feedback

Now that we’ve got the PLAY blog up and running (please go check it out if you haven’t), we’re repurposing this older blog as a platform for news and updates about Fame Game at large. PLAY is our exploration of this culture, the media that surrounds it, and the underpinnings of Fame in New York… this blog, by contrast, is more about the technology of Fame Game and our growth as a tool, reference point, and cultural map.

As such, we might as well get right to it: Fame Game is getting a ton of traffic and it has slowed the site down us down to a crawl!!! This is a bit like the problem we encountered during the winter, except that we’re finally building out the infrastructure that will allow us to grow much much quicker. We’re constantly working to improve the experience and meet demand, so please bear with us. It will be over soon, I promise.

As always, if you have any questions please write to me at rbrown [at] famegame.

Ryan

Fame Game is really starting to cook, so thanks for visiting and telling your friends. A lot has changed, and we hope you’re enjoying the ride. One of the cooler things we’re noticing, is the extent to which everyone googles each other to land on Fame Game.  Nearly all of the top searches that bring visitors to Fame Game are the result of people searches. While we don’t intend on becoming the next Who’s Who Guide, we’re pretty jazzed that people inquiring about this select community come here first. Slowly, but surely, we’re becoming the record of New York cultural life.

At the same time, this isn’t coming out of the blue. We did build this site to be searchable in this capacity, we just never knew the extent to which it would interesting. Turns out, it’ a big deal — the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that “47 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have Googled themselves.”

Its also funny that this idea, namely that people are more important the more searchable they are, has entered the cultural zeitgeist in some weird ways. Start by looking here, then watch this ridiculous video.

Ryan

ryan [at] famegame.com

Quick update: we made a simple revision to the way that all the pages on fame game look and feel. Its also really, really red.

We’re constantly trying to improve the experience, and we think this makes getting around the site a lot easier.

Let us know what you think…

Ryan

Ryan [at] famegame.com

fun with google charts
The audience for Fame Game has grown considerably in the last few months, and we are starting to wonder how well we really know you. For starters (and using our traffic data) I know that roughly 90% of you come from the United States. I also know that the majority of you are from New York. Though helpful, that’s not really much fun.If you wouldn’t mind filling out our simple survey, we’d greatly appreciate it. It will surely help us to better understand our users and how to better help them.When you’re done, you can enter your email at the bottom to join the mailing list.

Ryan

ryan [at] famegame.com

Got a nice email from the guys at Killer Startups today. Now I’m supposed to ask you to click the image above to help us win at the internet. Please do. Seriously.

They’ve taken the time to try and understand what we’re doing here, and they’ve done a fairly good job of summing it all up. From their review:

“Fame Game may sound like a trashy obsession, but this social web of influential New Yorkers actually has an intellectual base. It is tracking the “fame” of about 100,000 New York City residents and 2,500 organizations, which the founders claim represents the cultural economy of NYC. Indeed, the site does not discriminate between business owners, socialites, journalists, or architects- only the amount of attention they receive in the media. Fame Game could be described as a reverse social network- only once a person is listed in a media outlet and included on the site can that individual request to join. In this way, emerging artists, business leaders, or actors can work to gain more public attention and individuals take the role that publicists traditionally fill.”

I’m pretty happy with the way they’ve characterized our project. Simply put, the attention index exemplifies what Fame Game is facing forward: a public record of the social, professional and creative life of New Yorkers. What our friends at KillerStartups aren’t quite keen to however, is how Fame Game is also a tool (and platform!) for individuals to promote interesting and beneficial cultural projects itself. As we (our staff, partners and members) continue to add new content to the site, Fame Game will continue to grow in utility and influence. Its as simple as that.

And of course there’s a bit of criticism at the end:

“Will Fame Game better define its objectives? It lists esoteric rhetoric about celebrity culture, but the site needs to fine-tune its purpose to be successful. There are a lot of interesting and excellent ideas floating around, but at the moment it rather overwhelming.”

I find their criticisms valid, if only because we’re just now making use of the lessons we’ve learned in the last few months. At the same time, we’re looking at this social group and its relationships in a novel way, so if you’re confused try to frame your exploration in the simple context of “people, parties and projects.” Until then, bear with us as we wrangle some of these ideas that are “floating around.”

Thanks for your continuing support.

Ryan

ryan [at] famegame.com

It took some time, but we heard you loud and clear. We’re proud to say that we’re finally rolling out our new image feature here on Fame Game. You can now upload multiple pictures for yourself, others, and organizations. This means a couple of things:

• Enlarged photos get their own pages (like here, here, and here)

• Photos will live in collections or “Galleries” for easy navigation (like here and here)

Being that Fame Game serves as a “who’s who” of New York social life, we saw this as a great chance for everyone to add more pictures to the site to make that a reality. Now you’re not stuck looking at a little thumbnail – you can see these photos as big as they can get! (check out the media examples above, provided by our members and photo partners)

On top of this, we’ve also rolled out a new homepage. We’re still working on it (so bear with us) but this new format does a better job of helping everyone to see new and interesting things going on inside the system. We now show recent and featured profiles as well as the activity in the system – who’s joined, who’s uploading, and who’s connecting to whom.

