Vitaminwater, the beverage brand that has become nationally-known this decade through clever marketing efforts, is making another innovative move today — on Facebook. It has launched its own application, called “flavorcreator,” that appears within its Page and intends to get users creating their own virtual vitaminwater beverages.

While the app has all sorts of games, contests and other features, what it really is trying to do is gather market research about the sorts of flavors that Facebook users like. More on that in a second.

On its face, the app is a notably complex effort by a big brand to build a meaningful experience on Facebook, even as many others are still experimenting with basic Facebook page functionality like wall postings.

The app is actually a three-step game, and it has not gone fully live yet….

> Continue reading at Inside Facebook

A while back we were introduced to an interesting casual and social outfit all the way from Quebec City in Canada, Sarbakan Game Studios. But just who is Sarbakan? For 10 years, they’ve been a developer for social and casual spaces and have created roughly 600 games ranging from simple advergames, to virtual space titles such as Littlest Pet Shop: My Teeniest Town.

For a while, the Canadian developer has flown under the radar, remaining relatively quiet despite such big name partnerships such as Playfirst, Mindscape, Big Fish Games, Real Arcade, Nickelodeon Arcade, Hasbro, and Disney. However, it was roughly a month ago that the company stated it was going to “re-enter” the gaming world with an announced partnership with Microsoft, in which they would be developing games for Xbox Live Arcade.

While we do not know the exact games to be released, with the changes being made to the Xbox Live service, this partnership may prove to be most useful for both parties. As one of the most popular of the online console game services, roughly 30 million global sales of the Xbox 360 itself with over 20 million Xbox Live accounts (according to Microsoft.com), Live offers a brand new outlet of users for Sarbakan. However, with its collection of games catering primarily to hardcore — male — audiences (Halo 3, Call of Duty, Team Fortress, etc.), Microsoft does miss out on a great deal of the female demographic.

This is where Sarbakan comes into play. While females do play on the Xbox 360, it does tend to be less than the more casual Nintendo Wii. However, Sarbakan has focused a great deal on games catering to the female audience. According to the company, the past year has seen a big increase in female gamers. Approximately 28% its gamers are now women, and this number is still continuing to rise. Furthermore, recent time has begun to show a shift in online gaming. Based on statements received from Sarbakan, “internet connected consoles [are] projected to rise to 80% of all households (148 million out of 190 million) by 2012.” Between these sets of numbers, one can see the potential that lies, not only in the online console market, but the growing female audience as well. To that end, Sarbakan has also announced a bit of a teaser.

Though only a small amount is known thus far, a new game by the name of Star Fever Agency is also in development. Unfortunately, there isn’t too much to share just yet, but it is a social MMO designed specifically for girls. Players join up as part of the “Star Fever Agency” and are tasked with turning what the game dubs a “nobody” into someone of superstardom, while dealing with all the virtual drawbacks that Hollywood brings with it. Whether the game will be web only or available for Xbox Live as well is yet to be determined, but it certainly looks and sounds interesting and could very well boost that female userbase for Microsoft. Or, at least help it down the path of turning Live into a more, all encompassing, social space. Regardless, we will continue to watch for new information, but, in the meantime, you can check out the current teaser trailer for yourself, here.

With the evolution of the massively multiplayer online game, we have seen the space shift more and more away from a subscription model to one of a more “casual” nature. With the genre more popular than ever, comes the newest casual contender, Faunasphere, from well-known developers Big Fish Games. Littered, pun intended, with concepts of environmental care, the Seattle-based developer has created an attractive, free, Flash world of highly intelligent, DNA altering, laser-wielding, and pollution zapping animals.

The game starts the player off in an isometric, almost sci-fi looking world of highly saturated colors and cutsie animals. You’re what’s called a “Caretaker” and once you have selected from a list of three animal types (dog, horse, and turtle) you go off into the world to fight strange forms of pollution that have appeared all over the place. Yes, “strange” – some of it has eyes… don’t ask.

