The push by marketers to be “bookmarked” has been going on since the Favorites tab first showed up in web browsers. A bookmark on Facebook is the Holy Grail for an app developer: sitting in the footer of every Facebook page is the only way to be consistently “above the fold” and in the view of a user. However, more social games are also encouraging users to become fans of an app, too. More on that below.

Recent changes and trends are making these channels more meaningful to developers:

• The Facebook homepage newsfeed has defaulted from a real-timefeed (where users only typically see it if they get online within four to six hours after the item was posted) to an algorithmic feed that users may never see,
• Notifications (which at least are continuously highlighted till you click on them) are going away in the very near future, and
• A recent study of US women by Q Interactive showed that 85 percent of them use five or fewer games/apps regularly (you can make your own inferences that there are only six bookmark spots in the Facebook footer).

It would be interesting to understand the correlation between being bookmarked and visit frequency (which I think itself is highly correlated to propensity to pay). Lacking that data, most Facebook social game users can make their own inferences based on the number of promotions to “bookmark this app!” – like this one in YoVille:

Taking advantage of the recently released Bookmark Button that allows developers to put the “Add Bookmark” button anywhere on the page, FarmVille on Friday pushed a landing page that prompted users to become a fan or bookmark the app:

It’s obvious this is important enough to Zynga as this is being pushed immediately after the ubiquitous “send a gift to a friend” screen as a default. (Optimization is still to come because they obviously know that I’m both a fan and a bookmarker, but apparently not early enough to avoid defaulting me this promo).

While we can’t get the top bookmarked games on Facebook, we can look at the other continual push by developers: the number of fans of each application, on each app’s Facebook page. Gathering fans is becoming an increasingly important way for applications to speak directly to their users and improves the possibility that these updates get into the newsfeed stream.

Here are some of the top games, their number of fans, and the number of monthly active users (MAU) – then I look at the Fans per MAU to see what percentage of users can the application connect with:

One of the things that leaps out when looking at this list is that most of the Zynga titles are around 5% or lower with the exceptions of Café World and YoVille. Café World, though, is part of an overall effort by Zynga to drive fans for the application. To push the number of fans to 1 million, Zynga offered users an incentive of unlocking special higher-than-normal revenue producing menu items. Now that this has been achieved (earlier this week), they are now pushing to reach 5 million:

So what about YoVille? Currently with a 13.8% direct communication level, it’s second best-on the list to Pet Society which is at 15.4%. To a very broad extent, YoVille and Pet Society have very similar game play mechanic (except one is your avatar and the other is with a pet avatar), so it’s possible that some game play mechanics could intrinsically have better ability to drive a number of fans. But while FarmVille and Country Story are around 5%, SlashTown’s Farm Town is closer to 10%.

Likewise, FishVille is only at 2.1% compared to Happy Aquarium’s 9.9% — although to be fair it FishVille has only been out for less than a month. In these initial stages where Zynga is pushing for viral growth, the game pop-ups focus on “Asking for More Neighbors” instead of “Bookmark” or “Add as a Fan” (although both options are there as tabs). This may speak more to the launch tactics of different developers – where Zynga is very focused on traffic growth, other developers are driving more relationships early on. That said, as Zynga games mature (and the mechanisms with which you can interact with your users continue to change) these relationships become more critical.

While still a very broad metric, the Fans per Monthly Active User metric is an interesting way to look at which developers and applications are focusing on (and to some degree how much success they are having in) getting a more direct relationship with their users.

Boku Gets New Partners, Features, Languages -- Mobile payment provider Boku announced 12 new service partners this week: Zoosk, 6waves, Snap Interactive, Cie Studios, GameDuell, Cyberstep Communications, IGG, King.com, NHN USA, Ntreeve, Outspark, and Perfect World. Boku lets users purchase virtual goods through its mobile payments service. Along with the partnerships announcement, the company also says it is making improvements to its technology. Now, the platform will be able to immediately recognize carrier providers for phone numbers as well as whether or not it is mobile or land. This cuts down on the number of steps needed to sign up for the service by removing the user need to manually identify it themselves, thus attracting more customers. Boku will also be localizing its service into 20 new languages.

iPhones see 35% In-App Purchase Conversion Rates -- The iPhone title, Homerun Battle 3D is seeing a conversion rate of 35% for in-app purchases (according to an interview with Pocket Gamer). Prices range from $0.99 to $19.99 and have thus far generated 30% of all revenues for the game. The company reports that the more expensive goods are higher sellers. Most players are buying the items to garner an advantage early on, or to make up for frequent loses while in competitive mode. Despite success, however, the company feels that Apple’s $0.99 minimum price for in-app transactions is too high and is hurting business.

