Everybody knows what “retention” means until they have to design a metric. Ken Rudin, once of LucidEra and now general manager of analytics at the games site Zynga, thought that he and his team could “put something together” quickly — but it actually took “four solid weeks of discussion and debate.”

About 50 million people play Zynga games every day. It’s the leading online social gaming platform, according to Ken, and it’s grown from zero in 2007 to revenues of “a few” hundred million dollars annual revenue. Every day, the company captures 20 to 30 billion records of data, and Ken and his team use that data to improve revenue, viral marketing — and customer retention.

Zynga players play free. The revenue comes in a few dollars at a time for “virtual goods.” In the popular game FarmVille, for example, a player might get tired of the old-fashioned plow. The tractor upgrade costs $2.

“There are tons of different ways you can think about retention,” he laughs, “and which one should we use?”

How do you know when a customer has left? “Unless we don’t get a note saying, ‘Hi, we’re no longer playing,’ how do we know?”

Of course, no player’s going to make it that easy, so how long should Zynga wait before considering the player gone? A week? A man could have dropped his virtual pitchfork for a real vacation — or he could have plowed the last row.

Ken dealt with analytics all the time at LucidEra, but games were new to him. He’s learned a few things.

“It turns out, as you might imagine, that it depends on the game,” he says. The average simulation-game player tends to visit frequently, for example. Poker players, though, are much more likely to come back after, say, a three-month gap.

The retention curve also varies by the length of each player’s tenure. A new player who stays away 30 days is much less likely to return than a player who’s been at Zynga for years. Ken now puts users in three basic tenure buckets: “new,” “mature,” and “elder.”

Whatever question you try to answer, it has to be actionable. “There are metrics, and there are metrics that matter,” he says. If volume plunges, were the missing players mostly new ones? If so, it could indicate frustration; perhaps the games need better tutorials or less functionality at the beginning. Or were most of the missing the long-term customers? If so, perhaps the games haven’t offered enough challenge.

Ken expects growth when the economy improves. “When we look at what happens over holidays, such as July Fourth and Thanksgiving, usage really drops. Then it picks up as people go back to work,” he says. “[The games] are part of their routine. On vacation, players break their routines. They sleep late and spend more time with family. They don’t play the game.”

“It’s fascinating,” says Ken. “In analytics, so much of the problem is figuring out what the question really is.”

I think he means that it’s a great game.

I asked a San Francisco taxi driver I happened to sit next to about indicators he sees. I didn’t mean “low oil,” I meant big things. Whether the economy is still falling or not, for one.

Figure out how to collect tip data from cabbies and waiters and you’ve have a good early indicator of economic trends, I’ve always thought. But the cab driver, Richard Roe — also producer of a website on verbal defense tactics and a retired programmer — says no. Tips have been the same. Moods, too.

However, he has noticed one thing. People used to forget their cell phones all the time. With the recession, no lost cell phones.

Then last week someone left something for the first time in months: a shopping bag with a spiral-bound directory of antique stores.

Things could be looking up.

Evidence came in yesterday afternoon that, so far, BI is doing well in the new economy. Greg Turman, director of sales for the Western Region at Corda, phoned to say, “I’m going through the roof,” by which he means sales are good. “I’m seeing tremendous startup activity. People are saying, ‘I can no longer guess. I’ve got to know what’s happening so in case things get tight I’ll survive.’”

What’s behind the surge? He figures that people have finally understood the value of analytics and visual analysis.

It’s hard to see through the smoke as our financial house burns down, I know. But what I’ve noticed is more interesting: the first signs of rebuilding.

This month, three experts I read—visual analytics expert Stephen Few, Competing on Analytics author Tom Davenport and digital-media economy specialist Umair Haque—all seem to have knit recent blog posts with the same thread: honest value in business and the economy.

“The macro crisis isn’t really a financial crisis, an economic crisis, or a solvency crisis,” writes Haque. “It’s an institutional crisis: the economic institutions of capitalism are in shock.”

Perhaps it’s the shock of having been conned. One of the three levels of transformation he suggests is the return of authentic value.