What is most surprising about Faunasphere, however, is that there is no avatar customization when you first start out, only a small selection of different color skins for your character. But, this seems to change a little later in the game once you get your first “goal” (quest) referring to genetics.

The way goals work, players progress through the game using a simple quest system. Generally speaking, these are fairly basic collection quests, but a handful have some curious objectives, like genetics. Players can customize their character to have different and unique attributes that give it an advantage in certain areas. In the initial genetics quest, for example, players can modify your character to function in the cold. In fact, further modifications can be created when you level up as well and “lay an egg.” Unfortunately, due to general leveling speed and some vague player direction (more on that later), it was difficult to confirm just how much genetic manipulation could be accomplished.

Frankly, leveling does feel a tad slow for a casual game, so it is difficult to say what level of gene modification can be done with eggs. However, it does look like you can get some rather bizarre features and even other animals — but this is where another issue comes into play. From what it seems, everything that you need for these goals is garnered through digging up items under rocks, picking roots, or zapping pollution. That’s it. And this limitation is probably the single most frustrating thing about this game.

Yes, Faunasphere is pretty to look at, but half the time is spent running around doing the same exact thing and hoping to find the item you need. There just is no real direction and players end up floundering about trying to figure things out (not to mention your inventory doesn‘t have item names and your quests don‘t track which items you‘ve collected for it all ready). Even in one of the tutorial quests, it said something along the lines of “to learn the advanced techniques, go to X area.” Well, “X area” turns out to be an awfully big place and with no specific point to go to within the area and no map markers for it, it wasn’t exactly easy to find. Truth be told, the location was not found at all.

On the plus side players do get to create their own virtual space; their own Faunasphere, if you will, which is fairly entertaining and one of the mitigating factors of running around zapping everything. If you don’t get the item you’re looking for, at least players can get pieces to use in their own personal spaces. Unfortunately, so early in the game, it is hard to see what sort of potential really lies in this.

Overall Faunasphere is a good-looking game with a pretty hefty amount of things to do. Unfortunately, the volume of goals to accomplish becomes rather frustrating when you end up searching aimlessly for what is needed to finish them — while never really knowing if you’re doing what you’re are supposed to correctly or not. In the end, Faunasphere has a lot more capability than its current state is giving it credit for. Mostly, it is just the goal system that needs the most work. That said, even in its current state, the entertainment value was still there for at least an hour or so, and if Big Fish can get players to come back at a daily regimen for that amount of time, then this casual MMO should do just fine.

Playfish is one of the leading game developers on Facebook, but its latest game, Quiztastic, is getting a slow start out of the gate. Some of the company’s titles, including Country Story and Restaurant City, are still growing with roughly 5 and 12 million users respectively. Others have plateaued; the Worms-style Crazy Planets is staying steady at around 2 million.

What about the latest release, Quiztastic? With game play focused around TV game show-style quizzes created by the users themselves, this latest Playfish game has been growing extraordinarily slowly. It currently has less than 60,000 monthly users.

While we do not know the exact reason, we can make a few assumptions — most likely, the cause is the user generated content itself. Sure, it is nice to the give players creative control, but with that power comes a great deal of low quality content that, frankly, turns many off to the game as a whole. Suffice to say, Quiztastic raised a number of questions for us, so we sat down to speak with COO and Co-Founder of Playfish, Sebastien de Halleux to learn more.

In the interview below, he tells us about the company’s plans for growing Quiztastic, as well as the international growth and revenue the company is seeing.

[Inside Social Games] Thanks for talking with us again. Recent developments with Playfish have left us with a handful of questions. When last we spoke, we were talking about design, production, and specifically Restaurant City, but there are a few new things to discuss now; namely, Quiztastic. Obviously, quiz apps have been around for forever, so why create this title? What are your goals and expectations?

[Sebastien de Halleux] Quiz games have been a popular form of entertainment across many platforms, including TV, consoles and lately on social networks. However we felt that there was a strong opportunity to improve the quality of the quiz game experience on social networks. Quiztastic is an experimental title to innovate in this category and bring a high quality user experience that’s fresh and fun to a category that’s clearly enjoyed by many.

