth quarter. AT&T activated more than 1 million new iPhones in just the first five days of the device's launch in October. The company isn't just counting on the iPhone to boost business. AT&T just released its latest 4G LTE Android phone, the LG Nitro HD, as it tries to build up its LTE network. But as business rises, so does data usage. J.P. Morgan estimates that the average iPhone user will consume around 800MB of data per month. That's not far off from the average non-iPhone user projected to grab around 825MB each month. AT&T has itself been dinged in the past for its slow and sporadic network performance, especially among iPhone users. Though it's struggled to improve its network over time, the company still seems to be facing an uphill battle, certainly in terms of customer service and customer perception. It was recently rated the worst cell phone carrier for the second year in a row by Consumer Reports. And earlier this year, it ranked at the bottom among all carriers in a survey conducted by J.D. Power and Associates.

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