Some casual games are timeless. Players play because the game is fun, free, and only requires a few minutes of attention. One such game that’s been around for a number of years is PopCap’s Zuma, a sort of twitch-puzzle hybrid – but it’s now getting a new twist.

For those unfamiliar with the game, Zuma has players controlling a frog-like creature and shooting multicolored balls in a long chain. Every time a set of three identical colors is formed by the player, they disappear. The whole point is to make enough disappear to fill up a gauge and make the stream of balls stop before they reach the end of the track.

It is a simple concept, but has garnered impressive popularity on major web platforms like MSN and Yahoo! Games with roughly a thousand players on at any given time. With that popularity lasting over five years, it’s interesting to see PopCap integrating new social features for a new platform: Facebook.

Utilizing Facebook Connect, players can now play Zuma directly from the PopCap website and, in turn, compete with Facebook friends (who can also play on Facebook itself) for high scores. Like most score based games, players can merely see their standing amongst friends that are also playing, so it doesn’t add a tremendous amount of depth. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see PopCap step more and more into the social realm.

Developers like PopCap are finding that they can extend the life of older games by integrating them with new social functionality through Facebook Connect. However, Facebook Connect is not implemented within Zuma’s MSN and Yahoo versions of the game. Considering the large number of active users using these platforms, it would be even more powerful to integrate Connect there. However, that may be a more complicated political matter. Regardless, PopCap has a pretty strong reptutation when it comes to creating quality casual games – it will be interesting to see what comes next.