I think it’s quite clever on their part, and it feels like a natural evolution of the gaming ecosystem as advertisement starts to creep into the gaming experience. Social gaming has already seen some partnerships with large brands, like the Farmer’s Insurance blimp in Zynga’s Farmville, or deals with charities whereby they reap the benefits of virtual goods sold in the game. Some console games also have deals with advertisers that show brand ads on billboards in a stadium, for example.

But what if you combined a commercial brand with a virtual good that cost real money?

Let’s say you’re playing a sports game and your players are tired, so you need to re-energize them. Well, you can perform some “grind” action, or have them drink water, but you now also have the option to let them drink Gatorade. Drinking Gatorade will give your players an extra boost, superior to water or resting, and will give you a slight edge in the game. The catch is that the Gatorade option costs game credits.

Now some might say that paying for branded goods would be crazy because, after all, advertising is annoying and painful and we tolerate it only so that we can enjoy things like free television. We don’t pay extra to have ads shoved at us. If anything, we pay less when ads are involved, right?

Not quite.

In fact, we, the consumers, pay advertisers all the time. Not only do we buy their products, but we proudly wear their giant logos, and flaunt their designs. Why? Because it signals status. For the same reason that someone will shell out $50 of hard earned money for some awesome suit of armor in a MMORPG, or purchase a limited edition mansion on Farmville, other people will spend $500 or more on a purse because it has Louis Vitton’s logo stamped all over it.

As humans, we are drawn to social hierarchy, and we love status. “Aspirational” brands are just that – something for people to aspire to. Anyone can ride a bicycle. But it takes some real scratch to drive an Audi R8. Cruising down the street with your R8 purring will definitely turn some heads and might even get you laid. In a game, however, its superior performance might help you win the race.

So is it really such a stretch to think that people would pay a premium to unlock a branded virtual good in a game that provided some premium features or game play? I don’t think so. In fact, I believe that branded goods that cost real money could be wildly profitable, assuming they’re built into a game in a way that doesn’t spoil the core game mechanics.

The best part for game developers is that it could evolve into a two-sided market. Will I offer Gatorade or Powerade to my users? RedBull or 4Loco? Depends on which one of them pays for exclusivity. Then you can turn around and sell the branded virtual good on top of that. It’s a win-win.

I haven’t heard of anyone doing this yet, but if any of you know of real life examples of this, please let me know in the comments.

Be that as it may, Twitter just launched a redesigned homepage a few minutes ago, and it features search and topic trending front and center.  As I just tweeted, if there was any doubt about the direction Twitter might be headed as a company, I think the new design clears that right up.

Regular Twitter watchers should not find this surprising. Frankly, I think it makes a ton of sense. Real-time search is the new black here Silicon Valley, and Twitter is uniquely positioned to do something interesting in this space. Of course, the challenges are still great, because simply searching what people are saying or doing in real time doesn’t solve the problem of relevance, context or accuracy.

I’ve long been interested in both social search (e.g. mining one’s network for data) and real-time search, and I’m really excited to see what Twitter has up its sleeves.

P.S. Perhaps fittingly, it was launched on @Ev and @Sara‘s anniversary. Hooray for new beginnings!

At Joby we use Netsuite for our shopping cart, and one of my chief frustrations is how locked in we are to their shitty UI design. It’s truly awful. It takes at least 6 steps to get through the entire checkout process, entering discount codes is completely unintuitive, and customizing the look and feel is very limited and a pain in the ass.

FoxyCart seems to solve most of these problems, and I wish I had a project right now that would let me implement it so I could test its full functionality. They let you completely customize the look & feel of your cart using CSS, they make checkout a breeze, and they’re compatible across most modern browsers. They also have fancy features like live rate calculation from most major shippers (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL).

If any of you are looking for a solution out there, I encourage you to check it out, with the caveat that it’s still in beta, so it might not have 100% of the features you want. But so far it’s looking pretty darn good.

Here’s a video of their demo:

I give them kudos for addressing these questions publicly and for permitting transparency into their operations and technical challenges. As I see it, however, they’re still not out of the woods yet, even if I (and most of the Twittersphere) am pulling for them in a big way.

Over the past few days I’ve been working on getting our Joby version of the Help Center up and running, and I’m pleased to show off our installation to the world. I can’t say enough about the folks over at Get Satisfaction – especially Lane, Thor and Scott (their lead developer), who have been extremely helpful the entire time. Those guys really do know customer service.