Class-Action Offers Scam Lawsuit Now in Court — The law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff LLP, the one that said it was looking into a possible class-action lawsuit against Facebook, Zynga and other companies over scams in offers, has now filed. The firm, along with Wexler Wallace LLP, is representing a class-action plaintiff who was tricked into signing up for a mobile subscription service. They’re looking for up to $5 million.

Zong and Jambool Announce Partnership - Mobile payment provider Zong announced yesterday that it has partnered with Jambool, the parent company of payment provider Social Gold. This will allow Zong’s mobile payments to be available through Social Gold’s Flash API (which is already being used by about 100 developers) for virtual goods purchases.

Flurry Launches iPhone App Discovery Platform, AppCircle - Analytics startup Flurry has launched AppCircle. With the platform, developers can track detailed analytics such as time spent on an app, what other apps users use, and how much they are spending. The platform is free to the developer, and Flurry sees nothing unless a sale is made.

The company says that around 14,000 developers using the system, and can track around 40 million unique users monthly. Flurry also says that it is tracking about 66% of iPhone and iPod Touch users and an equivalent percentage on the Android, meaning that the platform can recommend more relevant games to users for multiple devices.

Apps that make use of AppCircle can make recommendations to users about other games they can buy. The ad is a non-intrusive single line at the bottom of the screen that can be tapped and leads to where it can be purchased. Only then does Flurry take a cut. Currently, should an app be purchased, the developer receives 70% of the price (Apple gets the rest). Of that percentage, either $0.50 or 30% (whichever is greater) is shared with Flurry who divides it between itself and the app that hosted the recommendation link. Apple will also give 5% to Flurry via Linkshare.

iPhone Pirates – Piracy on the device continues, as this Gamasutra article details. Indie game developer Bram Stolk, said that his game, The Little Tank That Could, had 1,114 copies in circulation. Only 45 had actually been sold. A the recent Game Developers Conference in Shanghai, China, ngmoco said it was experiencing a 50%-90% piracy rate. Now, another indie developer, Smells Like Donkey, is reporting the same percentage for its iPhone title, Tap-Fu. Greg Yardley, CEO of the analytics company Pinch Media says that of the 8% of iPhone apps that utilize its software, around 60% of them are being pirated.

Fizzy.com Launches Game Developer Network – Online games developer 3RD Sense, operator of Fizzy.com, has launched a the Fizzy Game Developers Network (GDN). The new network will provide Flash developers a means to showcase, distribute, and earn revenue from their titles. Developers may upload their games to GDN as either free-to-play or pay-to-play with the former earning money based on the number of plays it receives. The latter, however, will earn 50% of all sales, plus further income from the number of plays. Currently, Fizzy.com sees around 1 million unique users a month, and distributes games across a myriad of partner websites as well.

uSocial Ordered to “Cease and Desist” — Facebook has sent a cease and desist notification to the marketing company, uSocial for violation of the social network’s terms of service. According to BBC News, the company sells Facebook friends and fans and was “letting people profit from their profile.” uSocial “violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm,” according to the report.

Viximo Parnters with Interscope Records -This past week, virtual goods platform Viximo announced a team-up with Interscope Geffen A&M, allowing them to develop licensed virtual goods from Interscope artists. The first round of these new goods will be based around Lady Gaga and slated to release the same time as her album on November 23. In fact, the “Lady Gaga Line” will be attainable through a virtual gifts store on the Lady Gaga, Facebook Fan Page with all payments, analytics, and transactions handled by Viximo.

