Café World on Facebook

Kim Vallee — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:57:12 +0000

Lately, I have been running my own restaurant on Facebook. Café World is another game by Zynga. You are the chef. Your friends/neighbors can be your waiters. As you advance in the game, you will be able to add stoves, service counters and preparing more recipes.

Organizing your room (kitchen and tables) is part of your success as the game determined the maximum resources (number of waiters, stoves and counters) that you can have. You can expand your restaurant at will, if you accumulated enough coins.

You can play at Café World the way you like but here are things that you should know:

Quicker to make recipe spoils more quickly. (1) Plus, look at the clock and your agenda before deciding what to cook. You do not wish to wake up at 3 am to serve the cheesecake that took 12 hours before being ready to serve.
Customers that were served in a timely fashion will add .1 to your buzz factor. Customers who cannot be served due to lack of available seats (3) or that are not served fast enough will reduce your buzz factor by .1
The buzz factor (thumb up) determines how many customers you will get. Keeping a window (from your browser) opens with the game playing speeds up the buzz factor. But make you have enough food on the counters because you will lose pretty quickly your advantage when the food ran out. (2)
You can close your restaurant to not run out of food while you are not in front of your computer. I close mine at night. Simply remove the door(s), that is put the door back in your inventory.
One server can serve 8 tables easily. Better to have more tables than risk that waiting customers leave unhappy.
Each table is for one person. No need to put two chairs. (4)
Visit your neighbors every day to earn extra cash and leave them a tip

Give me versatile decor elements

Unfortunately Café World is weak on the decor options. A part of the fun is to infuse your own style into your restaurant. There are many choices but nothing that will enable to create a restaurant style that you can brag about. For that reason, I will probably get bored of Café World quicker than usual. If I can not decorate my space to my satisfaction with the extra coins I accumulated, what is the point?

Why can game developers are too cheap (no excuse here, since Zynga makes lots of money) to hire a with interior design consultant to help them create amazing and versatile decor elements. Zynga assumes that you will go for a kit; so boring and passé! Clearly, the video game industry did not evolve on that topic since the first video games in 1980s. Maybe, we need more girls as lead game developers to change that.

+ Café World by Zynga on Facebook

Quickly Share How to Get to a Place on Twitter with TwitArea

Kim Vallee — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 13:45:05 +0000

Many people use Twitter to meet their friends at restaurants, shops, museums and other public places. Launched last week by Praized, TwitArea enables to quickly lead them to a place’s address, phone number and locate the place on a map. If you have a smart phone, you will find that having a direct link on tweets saves you time while you are on the run.

Another good use is to clearly identify a place. A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted about a hotel in Toronto. But the Toronto hotel has almost the same name as a trademark hotel in Chicago. Linking to the place on my tweet would have avoided the confusion.

How to Use TwitArea

No need to register. All you need to post a tweet with TwitArea is to use Firefox and be on the Twitter.com site. Simply install the Firefox add-on for TwitArea. The Firefox add-on will add an Insert Place button under the text box on Twitter.com. Click on the button whenever you wish to add the information of a place. Find the place you are referring to and click on the Tweet this! button. Voilà!

Your tweet will look like this. Anyone on a computer or using a smart phone will be able to click on the short URL to know the address, phone and locate on a map the place. I like it because TwitArea simplifies my life.

About Praized Media, the maker of TwitArea

TwitArea is related to Praized community database containing the location of 16 million businesses in Canada and in the United States. The Praized application is what is powering my Places community on At Home with Kim Vallee. Located in Montreal, Praized enables publishers with an easy way for their readers to recommend local businesses to each other.

+ TwitArea