Authentic, long-run value isn’t created through arbitrage or gamesmanship — what we too often confuse strategy for. Games of off-balance sheet accounting, currency hedging, capital structuring, so-called labor arbitrage — where corporations simply shift to the lowest-cost, or most poorly regulated, sources of manpower — don’t create value. They just shift it around. Corporations who play this game of economic musical chairs are in for a rude awakening – because the music just stopped. And so they must rediscover the simple fact that value creation flows from making economic activities not just profitable in the short- run — but meaningful over the long-run.

Davenport lets some air out of “fluffy” social networking. He asks, “How can we really be producing value if we’re all sitting around blogging and Facebook-friending each other?”

All this fluffiness will be hard to maintain in our next period. He writes that “it wouldn’t be a bad outcome if the current crisis led to a more diligent, industrious economic climate.”

Few takes us down to products. He argues for honest value in business intelligence software. He often confronts badly designed dashboards—adorned with eye candy and other silliness—and urges those who listen to educate customers, not pander to them. The response is too often that, yes, we know, but it sells so there’s nothing we can do. Ah, promiscuity as a business strategy!

Any business that measures its success by current sales revenues or profits without regard for the effectiveness of their products will go for the silly stuff every time. I could argue that this is a poor business model because it’s short-sighted and doomed to fail, eventually resulting in declining revenues, but what’s the point? Businesses built on this model lack the foresight to appreciate the greater intelligence of long-term planning around products and services that effectively address the real needs of people. I believe the root problem that belies such business practices is not strategic short-sightedness or a myopic focus on sales—these are symptoms of a deeper, more fundamental problem. I believe that it’s wrong to build a business on self-interest alone.

Enough with this promiscuity. He adds, “Things that don’t work should not be sold—period. That’s good business.”

If the next president and Congress take Davenport’s advice and nurture big importers, high tech would surely be one of the first picks. How devastating, though, if Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs took advantage of an easy opening and overtook the U.S. even there.

I happened to read Few, Haque and Davenport. But I’ll bet they’re among many others these days arguing for a return to honest value and good business.

Back in 1971 Chile’s newly elected socialists dreamed of what today we’d call a dashboard, and it was to run the country. They actually did build it, and just 15 months after conception it was good enough to thwart a nationwide strike.

They called it Cybersyn. In Friday’s New York Times, Alexei Barrionuevo tells how the newly elected socialist government wanted an alternative to the top-down economies of the Soviet Union and Cuba.

The Chilean economy would be controlled from a series of “Star Trek-like” chairs with controls in the armrests. The controllers would read information on projection screens fed by data from a network of 500 second-hand telex machines transmitting from factories up and down the country. The team of “bright young Chileans,” led by the cigar-smoking, wine- and whiskey-drinking visionary, poet and painter A. Stafford Beer, actually found the telexes in a warehouse.

I don’t see how that wasn’t top-down. The proof, though, was in the pudding.

Barrionuevo writes:

Cybersyn’s turning point came in October 1972, when a strike by truckers and retailers nearly paralyzed the economy. The interconnected telex machines, exchanging 2,000 messages a day, were a potent instrument, enabling the government to identify and organize alternative transportation resources that kept the economy moving.

The strike dragged on for nearly a month. While it weakened Mr. Allende’s Popular Unity party, the government survived, and Cybersyn was praised for playing a major role. “From that point on the communications center became part of whatever was happening,” Mr. Espejo said.

As you might have guessed, the end came with a change in management. General Augusto Pinochet’s guys just couldn’t figure it out, and they dismantled the program.

If there’s one reliable sign that a recession is coming, it’s when the experts say they see none coming. I’ve survived four. “Oh, maybe a slowdown, yes…” they say. Now, in today’s New York Times, Charles Duhigg argues that what’s unlikely is a “full blown depression.” Quoth Duhigg:

Why? Because so many of them have spent so much time studying the Great Depression and trying to figure out how to react more effectively if things turn really bad again.

Would that be the same kind of study France and Britain did after World War I to avoid World War II? The kind General Motors did to sustain its dominance over the pre-hybrid Toyota?

Quick, buy gold!

Really, to infer from this that a depression is likely could be just as silly as the people who take official denials about Martian spaceships as proof that they really exist.

I don’t infer anything. I just don’t remember hearing the D word during past recessions.