In an interesting twist on offers – the  online advertising coupons that users can take for things like points in social game — there’s now a new way to earn. By doing virtual labor, via a partnership between payments company Gambit and “labor as a service” company CrowdFlower.

The idea is pretty straightforward. If you’re a user playing a social game, you go into whatever interface the company has set up for offers and other payments. Instead of being asked to, say, buy a Netflix subscription or a ringtone, or purchase a virtual currency directly, there will be a new part of the interface where you can take simple, online jobs. See the screenshot for the game myFarm. In it, a company needs the correct contact information for four businesses. It asks that users take 30 minutes to search the web and find the information, in exchange for points in the game.

In terms of making sure the users’ work ends up being valuable to the business, Crowdflower gives each user a reputation score. Multiple users have to ‘agree’ on the same answer for the answer to be cleared in the company’s system. People who have done well will be able to complete more and more difficult jobs. Because more difficult jobs are normally worth more to companies, users will be able to earn more points from them.

So, client companies never actually pays the user for their work, while the person gets the virtual goods they would otherwise have to earn, or pay for with actual cash. It’s a sort of win-win, and we’re very interested to see how it works.

Of course, real money does actually change hands. The client company pays CrowdFlower, and Gambit gets a cut.

Tapulous’ game series Tap Tap game series has been a hit on the iPhone, modeled after the popular video game Dance Dance Revolution. We had wondered why we didn’t see very much competition, but with the introduction of Rock Band a few days ago, well, now we do. Of course, Tapulous isn’t a company easily ousted from its top rankings, and so we take a look at its latest game, Tap Tap Revenge 3, introduced earlier this month.

For those unfamiliar with the series, the game is a rhythm music game that has players tapping multi-colored orbs as they stream down the screen, in sync with the song that is playing. Players can further increase the immersion by turning on options to tilt and/or shake the device as well (though most seem to prefer it off), and all of this was wrought with fun, original song recordings from both indie and popular artists.

To that end though, many people and reviewers seem to have found Tap Tap Revenge 3 a downgrade. The game costs about $1 to download, but players are only granted a rather limited number of tracks. There are more than 100 different songs to download (as well as a new song every week), but most of these free songs are unknown indie artists. That isn’t to say the music isn’t good, but it is hard to get a player interested if they have no idea what they are downloading.

As for known and popular artists, these too are, thankfully, available. However, don’t let that thanks go too far, as these have to be purchased in packs of two for $0.99 or packs of five for $2.99, and anything that was purchased in past games must now be repurchased. If this wasn’t enough to irk the player, advertisements and paid content are everywhere, which quickly becomes obnoxious and has driven many players to simply forsake the latest version and download Tap Tap Revenge 2 for free.

This isn’t all without hope, however, as the game has seen a few quality upgrades too. As far as the UI goes, many elements, such as the star power, the score multiplier, and a tap accuracy bar, are now conveniently always visible. Furthermore, the social play has also seen some improvement.

As with previous renditions, the game still has online, head-to-head play. Unfortunately, it is often too slow and unresponsive to be played well. Nonetheless, a new battle system makes up for this by adding a great asynchronous challenge mode that pits your high scores against your friends’. Moreover, players can now level up as they play and buy clothing and items for a customizable avatar.

In the end, the core game play of Tap Tap Revenge 3 is still a ton of fun to play. Yes, there are a lot of overbearing issues with it, but Tapulous does say that they are listening to reviews and complaints, so perhaps things will improve. Furthermore, even with all the user complaints, the popularity of past versions has carried this third title quite far as a vast majority of players are still ranking the game at five stars. The only question now is whether or not it will be enough to deal with the iPhone version of Rock Band from EA. There is still time to make improvements, but either way, they will be interesting numbers to watch.

Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus is bullish about the future of social applications, and he’s not afraid to say it. Given his social gaming company’s user and revenue growth on Facebook and MySpace, it was not surprising to hear him say so yesterday during a presentation he gave at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

The presentation is below. Much of it will be familiar to readers, but are a few notable items in it. One is Zynga’s own user growth numbers, in graph form. The company has now reached 50 million daily active users, with a big uptick happening around the end of 2008.

