The battle rages for attention online

There were several stories this weekend highlighting what various companies are doing to try and gain influence with online audiences. While none of the stories were alike, it seemed that they all had an element of grasping for attention in an increasingly crowded market.

The Wall Street Journal had this story by Ian Sherr and Daisuke Wakabayashi detailing the rise in the fight over videogames.

A long-running battle between Apple Inc. and Google Inc. for mobile dominance is spreading to the most lucrative genre of apps: videogames.

The two Silicon Valley giants have been wooing game developers to ensure that top-tier game titles arrive first on devices powered by their respective operating systems, people familiar with the situation said.

In exchange, Apple and Google are offering to provide a promotional boost for these games by giving them premium placement on their app stores’ home pages and features lists, these people said.

Last August, for the launch of “Plants Vs. Zombies 2,” a highly anticipated sequel to a popular zombie-survival strategy game, publisher Electronic Arts Inc. struck a deal with Apple, which promoted the game prominently in its App Store, according to people familiar with the matter.

In exchange, one of these people said, EA agreed to give Apple about a two-month window of exclusivity for the title, which wasn’t released on Google’s Android software until October.

ZeptoLab’s sequel to its popular puzzle game “Cut the Rope,” introduced in December, reflected a similar pattern. The company and Apple agreed to about a three-month window of exclusivity for Apple’s App Store, in exchange for the store prominently promoting the game, one person familiar with the matter said. ZeptoLab launched an Android version in late March.

Apple and Google representatives declined to discuss specifics of their exclusivity efforts. Exclusive titles are a common marketing strategy for videogame consoles, but are new to mobile apps.

Nick Bilton wrote for the New York Times Bits blog about the rise of inflated friends and followers as celebrities and others vie to more quickly go viral. It’s like harnessing the power of the mob, when the crowd is fake:

Whoever said, “Money can’t buy you friends,” clearly hasn’t been on the Internet recently.

This past week, I bought 4,000 new followers on Twitter for the price of a cup of coffee. I picked up 4,000 friends on Facebook for the same $5 and, for a few dollars more, had half of them like a photo I shared on the site.

If I had been willing to shell out $3,700, I could have made one million — yes, a million — new friends on Instagram. For an extra $40, 10,000 of them would have liked one of my sunset photos.

Retweets. Likes. Favorites. Comments. Upvotes. Page views. You name it; they’re for sale on websites like Swenzy, Fiverr and countless others.

Many of my new friends live outside the United States, mostly in India, Bangladesh, Romania and Russia — and they are not exactly human. They are bots, or lines of code. But they were built to behave like people on social media sites.

Bots have been around for years and they used to be easy to spot. They had random photos for avatars (often of a sultry woman), used computer-generated names (like Jen934107), and shared utter drivel (mostly links to pornography sites).

But today’s bots, to better camouflage their identity, have real-sounding names. They keep human hours, stopping activity during the middle of the night and picking up again in the morning. They share photos, laugh out loud — LOL! — and even engage in conversations with each other. And there are millions of them.

These imaginary citizens of the Internet have surprising power, making celebrities, wannabe celebrities and companies seem more popular than they really are, swaying public opinion about culture and products and, in some instances, influencing political agendas.

And then there’s Facebook, which is rolling out location software to tell you where your friends are hanging out. Seems like a good way to stalk your ex, or gain attention from younger mobile device users. Sarah Frier had this story for Bloomberg:

Facebook Inc. will let people know when their friends are nearby via smartphone notifications, adding features for its growing base of mobile users.

Consumers can customize the tool, called Nearby Friends, to see a certain group of people for a set period of time, or turn it off completely, the Menlo Park, California-based company said yesterday in a blog post. Friends will need to have the feature turned on in order to be seen.

Nearby Friends is Facebook’s latest move into location-sharing capabilities. The world’s biggest social network has added the ability for its more than 1.2 billion members to check into places like they would on Foursquare Labs Inc.’s mobile application. Facebook also has acquired Glancee, a location-tracking startup, and Gowalla, a location-based social network.

Foursquare, which popularized social location sharing, isn’t threatened by Facebook’s new service, Chief Executive Officer Dennis Crowley said in a post on his Tumblr blog. He cited a posting April 16 on the Verge technology news blog saying that people have accumulated many acquaintances on Facebook that aren’t their true friends.

While none of these applications are the same, it’s clear that mobile companies are competing for attention, especially as we all become more reliant on our mobile devices. What’s clear is that the companies that can win the battle for mobile will have a much easier time in the future.