Inside Social Games

Not too long ago former Facebook director of business development Netanel “Net” Jacobsson joined the advisory board at OpenFeint.

For those unfamiliar with the company, OpenFeint is a social gaming toolkit that was launched for the iPhone back in March of this year by Aurora Feint (makers of the mobile MMOs Aurora Feint I & II). The platform is intended to provide iPhone developers with a quick and easy means to enable the sharing to Facebook and Twitter accounts from their mobile applications and games. It also for easy integration of social features such as leaderboards, events, and in-game chat.

However, the company’s recently launched version 2.0 aims at solving the problem of social discovery. As has been stated many times before, distribution has always been a critical issue when it comes to developing on the iPhone due to the thousands of apps currently in circulation. Nonetheless, through use of the social graph, the new OpenFeint will be more similar to the new Facebook application directory in the sense that it will show users what their friends are playing.

As stated by Jacobbsen in his blog, “the developers of Aurora Feint [have] taken every piece of OpenFeint and injected a healthy dose of Friends into it. Every page you look at, from a game’s iPromote page to your achievements list, has a social context.”

Seeing as how Jacobbsen all ready has significant experience talking with partners about Facebook Connect, he should be able to help OpenFeint right off the bat. Facebook Connect has already had significant impact on many iPhone apps and games. Thus far, over 3 million users have joined OpenFeint.

[image via Net Jacobbsen Blog]