As you may have noticed (or more likely not noticed), Thinker development has been on hold for a bit as I have recently been relocating to Portland, Oregon. Why Portland? Well honestly, because I thought it sounded like a cool place to live. Little did I know that Portland is actually a big hub for web and user interface design, and one of the most entrepreneur friendly cities in America. So the prospects are very exciting.
I'm starting this blog for several reasons. Firstly, people need a good way to learn more about Thinker. The information on the beta has been very sparse and not very engaging thus far. The facebook page doesn't suffice, and some of the beta testers aren't even on facebook. I need to make more connections with more people and broaden the social marketing base. Thinker is still somewhat obscure to many of the testers, so hopefully this blog can help fix that. I'm also constantly thinking about new ideas for features and direction, so this will be the place to document all that.
Secondly, on the dev side, I need Google AdSense approval. In theory, Thinker could use AdSense to serve contextual ads based on whatever you're thinking about. This is a concept that I would really like to begin testing. Unfortunately, it's notoriously difficult to get AdSense approval for some web apps because they don't always serve traditional web content. I've modified Thinker so that it serves the content of a world directly without any scripts. Nevertheless, I've been repeatedly turned down for "insufficient content". Google offers some great resources for web app monetization. Thinker currently uses the great in-app payments system via Google Wallet to allow for tipping. Sadly, they seem to be lacking the same kind of contextual ad solutions that they use in their own web apps (e.g. Gmail). If anyone out there knows of any alternatives or solutions to this problem, please let me know.
No comments:
Post a Comment