Another item is the conclusion of a virtual goods charity drive within the game FarmVille, which we’d covered in more detail last week. A virtual good plant seed in FarmVille generated a total of $830,000 in a couple weeks, with half the revenue going to nonprofits working in Haiti.

“Don’t believe this will end with Facebook,” Pincus said yesterday. “You will see many other forms of social plumbing emerge, and the category of social apps will be up for grabs in every traditional sector, from travel to search to gaming.” What he means, as you can see more about in the slideshow, is his definition of “web 3.0.”

He defines the first version of the web as being about initial experimentation with web pages and links, the next version being about Google’s search and advertising efforts — essentially, successfully using the web as a platform to build a big, useful business. The third version of the web is the social application economy.

Here’s the slideshow:

Remember the days of 8-bit graphics? How about adventure games where players gallivanted around a pixilated world interacting with virtual everyone and everything? A place called Sarien.net does. Sarien is a little place we happened across that has actually converted a number of classic Sierra adventure games from their original formats to a more web friendly version that allows users to log on and play together.

Unfortunately, the number of users playing on the site is exceedingly small, so playing socially was a bit hit or miss when we tried. Nevertheless, when there are other players around — and when you happen to find yourself in the same location in a game — you can interact and talk with each other. Granted, this isn’t all that social in the grand scheme of things (example: in-game events for one player are not shared with another in the same room), but remember that these games are from the 1980s… well before the prospect of social gaming was even a thought.

All the same, the games do bring a great deal of nostalgia as players walk around using arrow keys, right-clicking for options, and selecting from a myriad of interactive options (with the primary results being mere text responses). Frankly, the original feel of the games has been well preserved by creator Martin Kool, CTO and partner to a Dutch web applications company by the name of Q42 (queue forty two).

Sarien.net is based off an older creation of Kool, a similar portal called Good Old Adventures. Using images from Sierra games that had to be manually created using a copy and paste method within WinAGI Game Development Studio, it was created to bring back the games in the form of a glorified chat room; almost a mini-virtual world. Unfortunately, this meant there was no game play. After four years, however, the idea of reviving these classic titles evolved into Sarien.net where each of the Sierra games’ “GOTO” programming statements (statements are stand alone instructions given to the computer to carry out a simple task or when combined with others, a very complex one – for our non-developer readers) statements that could jump anywhere in the code, including what is called a nested “if“-statement – had to be reworked for a more modern environment. While it is a lot of programming jargon, the nested “if“-statements were removed using a decompilation method, and the rest of the code emulated by what is called “switch/case statements,” thus allowing the games to work as intended, but still play nice with modern JavaScript.

While impressive, the endeavor begs the question as to how popular replaying such old games would be. Granted, there is a great deal of nostalgia, but the fact remains that these games are extremely dated, and that novelty might not last long. There doesn’t seem to be any monetization going on at the moment, so it is possibly intended to be just a fun side-project from a fan of classic games. To that end, it really is quite well done and certainly adds a little something extra to the games many of us grew up on.

Current Game Library:

• Gold Rush!
• King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown
• King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne
• King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human
• Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
• Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel
• Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter
• Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge
• The Black Cauldron

Looks like Aurora Feint has been up to more than just improving its OpenFeint platform. Today they are unveiling the first preview of a secret project they have been working on, code named “VSL.” The project is, in fact, a game for the iPhone that is scheduled for a holiday release, the company tells us. Fitting in nicely with the latest changes to Apple’s policies, this VSL game will be free to play.

After speaking with Peter Relan, Chairman of Aurora Feint, and Jason Citron, co-founder and CEO, we learned that VSL will be a casual, multiplayer game focused on “level unlocking and virtual goods packs,” (with packs costing around a dollar) intended to make use of the new in-app purchase system Apple has recently allowed for free to play games. As we’ve seen with ngmoco’s Eliminate and SGN’s plans, many games are shifting towards a virtual goods transaction model similar to what you see with in online games.

To this end, VSL is focusing heavily on player level progression being an integral part of the virtual goods. As a player plays and improves, they will unlock sets of virtual goods. Such goods will come in the aforementioned packs, and like many Facebook games, most will be free if significant time is spent playing, but cost money for immediate use and/or gratification. These goods will be utilized for character customization as well as completing in-game achievements. Moreover, Aurora Feint stated that more levels and virtual goods will be continually added in order to improve longevity.

