In a Google Tech Talk, Sebastian Deterding talks about how we can apply the concept of Gamification to everyday services and sites. They define gamification as, "integrating game dynamics into your site, service, community, content or campaign, in order to drive participation". They give a few examples such as Nike Plus which tracks exercise, Mint which offers a service to set financial goals and finally in sustainability to create a game out of driving efficiently.
They also discuss a variety of interesting services that offer game design elements anyone can add to their website. They give a few examples such as: GetGlue, CubePoints, BadgeVille and Nitro. After looking at these sites it looks like they offer a variety of services to help retain users, increase loyalty and provide more engagement. A look at BadgeVille's they state that:
Badgeville is a white label Social Rewards & Analytics Platform. We make it easy to increase the loyalty and engagement of your web audience.
GetGlue aims to keep the interest of its users by offering rewards in the form of virtual a real stickers which they will mail to their users. The stickers can be earned by doing certain actions on the site, some involve time and others are hidden for the users to find. Finally Nitro's site says the following about gamification:
People have fundamental needs and desires - for reward, status, achievement, self-expression, competition, and altruism among others. These needs are universal, and cross generations, demographics, cultures and genders. Is your website or experience doing anything to address these needs? Most aren't.
Nitro offers an API which claims to provide the following components: Actions, Achievements, Trophies, Points, Levels, Leader boards, Virtual rooms, Virtual goods, Avatars, Groups, Competitions, comments and Friends.
It looks like the entire laundry list of every possible gamification feature that I can think of. All these sites have one thing in common, which is the use of common gameplay features present in many games such as points, badges or achievements and leaderboards. The talk is a good resource for how to implement gameplay features in your own website or service and the gamification sites listed above is a good place to start with that endeavor.