Mad cows & MashedIn games.

If you recall your Greek mythology – of course you do – you’ll know that Io was a nymph whom Zeus fell in love with, then turned into a cow to protect her from Hera, his jealous wife. But Hera, wise to Zeus’ tricks and having a vindictive streak,  sicced an angry horsefly on the cow, to sting and harass her until she went insane. Io, still in cow form, stampeded halfway across the known world to escape the horsefly, eventually winding up in Egypt, where to her relief Zeus turned her back into a nymph, allowing her to invent the flyswatter.

In our day, short on whimsy and the time to pronounce words fully, I/O is an acronym meaning Input/Output. The folks at Google have adopted this term for their annual interaction with the developer world, the I/O Conference in San Francisco, to which my four of my co-workers are presently en route, there to debut the MashedIn I/O Game.

Playing the game.

The MashedIn I/O Game is a contest to see who’s the most connected conference attendee. Taking advantage of MashedIn’s power to discover connections across social networks, the game awards points based on how many fellow conference-goers you’re connected to, either through the social networks you belong to (1 point per connection) or by scanning their game-generated QR codes (5 points each) with your smartphone.

At the end of the conference, the points leader gets an iPad.

One more wrinkle. You get 25 points each for scanning our guys Kevin, Blair, Mike, and Jason, so seek them out at the VendAsta Technologies booth in the Developer Sandbox, and (in return for being buttonholed and bragged to about MashedIn) you can get a leg up in the iPad race.

I wasn’t involved in the planning stages of the game, so I didn’t get a chance to pitch my name suggestion: Mad Cow. Get it? Because of the Io-I/O thing, and how all the players will be scurrying back and forth like they’re being chased by horseflies.

…Ah, well, too late now. That link again is mashedin.com/io. Get connecting!