What is most curious about this announcement, however, is that Relan and Citron said that the game has actually been in development for several months and that the recent changes by Apple were actually predicted by the mobile developers.

As for further specifics about the game itself, the both Relan and Citron were… suffice to say… enigmatic. From what we can piece together, the game is a semi-competitive, asynchronous multiplayer game that is somewhat akin to the original Aurora Feint apps (The Beginning and The Arena). Apparently, players will be able to garner some form of benefit from playing with and inviting each other, but, sadly, the specifics as to what this means was left out. Nonetheless, it was said to be a little different than what we are used to seeing in more traditional games such as Mafia Wars. Evidently, the ambiguity is merely their way of stirring the pot a little as they did say that further announcements will be made closer to the final release. Either way, we will be watching.

As a side-note, along with the game will come the 2.4 release of OpenFeint – scheduled for release in November. It will allow developers to integrate OpenFeint achievements into the upgrade process from a free game to paid one.

So are you Snake Eyes or Storm Shadow? Scarlett or The Baroness? It was a red letter day when they first announced the new movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (which came out in theaters during early August) and fans of the original show found themselves either drooling of the premise or fearing its release. Of course, with most big-name movies these days, many big developers (such as Electronic Arts), build games to springboard off the buzz generated by the film. From time to time, movie-driven games appear with the DVD release as well.

A new Facebook title called G.I. Joe Faceoff Game looks to be using this concept in reverse. The app is extremely simple, so the game is intended to promote the release of the DVD next month rather than stand alone.

Players begin the game by creating a customizable version of characters Duke, Snake Eyes, or Scarlett on the G.I. Joe side or Storm Shadow, The Baroness, or Neo-Viper on the Cobra Side. Of course, while each character is customizable, the range of aesthetic variation is rather limited. Players can change their top, weapon, pants, and boots with roughly five different choices amongst each of them. However, many of the outfits begin as locked and require the player to level up before using them.

Once you have customized your character to your liking, you can then begin fighting other players in an automated battle and earn points, if you win, for the purchase of more and greater upgrades. These upgrades consist of the weapons, items, direct stat enhancement, and vehicles (oddly enough, a helicopter costs less than a sword…). Each purchase further improves select character statistics such as endurance, strength, agility and combat training. Obviously, this equates to more wins, which means more points available for upgrades, which leads to more fighting, which… etc. As you can see, the game quickly becomes a near endless cycle of fight, upgrade, fight and quite frankly, it gets old very quickly. Nonetheless, the term “near” is the key word here as there are only four ranks to level through, and with a limited number of purchases to be made, the longevity of this game is extraodinarily short.

At the very least, the artwork is nice to look at, but that doesn’t exactly compensate for the dull game play. Frankly, the only thing that felt like a significant reward was the unlocking of two behind the scenes clips from the movie. However, they are clips from the DVD’s bonus features, so with a little patience (the DVD releases on November, 3), the videos would be available to anyone purchasing the movie.

G.I. Joe Faceoff feels intended to be a promotional tool – a catalyst for the video release, if you will – rather than a stand-alone title. Considering the overbearing popularity of the Facebook social network, this is hardly a bad move. It helps get the word out for a relatively low cost, makes use of the social graph, and well likely help, at least to some degree, improve the sales the DVD and Blu-Ray release.

Forget us boring industry news sites, there’s a new class of game blogger out there, and it’s made up of devoted players who start blogs for their favorite social games. There are, of course, blogs for most anything you can think of.  So, what’s especially interesting is how many there are for top social games, and how high the quality is — especially when you consider that these are games already designed for socializing. It’s not like you need to start a blog to help you find like-minded social game players.

We’ve mentioned a few here on Inside Social Games. Soyon Im, the author of Pet Society Anonymous, a blog dedicated to Playfish’s virtual pet-caring game, penned a great article for us last month about addicted social gamers. We’ve cited the blog FarmVille Freak for its coverage of how a charitable virtual good works in Zynga’s virtual farming game.

Here’s a list of some social gaming blogs we’ve seen out there for a few popular games, with the criteria for making the list being that the blog is regularly updated, and dedicated to a single social game. The list is by no means complete, so let us know if there are more games and blogs you think we should add.

