Games in social media

After yesterday's post I must have been looking for 'gamification' in my everyday life and it wasn't long before I found some evidence. I have just started to use Scoop it and was interested to see that they are using elements of gamification to make the experience more engaging for users.

There is a suggested list of tasks to perform and a progress bar that lets you measure how you're doing. There are numbers all over the place, statistics and a scoopit score:

"a new metric that indicates the excellence of your work (out of 100). It helps   you, as a curator, to measure and increase your topic quality; and it helps to discriminate amongst various topics while searching, browsing or exploring topics. This Score is calculated based on your activity as a curator (edition, tag, share, etc) and on your audience engagement (views, reactions, etc)."

Everything is working to get you you to 'level up', to learn from your interactions with others. Like the idea of a Klout score (or previously a technorati score) I am not sure if this is a good thing, but I guess the creators of these metrics are trying to engage with a generation that likes the excitement of a game-like environment.