[ISG] Now, one of the prime elements of Quiztastic is user generated content. Essentially, every quiz seems to be made by a user. Why grant them so much power?

[SH] Traditionally, TV quizzes have been very hard to create because the questions need to be written for a mass audience, and there’s an art in balancing them so that they are as broadly appealing as possible. On social network, you can narrow your audience to just your friends and this gives the scope for publishing much narrower questions sets around specific interests. We know that the most knowledgeable and most creative writers are out there and we wanted to create an experience that would let them express themselves with their friends and the world at large. Think of it as a kind of crowd-sourcing model a la Wikipedia.

[ISG] Usually, surfacing user generated content (UGC) is a double edged sword. We’ve seen it already within just a short time after this game’s release. Painfully easy or hard quizzes, foreign quizzes, vulgar quizzes, which, sadly, dilute the few good ones in circulation. What are some of Playfish’s plans to blunt this issue?

[SH] As can be seen by many popular UGC driven sites, from Wikipedia to YouTube, content management in a UGC environment is far from an easy problem. We decided to take a stab at it because at Playfish our mission is to change how the world plays games and we are not afraid of hard challenges that push the innovation envelope. We fully admit that we might not get it right from the start, but we have a history of working closely with our community to create new and fun experiences and this is the road we are taking with Quiztastic. Last week we released a new version of our quiz filtering system, including better language filters, community-moderated categories and a featured quiz module to surface interesting content.

[ISG] Well, that is most certainly refreshing to hear, but here’s an addendum to my previous question. Though this isn’t a problem for Playfish specifically, it is an issue for any game that relies heavily on user made material. Player’s aren’t game designers, so more often than not, the content is not quite as fun. Do you think there is any way to really get around this issue?

[SH] True, most users are not game designers, however, most users are a fountain of knowledge in areas that matter to them. This could be South African Wines , The Simpsons or simply what happened during a recent weekend with their friends. We wanted to tap into that knowledge, even if less than 1% of users end up creating quizzes, that’s a lot of quizzes on the social audience scale.

This being said, there are also more serious uses of the app: teachers wanting a fun and easy way to introduce a subject to their students, local businesses wanting to promote their offering, regions wanting to promote themselves, magazines looking for a fun way to engage with their online audiences. For all these and many more, we are allowing deeplinking to any quiz, so that they can be posted on the wider web.

Check out this quiz on Boulder, CO for example.

[ISG] Can we expect any Playfish created quizzes in the future? And will there be an easier way to find them than the current filters?

[SH] Whilst Playfish-created quizzes are in the works, we believe that the best content will come from unexpected sources. Our focus is to make these source more easily discoverable. With recently rolled-out features such as ‘Featured Quiz’, ‘Created by your Friends’, ‘Top Rated’ we are starting to tweak our quiz discovery mechanism.

However, we believe that quiz authors will want to market their own quizzes using deep-linking to connect their intended audience (friends or otherwise) to their special creation.

[ISG] One popular game that makes heavy use of user generated content is the PlayStation 3’s Little Big Planet. The game was phenomenal, but relied heavily on UGC for longevity. In that game’s case, many players felt that moderators for content were far to strict. What is your take on such moderation?

[SH] Playfish’s approach is very different from LBP. We don’t believe in heavy central moderation, but rather in improving the relevance of quizzes much like Google treats their ads. By providing tools and algorithms to improve the relevance of quizzes, we want to ensure users can always tune in to Quiztastic and see something that interest them, in their own language. Social filters such as which quizzes are popular amongst your friends play an important role in this quest for relevance.

[ISG] So how do you feel Quiztastic is doing now? Surely a lot of the early issues were just growing pains.

[SH] It is very early days, and there’s a lots of exciting features which we are working hard on and which are not yet available, but so far we have received lots of positive feedback from our community which helps us steer and nurture this new title. One of the biggest appeal to us is that UGC driven services heavily benefit from the network effect, so watch this space.