In case you’re interested, here’s the full press release, which includes a little quote from me:

Starting today, companies on the Get Satisfaction support network can respond directly to posts in the public Twitter stream, and incorporate those conversations into their own Web sites. Overheard bridges the public Twitter stream into Get Satisfaction’s support network. Help Center seamlessly integrates Get Satisfaction’s support network into the company’s own Web site.

With Overheard, companies can support customer conversations across the Web. Overheard lists out recent Twitter posts (“tweets”) related to a company and allows any user – employee or customer – to convert a selected tweet into a rich, searchable Get Satisfaction topic. When someone replies to a tweet via Overheard, Get Satisfaction sends a public reply to that person to let them know a discussion was started in response to their issue.

Comcast bridges Twitter to its Get Satisfaction community in order to not only discover customers outside of their traditional systems, but also respond to them:

“What a great way to work with other social media websites! Overheard is a great way for a company to stay connected to their customers on the web.” – Frank Eliason, Comcast Corporation

Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog uses Help Center ( http://getsatisfaction.com/for_companies/help_center ) to give customers a consistent, branded customer service experience with network benefits:

“We try to reach our customers wherever they are. Our bloggers speak to us through their own blogs, Twitter, and many other channels. We want to bring all of these conversations into MyBlogLog so that all members can benefit from the discussion. We’re excited about Overheard and Help Center because these services enable us not only to respond to our customers in a uniform and focused manner, but also to connect via the channels that our customers are already using.” – Ian Kennedy, Product Manager at MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! company.

Joby (maker of the GorillaPod) was also quick to leverage Help Center’s branding advantage:

“We like using Get Satisfaction, and jumped at the opportunity to use the Help Center at Joby.com. I’m a big fan of anything that makes my life easier, and now I can give customers quick answers while keeping them on our site. As an added benefit, the branding is our own and we can provide a consistent Joby experience.” – Peter Berg, Joby.

Help Center is an open source help application, written in PHP and powered by Get Satisfaction Web Services. This open source approach enabled MyBlogLog to embed Get Satisfaction’s customer service engine within its own Web site for a seamless customer service experience:

“MyBlogLog took advantage of Help Center’s open source code because it gave us more control. It was easy for our developer to use the Get Satisfaction API to match our own look and feel, and we had greater flexibility to use the Get Satisfaction customer service engine to meet our needs.” – Ian Kennedy, Product Manager at MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! company.

Help Center has a customizable look and feel, is extensible into internal customer relationship management applications, and supports quick localization. Though Help Center was just released privately this week, the company was pleased to discover that one open source developer has already delivered German translation.

Links to Early Overheard Adopters:

•    http://getsatisfaction.com/comcast/overheard
•    http://getsatisfaction.com/oreilly/overheard
•    http://getsatisfaction.com/seesmic/overheard
•    http://getsatisfaction.com/mybloglog/overheard

Links to Early Help Center Adopters:

•    http://www.mybloglog.com/gs/
•    http://joby.com/support/
•    http://help.skitch.com/

About Get Satisfaction:

Get Satisfaction ( http://www.getsatisfaction.com ) is a Web-based support network that delivers customer service from the outside in. Constructive, customer-focused communities for companies and products emerge within this ‘Switzerland’ for company-customer engagement. The company is privately held and institutional investors include First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, and SoftTechVC.

So what could be better than something which marries the two? In an attempt to do just that I downloaded Twitterberry the other day to test it as a client on my Blackberry.

Unfortunately, I found it to be a great concept but poorly executed. It contrasts starkly with the fluid, effortless UI of the Blackberry. My chief complaint is that it’s too difficult to see updates from your friends when using Twitterberry. The screen defaults to an input screen where you can enter tweets, but if you want to see what anyone else is up to, you have to explicitly select the “Friend Timeline” window via the menu button. Doing so not only takes you away from the ability to update, but the friend timeline reloads itself EVERY time you look at it – it doesn’t cache tweets.

Another problem is the fact that you don’t have access to the full menu of actions when you’re looking at any screen other than the input section. So when you’re checking out your replies or your friends’ tweets, the menu button is dumbed down. To do anything useful, you first have to back out of the screen you’re looking at, return to the input screen, and then select whatever action you want. That’s an extra step which gets super annoying if you hope to use Twitterberry with any sort of frequency.

After about 5 hours of having Twitterberry installed, I uninstalled it an returned to using Google Talk for the Blackberry as my mobile Twitter client. It’s super simple, but it’s still more pleasant to use than Twitterberry.

Twitterberry definitely still has potential, but they really need to work on the user interface. For starters, try putting the friend feed and an input field on the same screen. That would make a world of difference.