Though we’ve made some major improvements, we’re still working on bringing the rest of the site up to speed. In the coming weeks we’ll be fixing the bugs and rolling out new Event Pages, so you can keep track of your own and others social progress with the same ease you do the rest of the site. In the meantime, and as always, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Ryan
rbrown [at] famegame.com
feedback [at] famegame.com

While we’ve been feverishly updating Fame Game’s data, technology and new features, we failed to realize that our claim feature had a glitch.

If you tried to claim your page by filling out the claim request form (on either the claim page, or your profile), our system was collecting your request, but we weren’t getting an alert. Basically, if you’ve experienced a significant lag in response time (more than a few days) please be patient - we’re getting back to everyone as fast as possible.

We’ve fixed it now, but if you hit submit and then saw the message, “unknown column undefine” then you should be expecting a response sometime soon. (Thanks to Ainka for the heads up!)

We should be all caught up by the end of Friday.

Thanks for your patience and encouragement!

Ryan

rbrown [at] famegame [dot] com

Hello and welcome back after a month long hiatus. We’ve been working on processesing the feedback we’ve gotten from our first public showing, and working on partnerships to add more media and information to the profile pages.

We would love your help in making this site a more accurate, participatory social map of New York City. You can inform profile pages with information using the ‘Profile Feedback’ box at the top of the profile pages. Biographical information, connections, and links can be input here for review, and eventually added to the profile page. Think of it as kind of a Wikipedia of the New York City social and cultural life….

At least that is where the site stands now. We have a lot more planned for the future, including the ability to claim your own pages, upload video and pictures, and add more artists, bloggers, and journalists to the database.

As always, let us know what you think works.

After the first day of being public, we’ve gotten some constructive notes from you, which are summarized below. Most of the feedback we received involves features that we’re developing, but will take a while to implement. In the mean time, feel free to take advantage of the Profile Feedback feature next to everyone’s name to add biographical information, tags, or external links that relate to the profile. Thanks for the thoughts, they influence the direction of our development!

Feedback

from Phillip Wood:

looks great,
i like the images, and the linking to the others,
I think i’d like to create some more Lombardi type structures. the http://www.theyrule.net/

is an interesting example.
I thinks it’s getting much more web 2.0 as they say, certainly looks more complete than Beta.

Maybe I’ll want to save my connections, and view them later, or be warned when a desired connection happens in the future.
I could do with larger images to look at the’re a little small.
urm, what else.

well your back end should obviously be tracking the links and views, building a model and possibly adding some weighting on the front end.
ie most popular viewed. favourite person this week on famegame, a famegame award for most viewed.

famegame awards, why not, fuck it. let’s be straight with this stuff, hey you with the hat, you’re the most famous person, here’s a prize. Where are my sponsors for this?

From Andrew Der:

It’ll be interesting to see how accurate the statistics are once more information has been factored in, since — based on my very cursory perusal of the site — a lot of the stats seem a bit askew.

We’ll adding all the old statistics from excesdaily.com with graphs, coming soon.

From Ceslie Armstrong:

Looks like a great site. Keep going! I emailed
some tag suggestions via the contact field on the site. Also, please
place me in MEDIA.

From Roy Kean:
You have me listed as both Roy Kean and Roy Keane.

It’s going to take a while to weed out all the duplicate names and misspellings, but we’re workin on it. Apologies.

From F. Sheeran:
I quickly browsed seems to be put together well. Congrats!

From Alexandra Lebenthal:
pretty darn cool- would be great if you had a section that could link
to someones website- also will someone be notified when they have a
new entry or one for someone they indicate they’d like to be informed
of?

From Lorre White:
I was looking around your site. You had sent something out a long time ago
where one was to type in their name and a number came up for sphere of
influence? I found it interesting that since I typed my name in then and
now it was the same number despite the fact that I have been on several
national networks numerous times, have started w magazine column and
developed a highly popular blog. Are you sure this system is current? Just
common sense seems to indicate that this is inaccurate? If nothing ever
changes then there is no need to come to the site twice. It would just be
something that I would look into. Others names I typed in had not changed
either. I am not as familiar with their changes so it is harder for me to
comment…..but I think you can see the point ; )

From Kelly Will:
hysterical! i love the rating system. xoxo

From Spencer Alcorn:
I don’t know what your original mission
was (is?), but I think you have an opportunity to do something very
interesting here, and establishing a site filled with original content
would be more constructive than the (admittedly very efficient) fields
of thumbnails and abstract-less and often-duplicated links. Allow me
to go out on a limb here and say that, insofar as “thought
experiments” go, your site has a great deal of evolving to do –
perhaps even to the point of developing some original thoughts.
As for the timing of your launch, I’ll say nothing beyond a genuine
expression of interest in what your site will become.

We’ll be adding original content soon, but we wanted feedback from people who will be using the site first.

From Andrew Saffir:
Looks great!!! Thanks so much for including me (and Daniel) in what is
truly a very unique take on the NY world! Keep up the good work! I’ll
be watching!