[ISG] Okay, now there is one other topic that’s been picking at the back of my mind. Moving away from UGC and Quiztastic, Facebook is growing significantly on the international level, and to that end you have been translating a lot of your apps. Have you been making use of Facebook’s app translation tool?

Sebastien: At Playfish, we want to create the highest quality experience for friends to play together and this mean ensuring that you can play the game in your native language.

So far we support around 10 languages in our games and are adding new ones all the time. We are not at this stage using the community translation tools from Facebook, given we operate in a Flash environment, but we do get lots of help from our community to improve our own translations and suggest new ones, so we essentially tap into the same great translation power that is the Facebook community.

[ISG] How effective has that been for you?

[SH] We have an audience distribution that mirrors the Facebook audience distribution so we are very happy with the local traction our games are getting. The amazing thing is that the concept of a ‘low quality user’ no longer applies as users from traditional ‘low value’ countries actually have a similar propensity to spend their hard earned money in a game, because the price point of virtual good is affordable ($1 compared to the retail price of a video game) and delivery is guaranteed since the virtual good is delivered online (unlike a physical good). This is changing the face of e-commerce and has led us to say that there is no such thing as a low quality user, only low quality experiences.

[ISG] It’s probably safe to assume that the translations are happening due to Facebook’s global reach. How much international traffic are you seeing now (compared to before translation)?

[SH] Our traffic is split evenly around the globe: 30% Americas, 30% Europe, 30% Asia, 10% Rest of World. Our games have been localized from day 1. This is one of the benefit of having 4 offices around the globe (Playfish has offices in Beijing (China), London (UK), Norway and San Francisco). Localization goes beyond language, there is also cultural aspects to respect and adapt to. For example menus in Restaurant City, fashion trends in Pet Society and down to memory cards in Who Has The Biggest brain (which feature both sushi sets and veggie burgers). Social games are a truly global consumer phenomenon and we are setup to address it both globally and locally.

You can get a glimpse of our players in different countries here.

[ISG] Has there been any one country, region, or demographic that has been the source of the most increases (traffic wise)?

[SH] We are strongest in markets where social networks are the most mature, i.e. US and UK, but rising fast everywhere else. In less mature geographies where social networks are still nascent we see signs of people joining social networks as a way to access our games. This highlights the key role played by content in the social network ecosystem.

[ISG] What about revenue wise? What groups of people are spending more? About how much more? Assuming you can share.

[SH] See my earlier comments about propensity to spend being quite different from traditional physical goods e-commerce. Latent demand is very high around the world. There are still large challenges related to the payment layer in more remote territories, but this is an area of intense focus by many players, both global and local, so this will get addressed over time.

[ISG] Thanks for your time. One last question: we’ve seen Playfish go from simple word games to virtual worlds, and now to user generated content: So what is next for you guys?

[SH] You never know what is going to come next from Playfish and this is part of the fun. One thing I can guarantee you is that we are hard at work on making our existing games even more fun, as well as working on some amazing new projects… on which I can unfortunately not comment.

Last month, A-ya Chiu of Taiwan had over 4400 friends on Facebook. Most of these friends were added for Pet Society, the Playfish game revolving around cartoonish pets. Because of her vast network, Chiu is the most popular girl in Pet Society, and her alter-ego “IceLashes” enjoys a fabulous lifestyle in the virtual world.

While Chiu (pictured, along with IceLashes) is an extreme example of a gamer gone add-happy, many others are following suit and significantly changing their experience of Facebook. Top game players are transforming Facebook from a social networking site into a gaming delivery system.

On her Facebook profile, Chiu, who is 24, shows pictures of herself playing up for the camera, sticking out her tongue and exposing her legs. She looks more like a booth girl than a gamer. But a gamer is exactly what she is. Currently unemployed, Chiu plays games on Facebook for more than eight hours a day. Pet Society takes up most of that time. In three months, IceLashes has advanced to level 38 (out of a maximum 47) and her virtual house is stuffed with the latest must-have items that are released each week.

