Virtual aquariums are the latest popular genre of social games on Facebook, and there are so many that it can be a bit daunting to choose one. It is, after all, a pretty big decision. So which one is the best? Which one is right for you?

At a glance, each game looks rather similar, granting users control of a personalized, aquatic world, but there are a few nuances worth pointing out. So we’ve taken a look at some of the top virtual aquarium games, Top Fish, Fish World, FishVille, Happy Aquarium, and My Fishbowl, to see just where each one excels.

New User Experience: Fish World & Happy Aquarium

Luckily, each game is smart enough to incorporate simple tutorials in each of their levels. However, the games that stood out the most for getting a new player underway are Fish World from Tall Tree Games and Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar.

Beyond the basics being taught, the former actually allows a nice bonus of gold to get a player started. Simply by signing up for email notifications (which only use your Facebook account) players are granted an extra 1000 coins. While many decorations may cost a decent sum, the extra coin allows for a much better start for a budding fish business.

As for Happy Aquarium, it is more a presentation and balancing element, although you also get free currency. Frankly, the tutorial is just better than the others and feels more a part of the experience as you are taught how to care for your fish by an old man (perhaps he is a fish store owner?). Furthermore, most of the items cost significantly less than the other games, which really makes advancement feel less daunting (even income is less).

Creativity: My Fishbowl

Hands down, the most creative game of the five is Chinese game My Fishbowl from TwoFishes Interactive. It works the same as any other aquarium game: Feeding, buying, selling, etc. However, there are little bits of polish that stand out. Instead of cleaning algae with a sponge, for example, it’s random trash (like egg yolk) with a vacuum type of fish (yes, take that literally, it has a vacuum-like nose).

Beyond what the designers provide, however, the level of creativity granted to the players is much more open. While the other fishy titles pigeon-hole players into making an aquarium in a more realistic sense, My Fishbowl was the first one we noticed to allow players to decorate in ways beyond what reality will allow. Evidently, this freedom has given birth to some wonderfully creative fishbowls including submarine riding pirates and giant coral ridden ducks.

Convenience & Usability: Top Fish & FishVille

It may sound minor, but both Slide’s Top Fish and Zynga’s FishVille do have some wonderfully convenient and usable interfaces. Top Fish is probably the most useful in regards to two features: Its speed of fish growth and its store.

Early on, fish grow in minutes to hours rather than days. People like rewards, and by granting a few quick perks early on, it really helps to get them hooked. That isn’t to say Top Fish doesn’t have fish that take days; they are just at a higher level. Furthermore, as these games revolve around decoration and buying new items and fish, Top Fish actually allows you to buy multiple items at once from its store and, lo and behold, actually lets you cancel your purchase.

Frankly, this is one of the biggest pet peeves with games like Fish World. If you click on something to see how it would look in your tank, you can’t cancel! Yet the purchase isn’t made until you left click. Thankfully, FishVille doesn’t do this. It allows you to see how items would look in a tank and actually lets you out of a purchase by simply clicking the pointer tool.

Overall Style: Happy Aquarium

Happy Aquarium, easily, has the most interesting style. It is so very simple, but all of the fish and items are highly stylized with only the fish’s key defining features standing out. Everything moves fluidly (unlike the rigid, blocky, and awkward animations of FishVille), and is well… very happy looking. Combined with the steady, calming aquatic-like music, it makes for a very peaceful, zen-like experience.

Of course, such an opinion on style is very subjective. However, it is also worth mentioning that Fish World is a close second. The art is wonderfully done in a more realistic fashion, and everything moves the way a fish should.

Overall, each app is a good game that caters to a number of different tastes. If we had to pick one, it would be a toss up between Happy Aquarium and Fish World — although its worth noting that these games have been around for over a month, while the developers of newer releases like Top Fish and FishVille haven’t had a chance to iterate with new features.

We expect virtual aquarium games to rapidly improve as more apps begin competing, and we’ll keep you posted on those developments.

When we did our review on the Fuel Industries game, Yack Attack, we stumbled across another title from the company called Pogo Puppies. The Facebook application was actually developed together with Electronic Arts; more specifically, EA Pogo. As a matter of fact, this is one of a handful of games to be developed between Fuel and EA (though the others are not announced as of yet), and despite the fact that Pogo Puppies has yet to see its big, official release push, the game seems to be doing fairly well. As it stands, it has around 90,000 users.

This game is a lot like Playfish’s one oldest and most popular titles, Pet Society, which is especially interesting given that EA just bought Playfish in a deal worth up to $400 million. In Pogo Puppies, players begin by creating a virtual, bipedal, puppy with a small selection of breeds (husky, labrador, chihuahua, beagle, pug, dalmation, and poodle). They can then adjust the ears, eyes, markings, and color of their digital pet.

Once they’re finished with a simple tutorial, players are able to feed, play with, and bathe their animal within their own personal “dog house.” This means the primary goal of the game is to be a virtual space app, allowing users to decorate their puppy’s quasi-3D home in whatever creative manner they like.