Pet Society, by Playfish:

• Pet Society Anonymous
• Pet Society Club
• Pet Society News
• Pet Society Chatter

FarmVille, by Zynga:

• FarmVille Freak
• The FarmVille N00B Weblog
• FarmVille Market
• FarmVille Neighbors

Mobsters, by Playdom

• MySpace Mobsters Exposed
• Mobster Strategy

SuperPoke Pets, by Slide

• SuperPoke Pets Paws
• SPP Addict

Slide is continuing its push into virtual goods with a new, cartoony virtual community app called SuperPocus. It’s less of a social game and more of a virtual world, and it combines elements of virtual pet-caring games like Playfish’s Pet Society with a magic-school-and-quest theme loosely patterned after the Harry Potter series.

The app is the biggest move that we’ve seen from Slide in some time. The company gained tens of millions of users through widgets on social networks, and simple apps on Facebook — and for a long time was focused on advertising. But it began experimenting with virtual goods last year, experimenting with things like sponsored “pokes” in its SuperPoke Facebook app. Then, it rolled out virtual pet-caring game SuperPoke Pets on MySpace in 2008, followed by the Facebook version. Today, the MySpace app has 6.31 million total users, while the Facebook one has 2.28 million monthly active users.

Slide + Pet Society + Harry Potter = SuperPocus

The new app is designed to eventually become a sort of virtual economy, complete with scarce virtual items that users will need to pay money to access.

But first, you create a cute-looking mythical virtual creature called a “BooBat,” and in a cartoon-y 3D interface you take it to learn spells at the “Academy of Magic.” You start off with a couple spells, but to do anything interesting — like fighting evil creatures called “glums” — you need to study up. The app only launched last week, and it looks like Slide is planning a range of additional features built around the concept of going on Potter-like “quests.”

The initial quests are basic. The first one you do is simply learning a spell: You only need to click into a virtual classroom in the academy, then click on the teacher BooBat to get it. The next quest is going to “study hall,” which is basically a timing mechanism that requires you to come back hours later to collect “spell gems.” You’ll need these gems to unlock more powerful spells.

You can also do things like pick out clothing for your BooBat and decorate a personal room for the creature with furniture. It also requires you to have enough health and “mana” to be able to cast spells, which you do by eating food and drinking potions. But you’ll need to buy these items in virtual stores on the site.

However, if you try to buy more items than you have coins for, you just won’t be able to complete the purchase. There’s currently no virtual payments system that allows you to buy coins. This is especially notable because Slide has been working on its own in-house payment system for months — its executives were PayPal cofounders, so it has serious expertise in payments. We’re interested to see how virtual goods purchases work once the app is more developed.

Other parts of the app also aren’t complete. Certain features that are already visible in it, like some rooms in the Academy, are “coming soon.”

The app is starting to grow, though, having reached 20,000 users in the few days since it launched. Slide is starting to promote the game to users on another app it owns, Top Friends, so we expect growth to continue.

And, eventually, we expect quests to eventually become key parts of what brings users back. Perhaps we’ll see a Sorcerer’s Stone-style adventure where you need to work with other BooBats (your Facebook friends) to capture some sort of object from an evil Glum lord? We’re making that up, but the point is that SuperPocus appears designed to be a new sort of franchise that it can easily keep expanding in order to keep users active.

Slide’s strategy

This is Slide’s second virtual community-style app to launch recently. It introduced a Rock Band-style music game called Rock Riot back in August. That app has recently seen an uptick in growth, and now has around 529,000 monthly active users. Aside from that launch, though Slide has spent much of the past year fine-tuning its apps, and working on bigger projects like payments.

We asked the company how the new app fits in with its larger plans. Here’s what Keith Rabois, the company’s Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, tells us:

Our vision is to build communities that fuel the creation and distribution of virtual goods. Central to this vision is building fun, addicting experiences where long-term engagement is driven by user-to-user interaction and community-created content. With gameplay as a key ingredient, we foster vibrant markets that will allow our members to earn real money by creating and trading digital goods.

