It’s silly, and kind of stupid, but it’s fun and it brightens up the Facebook News Feed. And it actually gets people interacting on Facebook, which it seems to me was once the whole point of the site in to begin with, although I can’t be certain because that’s a time clouded by the impenetrable fog of so many Farmville updates that my brain has been severely damaged.

And since these kinds of memes put the “social” back in “social media,” I find them quite useful from a web working perspective, too. They help you connect on a human level with people you might not otherwise have communicated much with.

Case in point, with many people who add me to Facebook after finding me through professional channels (i.e. this and other blogs I write for), there is little to no follow-up communication after that initial virtual handshake. Regardless of what we claim this says about our proficiency as social networkers, it does not constitute a relationship by any stretch of the imagination.

Thanks to the doppelganger game, and others like it, I’ve actually begun to have meaningful, non-business related interaction with a few of these folks. Even if the initial back-and-forth is quite innocuous, it’s still a seed that can lead to great things growing. Please note, I’m talking about impromptu memes and interaction here, not the use of Facebook apps like Farmville. If Facebook cut off application support tomorrow, I doubt I’d notice, except for the fact that I’d have to click the “Hide” button much less frequently in my News Feed.

The other benefit of participating in the impromptu online social network games that crop up constantly is that they’re just plain fun. You know as well as I do that you’re already spending lots of time procrastinating on Facebook anyway, so why not procrastinate in a way that encourages community building?

Have you developed any meaningful connections via innocuous social games like this?

Recently I was sent an interesting piece on “motivating yourself when you just don’t feel like it.” In other words, how to slay the demon procrastination.

The suggestion of this article was particularly timely as I’ve been feeling somewhat adrift for the last few weeks. I’d already overcome my inertia, but I realize that some of these tips could have been useful in getting me going again.

In the post, Jason Barr suggests eight techniques, but I particularly like these five:

• Let fear take hold. Use the “fight or flight” response to scare yourself into acting — and working!
• Keep the finish line In sight. Avoid natural tendencies to look simply at an immediate objective and focus on the ultimate goals.
• Make it a game. Figure out ways to measure yourself — then try to beat yourself
• Tell someone else. Sharing a goal or objective can bake in some social pressure (something that we’ve written about before).
• Break it up. Break your “big hairy goal” up into into more manageable steps.

Most of Jason’s suggestions seem fairly obvious but I’m intrigued by the suggestion to make your work tasks into a game. There’s been some interesting discussion recently on using gaming metaphors to change behavior — everything from the RPG-like metaphors of Weight Watchers, to the underlying psychology of Nike Plus, to the MPG readout of Toyota’s Prius and smart meters in homes reducing energy consumption. The first step in changing your behavior is generally to “instrument” and measure it.

I’d love to see the mostly dry GTD and productivity tools re-imagined as role-playing games, complete with leaderboards: “Can you ‘level-up’ and deliver that annual report?”

How are you measuring yourself and your work?

Read more at “8 Great Ways to Motivate Yourself When You Just Don’t Feel Like It.”

Luckily, I had professional cause to engage with The Sims 3. And it was with strictly professional interests in mind that I devoted upwards of 14 hours over the past two days to EA’s wildly popular life-simulation franchise. Well, maybe that’s not strictly true, but there was work involved.

In-game, I was working, too. Specifically, I was pursuing Sim careers in both the music industry and professional sports. In doing so, I realized that I think of my job in exactly the same way a Sim would.  Here are the specific parallels I’ve drawn between my real-life and simulated experiences.

Build Relevant Skill Levels

In The Sims 3 (and every previous version), in order to advance your Sim’s chosen career, you have to build up relevant skill sets. So, for instance, if you want your Sim to be a writer, you “practice writing.” When your Sim “levels up,” its product is worth more. It’s a very simple premise: acquire more skill and earn more revenue.

That was exactly my guiding philosophy with regards to my real-life education, too. I picked classes believing that class “x” leads to the acquisition of skill “x,” and even decided which degrees to pursue based upon an assumed natural career progression that would result from said choices.