Together with this virtual space customization, the game also incorporates avatar customization, granting players the ability to buy an assortment of clothing. These goods range from pirate costumes to Hawaiian leis (even swords are available… though that doesn’t seem too safe for an animal). What’s best, however, is that it looks like the clothing is always changing based on special events, and some of it is for a limited time (i.e. Halloween costumes).

Of course, all of this is great, but it does cost in-game money. In order to earn it, your puppy needs to learn and perform a myriad of tricks. Essentially, when you prompt your pet to perform, a bar appears with a bone sliding back and forth. Clicking the “Do Trick” button or pressing the keyboard shortcut displayed will stop the bone and execute the trick. Should you time it perfectly right — meaning the bone lands in the center — the maximum amount of coin is earned. Furthermore, performing tricks and actions earns experience towards new levels, which unlock more interesting and advanced actions.

Tricks consume your pet’s energy, so only so many can be done without rest or purchasable items such as energy drinks.

Truth be told, there isn’t a whole lot to complain about with Pogo Puppies. Granted, it is an awful lot like Pet Society, but it does have a few key differences (like the tricks). In fact, one feature that it does have is a “central park” that allows players to chat with each other through their canine avatar, regardless to whether or not they know each other. From here, they can also play fetch, collect sticks, or just jump around.

Currently, the developers are still stating that it is in beta, so any real bugs (and there are some) are likely to be fixed before the official EA push. Beyond this, however, the game looks and feels great and is an excellent iteration on the Pet Society concept. That said, however, it could benefit from more differentiating factors. Currently there are some, but they only differentiate it from the Playfish predecessor and do not yet feel like quite enough to make the game truly stand out.

Social gaming company Playdom has been looking at raising a big round of funding since this spring, but now it is closing one worth up to $70 million at up to a $300 million valuation, industry sources tell us. The investors include NEA, we hear — although the company isn’t commenting. [Update: TechCrunch has the details. The company has raised $43 million on a $260 million pre-money valuation, with New Enterprise Associates, company chairman Rick Thompson, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners participating. This is its first venture round of funding.]

Mountain View, Calif.-based Playdom’s funding comes at a crucial time, as its largest rivals have also been making new moves. Playfish officially announced its up-to-$400 million sale to Electronic Arts on Monday, in a deal worth up to $400 million. Zynga, meanwhile, is churning out new titles, bringing in more than $200 million in revenue; it appears to be holding off of any new funding (or a sale) with the hope of going public sometime next year.

Also interesting to note: Recent rumors suggested that Playdom is raising “a sizable round in the double-digit millions and is seeking a valuation around $100 million to $200 million.” Perhaps recent data points, like early reports about the sale of Playfish, helped drive up the valuation (assuming the $330 million number we heard is accurate, of course)?

Playdom’s position is a bit different than the other companies, as its historical strength has been on MySpace, with games like role-playing game Mobsters and virtual world Sorority Life. And while MySpace is the second-most significant social platform behind Facebook, the site itself is not growing. While Playdom continues to be the largest developer on that site, at least by our reckoning, it has been making a big push into Facebook since this past March, and has continued with more recent releases like Mobsters 2: Vendetta. That effort has been at least somewhat successful: The company is now the 13th largest developer on the site, judging by total of 14.6 million monthly active users across its six Facebook apps that we know of. Note: This number is not equal to its total number of monthly active Facebook users, because Playdom, like many other developers, cross-promotes games within each app; some portion of our number includes users who play more than one app. Perhaps more tellingly, AppData shows Playdom with 2.14 million daily active users.

Altogether, Playdom said in October that it has 28 million monthly active users. We’ve also heard that it is on track to make around $50 million in revenue this year. How? Through virtual goods in its games; in a recent move, for example, the company inked a deal with pre-paid card provider InComm, to let users buy currency at retail outlets. This past spring, the company was making about half of its revenue from offers, and we recently heard that was down to around 40 percent. Advertising offers, for those who haven’t been paying attention to the industry in recent weeks, have been criticized for including low-quality if not outright deceptive ads for things like mobile ringtone subscriptions. But Playdom hired a new chief executive back in June — former EA executive John Pleasants — and he recently told CNET that offers have become a smaller share:

Okay, so why would Playdom raise this money if it’s already making money and growing? One reason is that competitors, notably Zynga, have been busy buying advertising on Facebook to promote their own games. We’ve heard Zynga may be paying Facebook up to $50 million this year for running its ads, although a more recent rumor suggests that the number is even higher. Buying advertising has been an effective way for social gaming companies to reach new users, and it will likely become even more important as Facebook begins making major changes to its communication channels. What else to do with the money? Acquisitions are one possibility — and something that competitors like Zynga have made a big part of how they expand. Or, perhaps the money is for continued expansion on to other platform, like its efforts on the iPhone?