While a number of games have graduated from our up-and-comers list to become apps with more than 1 million users, there are quite a few more to take their places.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Addict	514,724	+514,723	+100.00
2.	Band of Heroes	690,107	+421,478	+61.07
3.	Ask a Friend	350,991	+283,060	+80.65
4.	Fish Isle	289,447	+276,222	+95.43
5.	The Hierarchy	363,281	+174,596	+48.06
6.	Piou Piou contre les cactus	361,219	+159,941	+44.28
7.	WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?	366,713	+110,198	+30.05
8.	Gift Creator	604,934	+105,513	+17.44
9.	Do you think…?	332,106	+84,670	+25.49
10.	COLLAPSE!	255,305	+76,897	+30.12
11.	JibJab	972,278	+72,426	+7.45
12.	商業大亨Web	416,091	+67,979	+16.34
13.	Which Classic Hollywood Actress Are You?	172,729	+63,683	+36.87
14.	Ninja Warz	107,117	+56,715	+52.95
15.	Top Fish	104,189	+51,201	+49.14
16.	Moment Of Truth	412,299	+50,640	+12.28
17.	Kamu cocoknya punya pasangan orang mana ?	258,534	+44,302	+17.14
18.	GridIron Live	127,295	+43,705	+34.33
19.	Mi Granja	424,666	+41,324	+9.73
20.	Spore Islands	120,147	+39,848	+33.17

The sec0nd on the list, Addict, has shown up before. It gives you a loosely described percentage score for how “addicted” you are to Facebook, based on how often you use site features. However, it appears to have been taken offline by Facebook. We’re not sure what’s going on here.

So let’s look at some of the especially interesting apps on today’s list. Band of Heroes is one, with 421,000 new users to reach 690,000. At number four, it is at the tail end of at least three role-playing games from LOLapps that have been making their way into the millions. The others have been Diva Life and Yakuza Lords. These games are part of a larger plan by the app developer to promote other types of video games, more here.

Another role-playing game, The Hierarchy, also continues to move up, reaching 363,000 by today.

There’s a pretty neat French-language game, though, called Piou Piou contre les cactus. It’s a cheery, arcade-styel game where you control a flying rubber ducky that you navigate up and down a screen trying to dodge cactuses.

And an interesting game-related one also showed up in our overall apps list over on Inside Facebook: Happy Aquarium Community, from CrowdStar. The developer appears to be building apps that are actually forums for Happy Aquarium and its other games, although we’re not exactly sure why.

Other notables include JibJab, Slide’s Top Fish and Spore Islands

Zynga has hit a new milestone on Facebook, and meanwhile, it has just launched a couple ways to increase its presence on the web: A stand-alone site for its hit game FarmVille and a new browser toolbar for Mafia Wars.

The San Francisco company now has more than 200 million total monthly active users on the site, according to AppData. This measure is slightly deceptive, as we don’t have a way to tell how many of users play more than one Zynga game — some large minority of these users are being counted more than once, especially as Zynga cross-promotes its games.

However, Zynga also currently has around 65 million daily active users, from our understanding. 61.3 million of those are on Facebook, according to AppData, so presumably the others are on its MySpace and iPhone applications.

If Facebook is clearly where Zynga is seeing the most usage, why would it launch a site and a toolbar for its games?

The toolbar (get it here) is fairly obvious — it lets you keep track of stats in the text-based role playing game, like health, energy and stamina. There’s also a drop-down menu that lets you “do jobs,” go to the Godfather, and navigate to the home page with a single click. There’s also a “Limited Edition” item you get when you download the bar. If you’re one of the 26.9 million monthly active users or 6.89 million daily active people playing Mafia Wars on Facebook, this toolbar may be a nice addition to your playing experience — and also another way for Zynga to maintain your regular engagement with the game.

So what about FarmVille.com? While the idea may seem to be a way for Zynga to move away from its dependence on Facebook as its platform, it’s not currently headed in that direction. Instead, the game uses Facebook Connect to allow the same social communication as on Facebook: Basically, it is the exact same game, complete with the same virtual farms and neighbors that players already have on Facebook. So what’s the point of having a separate site? One is performance. The dot-com site loads a lot faster, and doesn’t have to deal with the occasional bugs on Facebook’s site. Another reason is that the Zynga has more space to work with on its own site. Instead of the Facebook interface — the top navigation toolbar, the right-hand column ads, etc. on Facebook — Zynga can use all that space for its own purposes. More “elbow room” for Zynga’s growing empire, you might say. In FarmVille.com, it has links to its FarmVille blog on the left-hand side, a link to its fan page, a feed of all of your friends activities in the game, its own navigation bar at the top, and even its own background design.

So should we expect Zynga to move all of its games off of Facebook? We don’t think it’s going to be a huge priority for Zynga at this point: It didn’t launch it’s latest game, FishVille, on a separate site, for example. But if the company sees more engagement on FarmVille.com than on the Facebook app, then we’ll likely see more. For a more thorough exploration of this topic, see Charles Hudson’s post, here.