Even now, as a working professional, I look upon improvement as a simple process of writing more about a particular subject to become better at writing about it. In fact, if I think about it, I can almost picture my skill learning status bar filling up and approximate a percentage of completion. Never mind that gaining real-world experience is an analog (continual) process, not a digital (staged) one.

Thinking of real-world skills as things with definable, static levels of achievement is useful for a couple of reasons. First, even if it’s not technically true, it helps you set up milestones to track your progress. It’s much easier to strive for something if there are defined plateaus between slopes. Second, it helps communicate your comfort level with a particular subject. Everyone understands the concept of skill levels, and will understand approximations based on that concept far more easily and quickly than a narrative of your accumulated experience.

Befriending the Boss Will Help You Advance

In The Sims 3, a crucial new component of job advancement is knowing who your boss is so that you can become better friends with them and therefore advance your career. To be clear, I’m not just talking about kissing butt or being ingratiating, but forming genuine bonds.

In all the jobs I’ve held in the past, I was friendly with at least my immediate supervisor, and generally anyone who could conceivably have direct influence over my professional destiny. I wouldn’t say I always went out of my way to make certain this was the case, but it was definitely something I thought about. And my thoughts about relationship-building are similar to the multistaged approach of The Sims 3. Thinking of a supervisor or manager as an “Acquaintance, Friend, Good Friend, Best Friend, etc.” is a simple way of assessing what kind of action on your part would or wouldn’t be deemed appropriate.

A Successful Sim Does Not a Successful Person Make

I can talk all day about how the career metaphors found in The Sims 3 can be helpful in thinking about your real-life profession, but it doesn’t change the fact that my Pop Icon Sim had a far easier ride to success than I have. There is danger in drawing too close a parallel between EA’s amusing distraction, and the working life we engage in every waking day. Maybe most notably, I can “Save & Exit” The Sims 3 with relative ease. Not so with the daily grind.

Can you draw parallels between gaming experience and your professional life?

In short, they’ve found that while free apps are downloaded like crazy, active use drops off fast. Paid apps tend to see more use after installation and are used for longer periods. If it’s a paid game, all the better.

Long before he stopped using his iPhone altogether, Om raised similar questions on GigaOM regarding app usage.

Does your own iPhone usage support this data?

Looking at my iPhone I find that most of the applications I actively use are those that support or work in cooperation with the web-based tools on my desktop computer. Even though I’m not using a wide variety of applications, overall I’m using my iPhone on a daily basis far more than I have used any other mobile device.

My app mainstays include Remember the Milk, Facebook, TwitterFon, Salesforce, BeejiveIM (expensive at $15.99 but worth it), 1Password and Box.net. I also regularly launch eReader, TWC (Weather Channel) and Now Playing. While I still have a few games on my iPhone, I can’t remember the last time I launched one.

I took a rare visit to the App Store to see what I might be missing.

#9 on the Top Paid App list is something called “White Noise”, which pretty much sums up what the store is like for me these days. Not much seems to stand out in a sea of mindless games and fluff entertainment.

Part of the reason I’m bored by the App Store is how often I’ve been burned by apps that don’t live up to their promise. The ratings aren’t as helpful as they could be since you can’t see which version the reviewer was using when they cast their vote. So instead, I tend to grab apps from developers I already trust or those that are recommended on other web sites.

What apps, if any, are still making your cut? How do you decide what to buy/download?

Congratulations to Garvin and the Serendipity team for a fantastic 1.4 release of their wonderful blogging platform.

With the holidays here, and perhaps some free time available, jkOnTheRun points us to some Good Old Games for your netbook.

Slash7 shares a Jump Start Credit Card Processing Cheat Sheet – thanks Amy.

Andreas Gohr shows you how to Setup DokuWiki in <15 minutes.

Wayne Smallman tells us Why we need a blogging code of conduct. What do you think?