While publishers and social media experts focused on Twitter, the Facebook-based game Farmville collected an astounding 83,750,002 monthly active users.
In an essay comparing Farmville and Twitter, one web metrics blogger wrote: “The biggest take-away from this is not just that Facebook is bigger than Twitter, but that the interactivity made possible by the robust platform that is Facebook enables things like an [massively multiplayer online (MMO) game] such as FarmVille to be bigger than Twitter. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter! We just need to keep it in perspective, so we don’t act like media sheep giving Twitter more attention than it deserves.”
After the jump, you can watch our video interview with Orca president Richard Caccappolo about how publishers can use virtual currencies and virtual goods to spice up their online bookstores.
Here’s an excerpt: “They convert [virtual currencies] at prices that are not easily divided–one dollar gives you 33 credits [for example] … People don’t necessarily think, ‘it cost me 42-cents to send my friend a virtual beer.’ I think when the publishing industry starts thinking about how they chunk up content–whether it be articles or chapters–it shouldn’t be a debate of whether an article is worth one dollar or three dollars. An article should cost 43 credits.”
If you want to learn more about virtual currencies, mediabistro.com just opened registration for Virtual Goods Summit 2010–a two-day conference “focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies.”