So maybe the quests won’t get too much more complicated, or game-focused. Slide doesn’t want to be a social gaming company in the sense that companies like Zynga and Playdom are, but rather to be more like the free-form virtual worlds seen on other sites, like Second Life and IMVU. “Decorating, meeting other users, trading for rare items and eventually a complete marketplace are what we are devoted to,” Rabois says. The goal, he says, is to create a sort of “virtual economy.”

We expect SuperPocus to be under heavy construction for awhile yet as it was soft-launched so the company can fine-tune the app. Long-term, though, the concept — combined with Slide’s millions of users, and development expertise — could make for a hit.

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

[Hat tip to Siqi Chen for the first sub-head in this article.]

Meez is an online virtual world that’s become a sort of mainstream-style hangout for teens. Now it’s planning a new virtual world app for MySpace, due out later this week. From the early look we saw, it includes messaging, virtual rooms and other features to get MySpace users interacting. And, if a MySpace user sees a friend with Meez, and wants to create their own avatar, they can do so by going over to the Meez home site to buy virtual clothes.

Which fits in nicely with the business Meez has going. The site isn’t huge, but it has focused on getting profitable — and that has been happening since April, through a combination of ads, a subscription service and virtual goods. So now it has a technology and business platform to expand from.

Meez has 13 million total registered users, of whom 3 million are active every month, with the average person spending an hour on the site per visit. Around 600,000 users are on the site far more than that. Besides chatting, the site lets users do things like watch videos from YouTube and Hulu, and listen — and make their avatars dance — to music. Its home site, “Meez Nation,” includes neighborhoods and other places to hang out in public, as well as “roomz” that users can create and decorate.

Why MySpace? The average age of a Meez user is 17, with a range from 13 to 30, two-thirds are female, and 90 percent are in the US. These numbers help explain why MySpace — not Facebook — is the most popular site with users after Meez itself. Both skews young, American, and are focused on pop-culture entertainment. Around 40 percent of Meez users surveyed by the company said they had a MySpace profile, while only 19 percent said they had a Facebook profile.

Also, how is Meez more mainstream than some virtual worlds? It doesn’t emphasize sexually charged or bizarre avatars, but rather more typical hip-hop, goth, or otherwise fairly normal teen trends. Users requested avatars from the company, for example, that were more “full-figured” than what it originally offered, Meez chairman Sean Ryan tells us.

So, while many social gaming and virtual worlds companies look more closely at Facebook, we’re very interested to see how the MySpace focus works out. MySpace itself has been losing users, but it still has some 60 million monthly actives in the US, and the News Corp.-owned company is trying to make itself more of an entertainment destination. That effort is still underway, but Meez’s product seems like a good fit.

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

Having already launched a social gaming platform half a year ago for the iPhone, German company Scoreloop, provider of infrastructure and implementation services for mobile, social games, has since been up to something new. Today, they are announcing Core Social, a white-label solution for the integration of social gaming features, and are coupling it with what they are calling “Premium Integration Services.”

The key premise to Core Social is that social features can now be directly integrated into a game’s user interface. These include online high scores, achievements, player challenges, integration into social networks (i.e. Facebook), cross promotions, push notification, localization, and virtual currency. Granted, some of these were seen in the original versions of the Scoreloop platform (as well as others such as friending and multiplayer matchmaking) but with the new Core Social, a greater brand consistency between social features is achieved.

“Top tier publishers are all saying the same thing,” says Marc Gumpinger, CEO of Scoreloop. “They want social features, but they either fear integrating another company’s branded platform or think they need to do it all themselves.” This statement holds the key to what makes Core Social different. It is, in fact, not simply a “stand-alone platform,” as Gumpinger puts it, but actually allows iPhone developers to integrate “as many or as few social features they’d like directly into their games. Publishers can have these features right away – no strings attached – while retaining ownership of their users and brand experience.”

Suffice to say, Core Social offers a great deal of power and beneficial features to any social development, but for those with limited resources or tight deadlines, Scoreloop has sweetened the pot with the previously mentioned Premium Integration Services, where it helps companies add these white-label features.

Current clients include Parachute Panic from FDG Entertainment, Astro Boy from MobileBus, and Pee Monkey Jungle Fire from Happylatte. Scoreloop has said that it is currently further developing partnerships and is open to and welcomes questions regarding its latest platform and related services from interested studios and publishers alike.