Zeek Interactive » facebook

For Phrase Frenzy Fans – An Update

Jeff Turner — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:21:49 +0000

Caught off guard? Yes. To say we were caught off guard by the response to our Phraze Frenzy portfolio page would be an understatement. We knew the game was extremely popular, but had no idea just how much the game community wanted it to return. You certainly made that very clear.

So, we have decided to revive it under a new name, built on a completely new platform and we plan to launch it in Facebook. We added this to our production schedule just over two weeks ago and we’ve made significant progress, working it in among the other projects on our plate. We have made a ton of progress on the backend of the site, the stuff that is invisible to the user. We have a lobby, chat and some game functions working already. So, we’re well on our way.

Now, what should we call it?

We received some excellent suggestions in the comments and we want to get some of the ones we liked in front of you here.

Word War
Word Fury
Word Herd
Pop Phrase
WhirlWords
Frenetic Phrases
Frantic Phrase
Phrase Flow
Word Whirlwind
Phrase Craze
Super Phrase

Thanks for lighting our fire! We’d love to hear your thoughts.

My Y2K Story Would Be Better With A Few Photos

Jeff Turner — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:15:01 +0000

“Share your Y2K story” jumped out at me as I panned through one of my Twitter lists this morning. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great post asking his readers to share their personal memories of the Y2K scare. Ten years later, I remember it like it was yesterday.

At that time I was CEO of a company called AdOut. AdOut was responsible for 100% of the ads created by the Los Angeles Times, LA Daily News, and the Torrance Daily Breeze. Thousands of ads per night were created by our dedicated team of graphic designers. And those three newspapers depended on us, exclusively, to meet their deadlines each and every day. It was a truly a nightly miracle.

So, although we were running a 100% Macintosh office and had no worries at all about our systems being impacted by Y2K, the newspapers were very concerned about the power company and required that we rent a LARGE generator to kick in when the lights went out at 12:01 am on January 1, 2000. Of course, that never happened. And, truth be told, none of us at AdOut ever thought it would.

Insert Nostalgic Y2K Photos Here

So, we laughed about it at our offices. We all took photos by the generator, which was the size of a semi truck. I’m sure I have those photos stored somewhere, but I’m not about to try to find them this morning. And that’s what strikes me most about what has transpired in the last 10 years.

If Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had existed in 1999, I’d have those photos available for this post right now. I’d know exactly where to find them. This post would be filled with images, and embedded videos. The story would contain links to tweets that illustrated perfectly how silly we all were. We could laugh as we read the archived posts from the onslaught of Y2K consultants that surfaced in the months leading up the the new millenium. This post would be so much better if the social media tools available to us now were available to us then.

Boy has the world has changed in ten years.

Make It Easy For Friends To Share Your Message On Twitter

Jeff Turner — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:43:56 +0000

Last week I received a direct message on Twitter from Matt Stigliano, aka @rerockstar. He was writing a post about Mothers Fighting For Others and wanted to automatically place specific text into his readers’ Twitter status window to help spread the word about the cause.

He asked if I knew how to create that kind of link and I said I did, but that it would take more than 140 characters to explain. So, he sent me the text he wanted and I created the link for him. You can see how he used it on the link to “@realhughjackman” near the end of Matt’s post about MFFO.

In making the link, it occurred to me that there should be an easy way for anyone to do this.

So, today I passed the objectives on to Steve, gave him some links to a couple of API’s, and he built a simple tool that allows you to quickly and easily create a status update URL for Twitter. How simple is it? In the form window on the page, just type in the message you want OTHERS to send via Twitter, then hit submit. We then generate a TinyURL link that you can use in blog posts, or simply include in a tweet or direct message. You can use it anywhere you can place a link.

If your reader is logged into Twitter, clicking on the TinyURL link will automatically place your words into their Twitter status update window. They can then review the message and hit send. It makes it easy for someone to help you spread your message and gives you more control over that message.

Shortly after we created the tool, I used it to try to get the attention of Hugh Jackman again. This time via a Facebook. As you can see in the image below, I placed this URL – http://tinyurl.com/cw7o5j - in my Facebook status window.

Because it was so simple to do – click on a link, hit send – the single status message created a slew of updates on Twitter. Each update contained the exact message we wanted delivered to Hugh. Real people sending a real message.

The easier it is for your readers to do something for you, the more likely they are to do it. Create a status update URL and your readers will be more likely to help you spread your message.

Would you like to give it a try? Click here to create your own status update URL for Twitter.