By Filippo Vanucci (January 26, 2009) (Question 1)

The website called The Hype Machine (www.hypem.com) is a social network that collects music coming from blogs around the net and makes it freely accessible to its users. The website had an initiative that I consider a good example of persuasive technology.

A while ago, during the US Presidential Election campaigns, I was accessing my profile and I found that they had introduced a new feature, a personal image for each user profile; but the default image for everybody was a picture of John McCain (the Republican candidate) and a message had appeared on my dashboard, saying: “Upload your profile picture today! Don’t be a McCain!”. The aim of this “campaign” was to stimulate users to personalize their profiles, to enhance social networking dynamics, but for sure the Hype Machine’s designers also wanted to obtain visibility, provoking discussions on blogs and other social networks. The choice of McCain as the protagonist of the initiative was risky, but probably without the risk it wouldn’t have been so fun and provoking. Now that we know how the story ends, poor McCain…