Our Web 2.0 awakening

October 4, 2006 on 6:03 pm | In General, The Casual Games Business |

If you were talking to marketers and you wanted a sound bite, you’d probably say Web 2.0 was about unleashing the power of the community. This is a grand statement, but what does that mean? The best way we can explain it is by drawing on our own experience.

Some time ago, we decided that we wanted to create a directory of online casual games. There were two ways we could go about that, really. The first route would have been to try to build and create that directory ourselves. The second route — and the one we chose — was to build an environment that allowed the users to create their own directory.

We launched Millions Of Games (MOG) five or six months ago, using techniques that were pioneered by sites like Delicious and Flickr. MOG is still in beta. It’s not finished. We haven’t really launched it at all yet. But in that period, over 1400 people have created what is now the world’s biggest directory of online games — something that would have been impossible for us to achieve on our own.

So how does that work? When they come to MOG, players have the opportunity to sign-up for free and create a list of their favourite online games. We call this “mogging”. What makes MOG a Web 2.0 application is that this list is shared with other people. Very quickly you can see who else is playing the same games as you, and you can see what else they are playing.

Very quickly, users create a powerful array of data that would have been impossible to assemble in any other way. That’s an important part of Web 2.0.