Today’s Feature Friday is not about a single feature but rather about initially prioritizing user engagement and growth over other features and in particular over discovery and analytics. The idea here is simple but still often ignored. If you have engaged users then their activity will generate the data you need for discovery and analytics. In some ways this is a corollary to the idea that lots of data combined with simple algorithms tends to beat more sophisticated algorithms run over less ...

Yesterday, Techcrunch announced that Mint was adding gameplay to its service in the form of a financial fitness score. The Techcrunch post already pointed to Foursquare as a service that is making very effective use of gameplay to motivate activity and engagement in the system. I have also found this to be true for TheSixtyOne, which awards points for many different kinds of behavior. I believe we will see many more sites adding gameplay components going forward, much like sites added social ...