Not to long ago, we took a look at the latest social gaming startup, Gravity Bear. Founded by Flagship Studios and Blizzard Entertainment veteran Phil Shenk, he and his team of six are looking to create social games to compete with market leaders like Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom. And, the company recently released a small teaser preview of its first Facebook game, Battle Punks.

This game actually looks very, very cool. Slated to enter open beta sometime before the close of the year, Battle Punks will contain 3D combat-based game play, customizable avatars, and a beautiful fantasy environment.

Players will begin by creating a personalized avatar and, by the looks of things, enter into fights with other users in order to become the best fighter around. As they play, they are capable of winning weapons, spells, treasure, and, of course, experience. Furthermore, characters will need to carefully select items from their inventory, “Battle Items,” in order to grant them the best strategic advantage they can garner before each bout.

The new application will also launch with the new analytics system from its partner SQLstream. This way, the developer will be able to more closely monitor what users are doing and fine-tune game features.

“Our goal with Battle Punks is to help people have fun and deeply memorable experiences with their friends through games,” says Shenk, “This is the primary mission of Gravity Bear, so our first title is designed from the ground up to be a shining example of that philosophy of community and fun. We can’t wait to build a new community of people who simply love games as much as we do.”

Can Twitter become a social gaming platform? We haven’t seen any break-out successes yet, but there are a few interesting games worth taking a closer looking at.

Ones like 140 Mafia and World of Blood have integrated themselves into the social network (though not directly, yet), not to mention simple typing games, online dating, quizzes, and even apps integrated into World of Warcraft.

Below is a compilation three such games, and one fairly unique one.

Twitdraw:

One of the older applications found on Facebook is a simple app by the name of Graffiti. Still with upwards of 3 million monthly active users, creator Mark Kantor and the Graffiti team actually created a rendition of this more classic title on Twitter, called Twitdraw.

As expected, the simple game works sort of like Microsoft Paint, allowing users to adjust the size, color, and opacity of a circular brush and paint… well… graffiti on a blank, white canvas. Once your master piece is completed, the artwork is posted to Twitter with a link to where your lovely creation can be viewed and even added too (not to mention it is added to a very impressive public gallery, filled with beautiful pieces of “Top Graffiti” as well as those most recently created). In fact, you can even begin a graffiti “chain” (like a chain-letter) in which you send the tweet to multiple people at once.

TwiDrink:

Perhaps drawing isn’t your thing. If not, here is another interesting and simple app for your Twitter palette. Anyone who has been playing games on Facebook or MySpace for a while might recognize this type of game. This title is TwiDrink and is most similar to games like Pass A Drink (socialreach)and Cheers!! (BitRhymes).

That alone should explain the premise of the game, but for those unfamiliar with said titles, TwiDrink is best described as a social, virtual drinking game. Players log on, buy some cocktails (everything from long islands to margaritas) and send them to your friends. Each drink received adds a little drunkenness to a “Drink-O-Meter” at the top of the screen and it becomes a simple contest to see who gets drunk first.

Unfortunately, there isn’t too much you can do besides tweet about drinks and blindly invite followers until someone you know actually joins. Nonetheless, it’s hardly a complex app, so anyone that does take an invite will figure it out rather quickly, and it is at least a minor something to play around with for those virtual socialites.

Tweep Tycoon:
Yet another game reminiscent of others on Facebook is Tweep Tycoon. Similar in respect to games such as Friends for Sale, this interesting title, from the same guys who created the early Twitter games of Pop Answers and Whose Tweet, shows that everyone most certainly does have a price tag.

Players begin with a hefty $100,000 in virtual currency and can buy any user on Twitter as a “pet.” Pets, as it were, start off costing around $10,000 and will increase every time they are bought. Suffice to say, that price can increase quite a bit, thus both the “owner” and the person being purchased earn a percentage of their quoted purchase price, fulfilling the previously stated “price tag” pun in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

Shopping is also made very simple, allowing players to make purchases based on friends, followers, celebrities, a wish list, and, of course, an overall global category.

Artwiculate:

Not all games are a variation of Facebook predecessors, however. One such game is a fun little app by the name of Artwiculate. This title actually makes more direct use of Twitter’s core premise, chat.