In comparison, Karen Bedford of England, who has been playing the game for about a year for one to two hours a day is five levels below Chiu, and her house, while nicely decorated, is smaller. Such differences are caused by the fact that friends equal money in Pet Society. Each day you visit a friend’s pet, you earn up to 30 virtual coins. The more friends you have, the more money you can make and the more things you can buy.

Other online games, such as Zynga’s Yoville, also reward players for interacting with friends. During a discussion panel at July’s Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Sebastien de Halleux, COO of Playfish said that connecting with friends is an immediate objective of social games. “There needs to be a benefit for users to invite others into the game,” he said. He emphasized that Restaurant City, another Playfish product, is less about restaurant management than about employing one’s friends as cooks or servers.

Problem is, while these games have millions of users, many people have only a handful of real-life friends who play them. Hence, players flock to forums and blogs to find one another. “Add me. My pet needs more friends,” is a familiar plea.

Sarah Gordon Weathersby, a retired IT professional in Raleigh, North Carolina, jokes that such forums feel like the “red light district,” but other gamers can’t resist clicking the add button. Many items in Pet Society cost thousands of coins, and buying them would take weeks of playing (or real money) if you don’t have many friends. Even a moderate player like Ulrika Ruston, an English teacher in Sweden, has added 41 complete strangers. There’s also a mass-add application designed to centralize your contacts and build your alliances in over 90 games.

When gamers triple or quadruple their network, Facebook loses some of its usefulness as a way to communicate with friends. It becomes less of a social platform than a gaming platform. Then again, many people don’t rely on Facebook to contact their friends and family. They e-mail or phone their loved ones and use Facebook for recreation.

MiYon Richardson, a mother of two and a digital scrapbooker in Texas, says that after her network ballooned for Zynga’s Mafia Wars, her news feed and e-mail box became cluttered with game-related messages. “I get so much spam now,” she says. “I very rarely see an update from my real friends.”

Richardson alleviates some of the spamming problem by separating her friends into different groups. This allows her to filter her news feed and prevent certain people from seeing all of her information. But many other users, including Chiu, don’t take advantage of such features.

The most popular girl in Pet Society likes to share her pictures with everyone. Chiu has uploaded over 2,000 images, mostly of IceLashes. When she makes a status update, it’s usual to see several hundred people “like” it.

However, Chiu has become a bit judicious recently. In the past several weeks, she has been de-friending about 1,200 people, initially because her bloated network was causing Pet Society to load slowly. But she also removed people who begged for items or had multiple aliases.

Still, with over 3,200 connections, Chiu’s Facebook habits may have made a lasting impact, blurring the lines between gaming and friendship. Communicating several times by E-mail, she promptly answered all my questions until I asked her how many of her real friends play Pet Society.

Chiu replied, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘real friend.’ If you mean real friend besides me, then the answer is about 20. But if you mean real friends in the game, about 500 chat with me and send me gifts.”

I clarified my question. “When I said ‘real friend,’ I meant someone you know through school, work, parties. Someone you meet in ‘real’ life, not just through the Internet.”

This time, when Chiu replied, she halved her initial estimate. “I have about 10 friends in this game…lol.”

Soyon Im is the writer of Pet Society Anonymous.

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Virtual goods transactions are still evolving within social games in the US and many other parts of the world, but the business model has already matured in parts of Asia. But are established gaming companies still able to grow revenues? Recent statements by Korean gaming companies Nexon and Gamevil suggest the answer is yes.

Nexon, a privately held casual gaming site, said its revenue was up 35% year-on-year revenue, with its number one contributor being the virtual goods-driven title MapleStory.

With a stated 92 million registered users (6 million of whom are in North America) and a peak concurrent user count of 70,000, the tremendous popularity of Nexon’s MapleStory is certainly apparent. An increase in revenue indicates the company has refined its virtual goods economy, and is benefiting from US growth. In fact, Nexon said that in 2005, the year MapleStory was launched in North America, revenues were upwards of $230 million with a $75 million net profit, and in 2007, U.S. sales of virtual goods were around $30 million. Assuming the company didn’t take a revenue hit in 2008, the 35 percent growth number means it is likely bringing in a lot more money now.

