We Can Fix That with Data

Yesterday, I snarked on food diary websites who could make money with their data.

In terms of determining the “average American diet,” like NPD food diary findings strive to do, diet websites like The Daily Plate won’t be useful. People who use those sites are Internet-savvy dieters. They almost certainly aren’t representative.

However, it’d be fascinating to compare the average eating habits of said Internet-savvy dieters over time — did Michael Pollan and friends really encourage a significant number of people to start eating “food, not too much, mostly plants,” the way that NYT article suggested? They could undermine the NPD there. Muahaha.

Companies like Weight Watchers could benefit tremendously from analyzing their database. The Weight Watchers program depends on social reinforcement, where group leaders are pushing company policy on “the right foods to eat” and (to a lesser extent) consumption of Weight Watchers products. If a significant percentage of Weight Watchers members use the website to track their diets — and track reliably — the company can see how effective those money-making policies are, and can see whether or not it makes a difference, since users regularly track their weight. (Of course, they need to take a shame factor into account — you know, since stuff you eat while you’re standing doesn’t count, and that weight can’t be right, because I drank a glass of water before I went to bed, etc. etc.)

Is Weight Watchers taking advantage of their database? They charge an extra fee for access, so I doubt it. Additionally, they say that group members who use those tools lose more weight; the small print says “weight loss data based on 12 week study comparing people who were instructed to attend Weight Watchers meetings and use eTools to people who were instructed to attend Weight Watchers meetings alone.” If local Weight Watchers groups send data home — I don’t know if they do — they could have gotten that data for free.

To bring it back to games, Magic the Gathering presents a similar case. Wizards of the Coast pushes a huge amount of content out to a public that plays in game stores. Tournament play is regulated to some extent, but (to the best of my knowledge), deck composition is not tracked. Lots of people talk about the leetest decks on the boards, but there’s no real way to tell how popular they are aside from community manager-style gut feel.

Magic the Gathering Online should allow WotC incredible insight into the way that people play their game, access to data that they’ve never had before. However, the old version of MTGO saved decks on the client. You could save “net decks” to the server, but if I remember correctly, it defaulted to local storage. Data on the client does you no good.

I’d write a witty conclusion, but comparing Weight Watchers to Magic the Gathering is probably enough levity for tonight.

This is creepy.

This is funny.

While it’s old news by now, this article on the lack of social play in Warhammer is very good. Conan had similar issues, as I wrote about earlier this year. While encouraging social play isn’t as crucial in a PvP game with prebuilt sides, it’s still sad to see any MMO deny its fundamental nature.

Speaking of PvP: in the midst of a discussion on PvP itemization in World of Warcraft, some talk on tracking player performance in battlegrounds. I don’t know what Blizzard’s planning, but I hope they haven’t forgotten that a bunch of people have been trying to solve this problem in other contexts.

Getting back to Warhammer, gamerDNA’s been printing some interesting articles based on Xfire data and surveys. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a data mining company pretending to be a social networking company, so we can expect lots of intesting stuff from them in the future. Subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already.

In an oddly similar direction, this NYT article suggests that people are eating better food these days because the NPD says so! Somebody call the Daily Plate and Sparkpeople and Fitday and hell, Weight Watchers Online, and let them know about their exciting new business model.

I’d known who Jeff was for a long time, but for all the local developer events I went to, I’d never met him. So when I was told, on the first day back at work after a vacation, that Jeff would be joining the team, I joked that I was surprised to hear that he actually existed.

Turns out that he did, and he was great. He had amazing insight. Ask him a question about something, and he’d have an interesting answer. In the middle of a design meeting where he hadn’t talked much, he’d suddenly pipe up with something totally off the wall and totally right. He was adding wonderful little touches to everything.

Jeff would mail out the weirdest links. He loved random internet shit. He had an oddly insightful picture or Youtube video to respond to any email thread. I wish I had some of my old work email — there was some good stuff in there. I remember he mailed out this link shortly before we left the company. He thought this book was freaking hilarious — he was chuckling about it for weeks. This album cover game drove an email thread for a few days too; that’s where all those examples came from.

I wish I would have said goodbye the last time I saw him. I think he was smoking in front of the building as I drove away. I figured we’d all hear about what he was going to do next. I wish this wouldn’t have been it.