The game uses a sort of “word of the day” calendar approach, tasking users to send a tweet using the current word of the day in the proper context. Yeah, that’s all: Simple, yet gratifying. The tweet will appear at the main Artwiculate page to be seen by all, with points earned for each user that says they “like it,” and additional points earned if they retweet it. A winner is then chosen at the end of the day, and anyone who follows @artwiculate will be tweeted with the new word daily and track your progress over time with a stored profile.

Certainly, these games show a growing quality of titles on the Twitter platform, even if most of them are merely emulations of previously successful apps. However, hasn’t that been the case with so many Facebook titles in the past? With each iteration, despite quips about creativity, the platform grew and evolved. Does this mean Twitter will do the same? We’ll be watching.

This is a post by both Justin Smith and Charles Hudson

When we set out to write the Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009-2010 research report earlier this year, we wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the payments ecosystem throughout all popular virtual goods markets in the US, especially the booming world of social games. Given the explosion of payment companies focused on the social gaming market – from mobile payments to offers, large payment companies like PayPal to emerging programs like Facebook’s own “Pay With Facebook” – we wanted to understand where the money was really going.

So over the course of the next four months, we spoke with dozens of leading players in the industry, including: social game and free-to-play MMO developers, iPhone developers, offer companies, mobile payment companies, prepaid card companies, traditional payment companies, new companies building in-game payment widgets specifically for social games, and leading social networks. We gathered data from all of them through thorough interviews, synthesized what we heard from everyone to triangulate what we believe are the most accurate and in-depth estimates to date, and then passed our results by other industry experts (not in the research group) to sanity check our conclusions.

What did we find? To read our full analysis and outlook, you’ll need to get the report. But here’s a summary of our findings as it relates to offers specifically today:

Payment methods inside social games vary widely depending on the developer and aggregator. Based on our conversations with many industry leaders, we estimate that offers are generating just over 30% of all US social game virtual goods revenues in 2009, though some large developers don’t integrate offers at all, and a few developers report numbers over 50%. The remaining 70% is split between various methods of direct payment that we mentioned earlier.

As you might expect, offers often function as “on-ramps” to get players engaged with social games. However, once players become more engaged with a particular game, they increasingly migrate to direct payments because they usually need more currency than offers can provide to progress, and the same user is usually unwilling to take more than a couple offers in a given time period. Rather than giving personal information to more and more advertisers to take part in less appealing offers, users who are increasingly engaged with a particular game choose to pay more directly. So, almost by definition, games that succeed in growing ARPU (average revenue per user) and the base of paying users will tend to skew toward direct payments, as that’s the only way users can fund their accounts.

Most publishers are also surfacing direct payment methods via their offer partners. Only the largest and most sophisticated publishers (in general) are focused on direct integrations with payment gateways. Because of this, the offer aggregator often develops the optimization technology around which direct payment methods are most successful for different user segments within each game. For example, the aggregator may choose to display a greater variety of particular types of direct payment options that are more popular in certain regions, displaying more mobile payment options to adults in Europe or Asia than adults in the US, while displaying more prepaid card payment options to US teenagers than South American teenagers. The best payment methods often vary widely by location, age, and level of engagement.

Thus, the percentage of revenue going through offer partners is not necessarily the same as the percentage of revenue going to offers. Smaller developers in particular often generate their direct payments revenue via integrations with offer partners, going direct once they reach the scale to support taking it in house.

As we noted in our in-depth report on Inside Facebook today, we don’t know exactly what portion of offer revenues came from scammy offers, but we estimate it could be significantly more than the 20% of offers that offer networks now admit were scammy. We have yet to find any conclusive data on the scope of scam problems in offers, but we are continuing to investigate this.  Offer revenue will likely decrease in the short term as scams get continually rooted out, but it is clear is that industry-wide social gaming companies are deriving a large majority of their revenues through other payment methods.

Ultimately, the recent increase in media coverage of scam problems in offers could boost the fortunes of alternative direct payments, spurring developers to shift away from offers and integrate other direct payment methods more quickly. However, long term, we expect offers to continue to play a role in social game monetization, increasing in value as more large, high quality advertisers come into the space.

If there is any one Japanese, pop-culture icon that most people should be familiar with it is the cute cartoon cat, Hello Kitty. The downloadable title, Hello Kitty Online, published by Aeria Games, seems like a great fit for the franchise.

