Nov
08

Badges

Mon Nov, 2010 by Derek Mehraban

It’s no secret that people like to have awards.  Beginning with platform gaming systems, achievements have been a huge success.  Defeating a level or some other accomplishment earned a user a badge of that achievement.  Marketers then realized that badges could be used on other applications.

Photo Credit: OrangeSoda

Now we have FourSquare and Gowalla using badges to drive their applications and also drive traffic to their partners.  Rob Cottingham speculates that it will only be a matter of time before we have better integration of badges with more traditional software: for example, the Inbox Zero Badge in Microsoft Outlook.

While it is not a necessarily new idea, it is a widely proliferating idea.  People love awards and they love to display those awards.  Given the low cost to creating a badging system, the real question is why don’t we see more of them?

ReadWriteWeb: Apparently We DO Need Those Stinking Badges

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