You’d have to be living under a rock to not know about World of Warcraft at this point. Over four years old with well over 11 million subscribers and versions in half a dozen languages across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, the MMOG has proven to be one of the single most successful franchises in the history of PC games (let alone online titles). So what would be the next step for Blizzard Entertainment?

Rumor is that an iPhone version is in the works, according to Kotaku. Yes, an iPhone version. In the past there have been a number of claims, hoaxes, and mock-ups, but this past weekend came a video of WoW running on the mobile platform. From the looks of things we have seen in the video, the platform makes full use of the iPhone’s touch screen. Though it does not seem like a player would be able to play the game in full, it is more than enough to allow interaction, travel,  in game mail and auction house systems, and generally checking up on the world.

The most curious aspect of the video to note is that the game is running on what is called the Vollee client. This iPhone application has one main purpose: To allow the play of full PC games over a network on mobile 3G phones.

“Through the VolleeX engine, we can take full PC games, MMOs or even virtual worlds and stream them to any 3G enabled handsets, “says Vollee’s head of business development, Julian Corbertt in an interview with Pocket Gamer. “This means that you can now access games or full persistent online worlds right from your mobile handset. It’s a real step forward for mobile games as you can now have meaningful connected experiences on your handset.”

Vollee showed the power of its enging when it demo’d Second Life when it launched. Furthermore, the company has not only openly announced a partnership with Activision Blizzard (not to mention that Blizzard has been doing work on the iPhone already with Battle.net), but also stated, last year, that it would be supporting the iPhone.

The Top 25 for MySpace this past month was very stable amongst the Top 10, but as always, the latter half of the list contained its ups and downs. RPGs still dominate the leaderboards, and we have seen very few of other “genres” beyond those that have sat within the safe-hold that is the Top 10. Here are some of the major highlights from this month’s list:

• As was said, the Top 10 this past month was almost completely stable with only the #9 and #10 spot swapping places as Zynga‘s YoVille beat out Playdom‘s Kiss Me by a margin of roughly 240,000. However, Mafia Wars did close the gap between it and Mobsters ever so slightly with an active user gain almost four times that of the latter.
• In addition to this, relatively new title, Sorority Life moved up two places from #15 to #13 to overtake Playdom’s older title, Heroes.
• The gain for Playdom also pushed Zynga’s RPGs Gang Wars and Dragon Wars down with their respective user counts of 1,994,966 and 1,907,158.
• Overdrive moved up to #17 with a gain of 219,408 users to take the place of former #17, Cheers, who, surprisingly, is nowhere to be seen this month within the Top 25.
• With Cheers pushed out completely, the remaining seven titles each pushed up a spot with Speed Racing and Fashion Wars topping Friend Factor at #18 and #19, and Zynga’s other military RPG title, Special Forces filling in the empty slot at #25.

As with last month, MySpace remains the relatively stable platform compared to Facebook. Furthermore, since their official debut, Playdom has certainly held onto their dominance with Mobsters and other popular titles, regardless as to whether or not they fit into the RPG genre.

The Facebook gaming leaderboards have experienced quite a number of changes since we last took a look at them a month ago! Over half of the games and applications have lost rather significant numbers, but at the same time, such losses have given a number of new titles a chance to make their appearance in the Top 25.

The highlights:

• Zynga and Playfish‘s battle for the #1 spot continues between Texas HoldEm Poker and Pet Society, with the latter closing the gap with a gain of 1,348,759 to Zynga’s 1,054,775.
• However, that same growth did not hold true for spots 4 – 6 with Bumper Sticker, Pass A Drink, and Lil Green Patch losing about a million active users each.
• Playfish title Geo Challenge kept it’s #8 spot with 3.97 million active users this past month with Word Challenge coming in behind, but surprisingly enough the other Playfish titles were ousted by MindJolt Games who jumped all the way from #17 to #10.
• Zynga RPGs Vampire Wars and Street Racing increased in popularity with the former coming out on top at #12.
• Behind the major players, new comer Know-It-All-Triva appeared on the scene at #15 with 2,543,557 users, followed by another fresh face, 101 Eggs & More with 2,464,247 users.
• The past month also played host to two other new games for the Top 25 with Bejeweled Blitz from PopCap Games at #21 and Playfish’s newest title Restaurant City at #23.

The competition between Playfish and Zynga within the Top 25 has always been neck and neck in recent months, and this time around it looks to be Zynga that is coming out on top with all of their titles gaining traffic, and many of the Playfish titles (aside from Pet Society) experiencing slight declines.

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In their first game, Stack’Em, Gogogic created a fairly entertaining venture that merely dealt with the stacking of frantic sheep as high as you could, but despite simplicity, the game was made fun by the amusing sounds, and entertaining animations. Now, Gogogic has released their 2nd Facebook title dubbed, Who’s Your Friend?

This Flash game utilizes a very simple game mechanic that is directly connected to your Facebook friends (hence the name). When the player begins, they are granted 90 seconds and are presented with random profile pictures of their friends. However, when the image is shown, it begins as highly pixelated and slowly becomes clearer, with the objective being to recognize them as soon as possible and select their name from a list of four. Obviously, the faster you answer, the higher your score will become, and as such you are ranked amongst your friends via a high-score table at the bottom of the game, thus making both the means and the end social. However, despite this social core mechanic, the concept it is not without some serious drawbacks.

The first and most prominent issue with the idea of a visual quiz using friends is that it really doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of replay value. While it is somewhat fun to play through a couple times at first, how many times can you try to recognize your own friends before it gets old? Simplicity is a good thing, but often you would want something to be simple to learn, but contain some form of depth behind it (games like chess are a perfect example, as you can learn to play in about two minutes, but take a lifetime and still not master it). Beyond that, there lies an issue in numbers that is two-fold.

One of the two issues comes into play if you do not have many friends saved on Facebook, the game simply repeats the same few over and over again, thus defeating the purpose of the game completely. However, while this is possible, the more likely scenario is too many friends. You see, someone that plays Facebook games regularly probably will not have the issue of too few friends, but that same person will likely have dozens or more. Why? Considering that some of the most popular titles (i.e. Mafia Wars) require more friends to advance, many people will add large numbers of people to their friend’s list either to communicate within guilds/mobs/armies/etc. or to just increase their solo play capabilities. Regardless of the purpose, it becomes somewhat difficult to recognize people that you may not actually know personally.

In the end, Who’s Your Friend? is a decent idea with a simple plan, but it doesn’t come without its drawbacks. The game simply loses its novelty after a few plays, and if you have too few or too many friends (via mass inviting other social game players) within your Facebook profile, then the game play becomes either pointless or impossible, respectively. Nevertheless, if you don’t fall under either of those two categories, then the game is worth look.

Last month, I had the opportunity to speak on current trends in social games at the Facebook Developer Garage San Francisco, hosted by Kontagent. The evening included several great speakers, including Josh Elman from Facebook, Eric Ries, Andrew Mayer, Vikas Gupta from Jambool, Jia Shen from RockYou, and Jeff Tseng from Kontagent.

The videos have just been posted online, and all the videos are embedded below. In case you didn’t make it to the event, they’re definitely worth checking out! Speakers’ slides are available here.

Justin Smith – Social Gaming Trends

Josh Elman – Facebook Connect

Jeff Tseng – Beyond Viral Metrics

Eric Ries – Engagement Loops

Andrew Mayer – Casual Gaming Metrics Applied to Social Gaming

Jia Shen – Facebook Notifications Metrics

Vikas Gupta – Virtual Economy Analytics

Michael Hart – Netflix and Facebook Connect