Why? When product marketing and product management fit so fully hand in glove, you are destined for breakout market success, and being fun/funny has all sorts of memetic goodness attached to it.

Stating the obvious, in Web 2.0-ville, market success and financial success are not always one and the same but it is certainly a great place to start.

For more fodder on fun as product virtue, here is a post I wrote on Nintendo’s Wii and its fun factor in action:

http://thenetworkgarden.com/we.....fun-a.html

Cheers,

Mark

There has never been an application, game or otherwise, that is “as fun as possible”. Put another way, there’s no upper limit to the amount of fun that a user can or wants to have.

That’s a pretty powerful economic opportunity. In the near-term, “Funware” applications (that marry the best of game design with more utilitarian pursuits) will radially redefine both the definition of a game and the standard for web application design.

There are a lot of apps that use Funware principles, and the list is growing rapidly. For more info, check out my blog on the subject of Funware at http://blog.rmbr.com/

-G