Of course, not all Korean growth is coming out of the MMO market. Mobile game publisher Gamevil is also seeing significant revenues — and profits.

In the second quarter, the company reported sales growth of 67% in year-over-year total revenue, reaching $4.3 million. Operating income increased 188% to $2.6 million, net profits increased 214% to total $2.1 million — around a 50% profit margin.

Based on earnings from the prior quarter (Q1, 2009), fiscal growth was reported to be up 30%, operating income up 74%, and net profits up 55%. Again, these numbers have come primarily from virtual goods transactions, most from completely free-to-play mobile sports titles, and role-playing games such as HYBRID: Eternal Whisper. Note that the company has also launched iPhone versions of its games, but those versions have been minimal contributors to Gamevil’s growth, at least so far. The games have yet to utilize virtual goods transactions since Apple doesn’t allow the feature in free applications.

Despite the hang-up, Gamevil seems confident as the company states that it plans to grow in throughout 2009 with the release of new sequels and franchises within Korea, while new, upcoming international titles (including the remakes for the iPhone) could help the company’s growth elsewhere.

[via Worlds in Motion & PoketGamer respectively]

As the iPhone grows in popularity, so does the social gaming space within it. However, not all are developing games for the mobile device. Many, in fact, are developing platforms for the games themselves, and it is something we have seen before from companies such as ngmoco, Aurora Feint, and Scoreloop. Well, a new player will be joining that group as just last week mobile social gaming platform creator, Z2Live announced a second round of funding from Madrona Venture Group worth $3 million.

The total adds to the $1 million raised from the same investor last year, and will be utilized to develop what the Seattle-based developer describes as the “first mobile multiplayer game platform.” According to the company, the platform supports asynchronous casual games, racing titles, RPGs, and, in the future, first-person shooters. In addition to the wide level of games support, the Z2Live platform also plans to incorporate push notification, voice chat, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace integration, virtual goods, analytics, game lobbies, and about half a dozen more features.

Currently, the platform is free to use, but Z2Live does take a portion of any revenue generated by its supported games. However, considering the sophistication of the platform, it certainly seems like a worthwhile and viable option.

[via TechCrunch]

A traditional challenge for mobile game developers is figuring out how to get in front of users. Facebook’s announcement today about Connect for Mobile Web points to how the company could help solve that problem.

One way would be for Facebook to use its own mobile applications to advertise third-party applications that use Connect. By creating a channel for mobile games and other applications within its own mobile app interface, the company could help drive more users to developers — and in turn, make its own apps more central to how people use mobile devices.

Another way would be for device manufacturers and carriers to build similar channels on their own, showing top games and other apps that use Facebook within their own app stores and device interfaces. For example, Nokia could build a special channel within its own Facebook application to show off other Ovi apps that integrate Facebook Connect. Or imagine seeing updates from friends about the latest games that they’re playing whenever you open your phone.

We’ve already looked at the app-channel idea for Facebook’s iPhone app. Facebook already has one of the most popular apps for the iPhone, and it lets you use core features of Facebook’s main site — but it doesn’t have a place for third-party Facebook applications or iPhone applications that use Facebook Connect. Facebook could add a new option to its iPhone app interface, showing iPhone-Connect games that a user’s friends are playing, or that are especially popular with other Facebook-iPhone users. It would be a sort of Facebook app directory like what the social network already has on its web site, but just for the iPhone.

The underlying problem, of course, is that mobile devices have not historically allowed developers easy access to users. Carriers have typically cut deals with only handfuls of developers, to pre-load only a few applications on devices. Some platforms, like Symbian, have been around for years, but have restricted what developers could do. Apple’s iTunes App Store changed that, proving to the industry that users wanted to be able to choose from a wide variety of applications on their own. While the App Store is regularly and quite appropriately criticized for its restrictive and quirky app approval process, at least it successfully connects thousands of developers with millions of users. However, there are now so many applications for the iPhone that developers are having a hard time getting discovered. Third parties have already started creating their own distribution channels to address this problem: See SGN’s cross-network game promotions or platforms such as OpenFeint or Scoreloop for more.

