Pablo Villalba, Teambox’s founder, gives insightful thoughts and actionable advice on gamification:

• believing that you can engage users only by adding game features to an existing product is doomed to fail
• like social, gamification is a new “cargo cult”, an attempt to recreate successful outcomes by replicating features that worked for Facebook or Foursquare. Your product is different: why adding game features to it would “make you as successful as they’ve been”?
• instead, product designers should focus on providing a solid solution to people’s needs. Gamification can come on top of that to make the experience even better.

Best quotes:

• “Gamification is the monosodium glutamate of engagement: a low cost alternative to building something genuinely compelling for your users.”
• "Twitter doesn’t have game mechanics, and it’s truly engaging. Because users share things they care about, and Twitter does a great job getting out of the way and letting you do what you want to do."

Source: Teambox blog, Gamification, social and other cargo cults