Aug 07
25
What’s Your Daemon?
I absolutely loved Phillip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. The film version of the first book The Golden Compass is due out in December and based off the trailer, I am really looking forward to it.In the world of the book and film human souls, called daemons, live on the outside of the body and take an animal form. Children’s daemons can change shape and only become fixed as one particular animal around the time puberty hits. In typical movie fashion the Golden Compass Web site features the opportunity to get your own daemon based on a series of profile questions. However what is different here is that your deamon can be changed by your friends who might disagree with how you filled out your profile. You need to wait 12 days until your daemon is solidified (if you know me feel free to change mine above).The ability to embed the feature in a blog is a great one and one that YouTube and others have used to great success. However, the ability for friends to disagree or agree with your profile statements is a wonderful entry point to the viral feedback loop and reminds me how much of the real viral innovation happens in the film industry with so much rich content and a creative client willingness to take risks (notice I did not mention budget here).
I do think that they missed a major opportunity by not turning it into a facebook application and the responsible developer should seriously consider it. It is exactly the kind of thing that would enhance a facebook profile. They do offer it for use on MySpace and blogs (as I did above), but that feels so 2006.
Update: Interesting, it would appear that over the weekend, some people have disagreed with my assessment of myself and thus my daemon has changed from an Ermine to a Crow. Very cool, I think I like the crow better…
[tags]Golden Compass, His Dark Materials, Phillip Pullman, movie, viral[/tags]