Other companies, like Nokia, have meanwhile launched their own app stores, but so far none have proved nearly as successful as Apple’s.

This week, Facebook and Nokia announced an application for the manufacturer’s N97 model of phones, available through Nokia’s Ovi app store. Facebook could potentially feature gaming applications for Ovi that use Connect within this application’s interface, although the application was developed in-house by Nokia so that company would need to take the lead on such a move. Considering that Nokia wants Ovi to become a serious competitor to iTunes, it should think seriously about this idea — or at least some way of using Facebook data to help users find new games that they might want to play. It could also, for example, feature apps that use Facebook Connect within the Ovi home site.

Facebook applications are available for phones from INQ, HTC, LG Electronics, Motorola, Palm, RIM, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, the T-Mobile Sidekick, as well as phones powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. The social network could potentially create mobile app distribution channels for all of these phones.

So where is Facebook at now with this idea? It currently includes “mobile” as a category of apps in its app directory — click on the tab and you can see a generic selection of “mobile” games, but that’s it at the moment. However, on a conference panel in July, SGN chief executive Shervin Pishevar broached the idea of an iPhone app tab or channel of some sort, where users could bookmark and save iPhone apps, see app alerts, notifications, and more. At the time, Facebook mobile head Henri Moissinac said the company was looking into the idea. Facebook has since introduced a new version of its iPhone app, but it has limited app integration. Users can see notifications from applications on Facebook’s web site, but clicking through takes users to open up the app in a web browser. App invites are not currently available. And there is no customization to help Facebook users find more iPhone games.

To be fair, Facebook’s mobile team is busy with more immediate projects. The company works with more than 150 carriers in more than 50 different countries, and its first goal is to try to make Facebook itself as broadly accessible as possible. The release of Facebook Connect for Mobile Web affirms this focus, as it will let mobile web sites and apps share information back and forth with Facebook through just a few easy-to-add lines of code.

So, it may be that manufacturers and carriers themselves could take the lead on using Facebook data to help users find more games and other apps on their devices.

Launched in July by white-label application developer LOLapps, Yakuza Lords at first glance looks like yet another text-based role playing game with a gangster theme. But it might be something more than just an Asian-themed version of Mafia Wars.

For those not familiar, LOLapps is the creator of prominent Facebook apps Quiz Creator and Gift Creator. These have proven popular enough to get LOLapps 44 million unique visitors each month.

But back in April, LOLapps told us that it was working on creating a white label platform for the most popular genres of Facebook games, starting with mafia-style RPGs where the company would operate all aspects of the games and monetize them through virtual currency. Yakuza Lords looks like it’s the first step in that direction.

Now, to clear up any confusion, Yakuza Lords is fully developed by LOLapps itself. Here’s a closer look at the game itself, keeping in mind that these features could be included in its white-label version.

Rather than the Mafia, you deal with the Japanese mob, the Yakuza, but the game is otherwise similar to the industry standard: Players choose a type of character, complete jobs, buy items and property, build up a mob, and try to become the next Yakuza lord.

Visually, the game looks fine for a text based title, and is as good as any of the Zynga creations. However, the game actually occasionally uses vectorized pictures, some from Asian films, for some of its graphics. Depending on how you look at it, this is either amusing or a cop-out. For example, during the tutorial there is a “Job” that uses a scene from the foreign comedy Kung Fu Hustle. Other images seem to be from very niche films that most probably would not know, so it’s possible these were intended to be surprises for true connoisseurs.

Nevertheless, the game is still good as far as Facebook RPGs go. Perhaps it is not very original game play wise, but if you like Asian culture and the mafia games, then Yakuza Lords is one worth checking out. If Yakuza Lords is indeed a prototype for LOLapps’ white-label social gaming service, we may very well see an explosion of similar mafia-style games in the near future.