Rating: 
Summary: Are You Persuaded?
Review: This is a highly readable book, even for those with little or no background in the field, on a form of technology that will affect us all. There are wonders coming out of B. J. Fogg's lab at Stanford. Better to hear about and understand them now rather than having them working on you without your awareness. More like this, Professor.
Rating:
Summary: Helped me see the future
Review: This is a landmark book. Yes, it's easy to read and engaging (I expect that from any good book). But BJ Fogg's book goes farther than being just a "good book." This is an "important book" -- a work that will likely be read for years to come, something like Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." What these books share is the ability to help you see what others don't. Once you read the book, random data points in our world of technology start making sense. I can see the picture of persuasive technology now. I must say that this book was a bit expensive for me, but getting a clear vision of persuasive technology was worth it.
Rating:
Summary: Read it if you want to keep ahead of the game
Review: THis is a very good book on a very exciting topic that may help anybody involved in a design project think about its product in a different way. This book with all its great quality must be taken for what it is: an introduction to a new field that is very exciting, a real must know for UI and most product designers. Obviously, because the field is so new, no real how to are in the book, but they will for sure be in the next one.
Rating: 
Summary: Oy!
Review: This is the second book I have decided to review. I have decided to do so inorder that others may avoid my mistake. The book is banal. It goes on and on, creating category after category of needless taxonomies. Nothing even slightly new or interesting. Additionally it suffer the problem of all "internet" books. It was hoplessly outdated by the ime it hit thw shelves. Someone exceptionaly tiresome wrote a phd thesis, invented jargon and then decided to turn it into a book.
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Summary: A persuasive argument for a better future
Review: Through my professional interactions in the Silicon Valley, I'd heard of BJ Fogg's Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, but had always immediately associated negative or unethical implications with the term "persuasive technology." This book opened my eyes in a delightful way to the positive current and future applications of this science. For anyone who interacts with computer technology, whether from a design perspective or as a user, this book provides a thorough understanding of how interactive computing systems can change our attitudes and behaviors. Although based in research and academia, the book is not overly academic, but takes advantage of a somewhat textbook style of organization to make the concepts clear and easy to grasp. Illustrations, references, highlighted definitions, and bulleted summaries reinforce the concepts or give a quick shorthand depending on how you prefer to read the book. Fogg peppers the text with excellent real-world and hypothetical examples. I found the hypothetical examples most intriguing and suspect (or at least hope) that we'll see many of them become reality in the not too distant future. As a marketer not unfamiliar with the concept of persuasion, I found the chapter on Web Credibility in particular a valuable source of guidance on how to better design web sites and build trust into the experience. As a consumer, I was fascinated by the possibilities for persuasive mobile technologies - especially the idea that the most successful motivating mobile technologies will be those that best serve the personal goals of the user, rather than intrude into our lives and betray the trust we will eventually need to place in them. In writing this book, clearly Fogg was not only attempting to educate us about this new field of study, but also to persuade us that the future of interactive computing technology can have some very positive outcomes if we understand and respect the humans on both ends of the equation. I believe he succeeded.
Rating:
Summary: Persuasive Technoloby: Using Computers tyo Change What we th
Review: Very easy reading. Lots of good examples. I liked the summarys that reviewed the important points.
Thought provoking and opens many other doors to be explored.
Rating:
Summary: An important perspective on shaping thought and behavior
Review: With his book Persuasive Technology, BJ Fogg has made an important contribution to the fields of psychology and business. BJ, (a PHD graduate of Stanford) has done for digital-platform user experience what Allan Afuah and Christopher L. Tucci (two PhD graduates of MIT) have done for digital-platform business models. Afuah and Tucci, in their book Internet Business Models and Strategies: Text and Cases, clearly laid out the elements of Internet-related strategy formulation. Although its first edition came out only recently (August, 2000), the book is already in its second edition and has been adopted at a number of top-tier business schools. It has also had significant impact on the way many (including myself) develop Internet strategies. I expect that Dr. Fogg's book Persuasive Technologies will also soon be established as an important reference text for those wishing to use the Internet and other digital platforms (e. g., mobile devices, interactive broadband media) in pursuit of strategic and tactical aims. It will also serve as a powerful agent for stimulating discussions about the ethics of information technology design and deployment. Persuasive Technology is the first book dedicated to exploring Dr. Fogg's widely-discussed work on Captology (Captology standing for "computers as persuasive technologies"). BJ wrote the book at the urging of Philip Zimbardo (a Stanford professor famous for the Zimbardo Prison Experiment that many of us remember from our undergraduate psychology courses), who served on BJ's dissertation committee. Professor Zimbardo also wrote the Foreword to the book, which will most likely get the reader's attention as the importance of BJ's work is put in perspective. The book begins by providing an insightful context for the consideration of persuasive technologies. The book then spends the bulk of its time working through a refreshingly-explicit approach to characterizing how digital platforms may be used to shape user experience and behavior. Dr. Fogg has made important strides forward at providing a MECE framework (i. e., the categories/issues laid our per the matter under consideration are [1] Mutually Exclusive and [2] Collectively Exhaustive - this allows for breaking a problem down into smaller elements that may be understood and "solved" more readily.)* This has been done in a fashion that is user-friendly in the extreme. From merely scanning the Table of Contents, the reader can begin to formulate reasonably-robust methods for framing critical issues and opportunities relevant to persuasive technologies. Components of the framework are fleshed out in a fair amount of detail, with a generous set of references to the research and commercial applications that give shape and substance to the book's ideas. The book ends by discussing future trends in persuasive technology, and by exploring the ethical implications of the use of technology platforms in changing people's thinking and behavior. For several years, BJ has been challenging his students and his audience at large to address the ethical issues at hand. It is perhaps reassuring that the public community has been stimulated (and at times angered) by BJ's provocative attempts to stimulate dialogue. BJ, like many of his Silicon Valley colleagues, is somewhat of a technophile, but he has been adamant that we consider not just the benefits of technology, but its potential challenges to human privacy and dignity. This text will almost certainly be a key possession for marketing and strategy professionals who use digital platforms as a key component of their work. Hopefully, this book will make its readers not only "successful", but also a bit more thoughtful as actors in the human community. * Life, it may be argued, is not MECE (that is one of the reasons it is so interesting), but life and its salient issues can frequently be understood meaningfully in the context of MECE frameworks.
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