To clarify, Hello Kitty Online (HKO) is not a true “social” game like those found among Facebook, but massively multiplayer titles are, in their very nature, social in the sense that you work and play together, create guilds, customize avatars, and communicate with one another within a virtual world. These are of the many reasons they become so addictive — and, combined with the use of virtual goods, and customized virtual spaces — why this particular title caught our attention.

Having launched with open beta status in North America in early September, Hello Kitty Online brings players into the soothing and vibrant world of the pop-icon. Users create an avatar, and in their sleep enter Hello Kitty’s world. Evidently, all her friends are going to sleep and she can’t wake them up, thus it’s up to you to save them.

This is a true-blue MMO, in the sense that it is impossible to get the entire picture without playing for a few weeks, but from a new user perspective it is a very love/hate relationship. When first entering the world, players are greeted with a wonderfully colorful style and soothing music that adds to the atmosphere of serenity. Within your first couple steps, you already have a quest and you are on your way.

All movement and basic interaction is fairly intuitive with left click moving and right click performing a contextual action (right clicking an enemy attacks it, for example, but right clicking a plant gathers it). Furthermore, the area map displays all non-player and player characters, making whoever you need to find fairly easy.

As players complete tasks, defeat enemies (nothing dies, they just go to sleep), and gather items, they level up. However, what is nice is that players can level up skills such as gathering or woodcutting in tandem with themselves. To clarify, this means if you don’t want to fight, you can still level up just fine, and later on, these gathering skills will help support various crafting professions such as carpentry or cooking.

The game, surprisingly, also has a lot more social elements than we had initially expected. As with all MMORPGs, players do have an avatar, but rather than being a knight or mage, players are just themselves, thus the clothes they wear are not only bonuses to stats, but a form of expression as well. Furthermore, these can not only be bought in game, but with the “Item Mall” as well as virtual goods.

From this Mall, players can use real money to buy virtual goods for their avatar. Moreover, goods are also available for housing. Yes, players can actually buy a house and decorate it as well, thus integrating the whole personal, virtual space concept (which is made even more gratifying by the fact that your friends can visit it). There are also sections for farms, pets, extra emoticons, and functional items, but at this time they are empty. In fact, the farming element is curious as well; almost like a HKO version of FarmVille, earning players potential profit for grown crops. The only real difference is that the decorations are part of the house, not the farm, and players don’t directly support each other (i.e. visiting each other’s farms to scare off crows). Unfortunately, all of these virtual goods from the Mall leads to one of many related complaints. One has no idea how to buy the virtual currency (Loyalty) needed to make a purchase, and the help button does nothing.

Before getting into complaints, there is also an integrated blog, email, and even videos that can be shared directly from the game. Unfortunately, the video doesn’t seem to work at the moment, but it does look interesting. Assuming the player can figure it out.

And now we come to the problems — although this is in open beta, so we expect the features to continue improving. For its audience, HKO is a wonderful free game… except for one devastating poison. Usability and instruction are absolutely, and utterly horrid. Aside from quests, a new user has NO idea what they are doing. For example, there is a quest that gives a level three item. If you are not level three, it tells you, but nowhere on the visible interface is there a place to see how far you are from that level. No, you have to hit the “S” key to pull that up. Never was the player told how to do that. Since when are users omniscient? There are a number of issues like this, beyond just hotkeys, where something is not explained and its up to the user to figure it out.

Even the Wiki that is provided is fairly useless. First of all, there is no link to it (but it is on the main page you downloaded the game from), and half the stuff one searches for comes up with nothing. Sure, the information is probably there, but not in a very intuitive spot. A more avid use of search tags would be quite warranted. However, it did help in one crucial area… actually setting up the game.

This is by far, the most god-awful set-up for beginning a game. If a user does not go to the Wiki, they will not be able to figure out what to do. Here is the break down. First, take about two hours to download the game and about 30 minutes to patch (no big deal, this is sort of expected). After that is done, it asks for login email and password. That’s it. Never does it ask you to register, yet you have to. So where do you go? Oh, you have to register with Aeria. Done. Still doesn’t work. Search the Wiki… “you have to synch your Aeria email with Hello Kitty Online to create a new email @hellokitty.com” How?! How on Earth is one supposed to know that?! Likely, most users are not going to take the extra step unless they really want to play the game. Users don’t like making extra effort if they don’t have to, they don’t like to read. That’s why tutorials in console games have to be designed as part of the game. Players don’t want to listen to or read a lesson. They want to PLAY.

Developers constantly overestimate new users because they are so close to the game, they cannot take a step back to see how intuitive it is or is not. Sadly, this is an all-to-common mistake, and in the case of HKO, something that should be fixed immediately if it is not already underway. The game is pretty good for a free-to-play title and has all the right elements for a successful social/casual MMO. However, if these usability issues are not fixed, then this game is going to lose players before they even get started.

A month ago, the social distribution platform for the iPhone, OpenFeint unveiled its “Developer Spotlight” in which it would show off select iPhone apps making use of its service. Of the three that were shown, we decided to take a look at Finger Physics from PressOK Entertainment. With its simple, yet fairly addictive game play, this balancing puzzle game quickly justified the attention.

Finger Physics is a puzzle game. However, the puzzles are based around a “physics engine,” a type of computer program that simulates physics variables like friction and velocity. In this game, the objective is stacking objects of varying shapes and sizes so that they remain standing for five seconds. Truth be told, it isn’t the first of its ilk (i.e. Perfect Balance) but PressOK hardly lets that work against them.

The game includes light-hearted and colorful visuals paired with upbeat sound and music, but beyond this style, the game comes with a range interesting puzzles. 81 levels exist in Finger Physics. 81. Frankly, that alone is well worth $0.99, as this is a game that is going to last you a very long time.

If there is any one complaint, it is that the game, at times, feels a bit easy. Yes, if you have to deal with circular pieces, the game gets a bit tricky, but remember, the tower only has to remain standing for five seconds. That timer doesn’t start until the last block is placed, and once it is, the timer continues even if the tower you created is falling apart. You just have to keep pieces off the ground for five seconds. It didn’t say anything about how structurally sound your solution had to be. This, unfortunately, tends to make some of the later levels, that are intended to be tough, a little too effortless.

Luckily, some of the ease is mitigated by some special blocks and levels meant to show off the physics capability. For example, some levels are underwater and allow certain objects to float; others might contain explosive blocks that go off if they are not kept separated, or magnetic pieces that can both attract or repel. These make for refreshing changes, and really do add a bit more thought and planning to the game.

As a matter of fact, another fun and thought provoking aspect of Finger Physics doesn’t quite use stacking at all. Instead, players have to move a colorful-looking egg into an field goal shaped objective. The trick is that players must remove certain obstacles and let the physics engine move the egg. This means that they will have to remove them in a certain order and with a specific timing in order to solve the puzzle. Again, it’s not an idea that hasn’t been done before, but it is still a lot of fun.

Overall, Finger Physics is well deserving of its OpenFeint spotlight. It isn’t the most original game, in terms of design, but the puzzles are still a great deal of fun. Furthermore, with the shear amount of puzzles to be had, the game is more than worth the measly dollar it costs. And heck, if you don’t want to spend a buck, there is always Finger Physics Free. Granted, it doesn’t offer as much, but you might end up hooked and buying the full version anyways.

In light of Xbox Live’s launch of Facebook and Twitter integration yesterday, Sony is nipping at its heels, with firmware update 3.10. Today, Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. announced that it has integrated Facebook into the PlayStation 3 network as part of the “first phase of a variety of new features to further connect and enhance the online social [experience].”

From the looks of things, the new social integration does not seem to be quite the same as the Microsoft counterpart. Xbox Live allows players to view and comment on feeds, check out your Facebook friend’s pictures, and basically everything you can do on the web version’s homepage. According to the Sony announcement, however, the focus seems to be more closely knit into gaming itself.

The PS3 network could previously access the Facebook browser, but now players can tie together their PlayStation Network and Facebook accounts. Once bound, players will be able to share three different types of information: trophies, purchases, and game events.

Sharing each of these is exceedingly simple. For example, users need only sync their Trophies and they can publish their gamer prowess directly to their Facebook newsfeed.

The update also has PlayStation 3 developers getting a greater taste of the social graph. Any time a user makes a purchase from the PlayStation Store, they are granted the option to publish that to Facebook. This taste is further flavored by the Game Event Information section that allows developers to set up “trigger points” in games that allow users the option to publish something they did in-game to their feed as well.

While not dealing directly with Facebook, the new firmware update also includes a simplified Photos section for better accessibility and viewing, and a more customizable Friends List (though the customization only really deals with the background color of their PlayStation Network Profile).

As it stands, this is the first of many social updates slated for release on the PS3. As the console wars delve deeper in to social realms to compete, it will be curious to see just who does what, next.