For those who haven’t been paying attention to social gaming recently, the newest hot genre of game is not mafia battles, nor farming, nor pet care, nor even running a virtual restaurant. No, it’s taking care of fish in a virtual aquarium. And if you’re a regular reader, you’ve watched more and more of these sorts of games launch or get revealed in the last couple of months. Now, it’s time for a closer look at the biggest one of them all, and the developer behind it: Happy Aquarium, by CrowdStar.

In the company’s first interview with the media, CrowdStar community marketing manager Yvonne Lee tells us that Happy Aquarium was the first virtual aquarium game on Facebook (although there have been other types of fish games in the past). Launched in early September, Happy Aquarium has quickly gone to 26 million monthly active users and 7 million daily active users, making it one of the largest and fastest-growing apps on Facebook, according to AppData.

The game emphasizes taking care of your fish, more like the many popular pet-caring games on Facebook than the production-focused farming games — it’s “about loving your fish,” Lee says, not just selling them. Besides the usual mechanics of buying and feeding fish, you can name your fishes, train them in an obstacle-course mini game, mate them to create new fish, and enjoy the simple pleasures of being an aquarium owner, like “cleaning” algae off the aquarium with the wave of your mouse cursor. Other fishing games, notably Fish World (and now, Zynga’s new FishVille), tend to rely more on the production and sale of fish.

CrowdStar itself has actually been around for a year and a half, having originally launched a trivia game called Know-It-All Trivia. This year, the company decided to focus on high-quality games that monetized using virtual goods. Happy Aquarium was launched in September and it has spread because people liked it, not because it made heavy use of Facebook’s communication channels, Lee says. “We didn’t even implement notifications at first,” she adds, “users were actually calling their friends and family to talk about it.” If users want to buy more currency for things like new fish or fish food in the game, they can purchase it directly through Social Gold’s monetization service.

San Francisco-based CrowdStar has not officially launched other games, yet, although you can see a number of other ones, like “Sexy City,” in a toolbar on the app. These games are made by developers who are friends of the company, according to Lee. The company plans to keep building on Happy Aquarium, and is also working on “other things” — it is actually still in stealth, and isn’t disclosing funding, its number of employees, and other key details. But we do know a little bit more. The company’s chairman is Peter Relan, who is also the chairman of iPhone app developer Aurora Feint. Given this connection, we asked Lee if the two companies had any plans to work together on cross-platform games, and she says they haven’t made significant plans yet.

We’re interested to hear more, as CrowdStar is planning to disclose more details soon.

There have been a number of games that allow Facebook users to… bully, for lack of a better term, their buddies. One of the premiere examples (at least at the time) was KickMania! that had players punting friends as far as they could with, ahem, “explosive” results. Fuel Industries, in conjunction with Sony and Electric Farm Entertainment, have also recently moved down this friend-abusing route with a disturbingly indigestive title called Yack Attack.

No, sadly, “yack” does not refer to the animal (yak), but rather the slang synonym for vomiting…. The game is actually a tie-in with a new web series called “Woke Up Dead.” In the series, Drex, played by Jon Heder, is a college student that, well, becomes a zombie. Okay, perhaps the reasoning behind the barfing is not justified by this, but he’s a zombie. We’re lucky he’s not trying to eat us.

The game itself is exceedingly simple. Players pick a yacking victim from a list of their Facebook friends and line up their profile picture within a head-shaped frame. Then it’s time to load undead Drex with a little ammunition. This consists of everything from staplers to cameras, because, well, Drex apparently can’t eat human food anymore. Players continue to feed him until his stomach is at capacity, then time a power meter to see what sort of expelling force comes out.

The victim of the zombie yacking will hurdle backwards from the Drex’s projectile vomit with the objective being to send them flying as far as possible. Also, each item that you feed Drex has different levels of “explosive power” and “volume” that affects how far said victim will go, with some items combining to form a sort of reaction that can not only change the color of the yacking, but increase its force as well. Of course, the more you play, the more options are available.

As expected, each item to be fed costs an in-game currency, called Yackers. Unfortunately, they only seem to be attainable through completing offers, buying them, or inviting friends. The last option is perfectly viable, and the virtual currency model is certainly warranted, but not having an option to earn Yackers in the game itself is a little annoying and makes for a fairly short lived game experience for the average player.

Frankly, this is the biggest game play issue with the game. There really isn’t a whole lot of opportunity to get into the game before you’ve run out of your starting sum of currency. Moreover, while the game is intended to be a funny, the whole concept is still a bit nauseating, which really doesn’t help a new player hold interest for very long either. Unless they’re into zombies.

Overall, the game looks decent with well-polished artwork and sound, and while it hasn’t seen too many users yet, it does have the viral potential to spread like KickMania! once did. Furthermore, this will not be the last we see of Fuel either as the developer says it has some major projects with Electronic Arts slated for release in the next couple of weeks. Of these, Pogo Puppies, has all ready launched and is not doing too bad (roughly 90,000 monthly active users), so we will look forward to seeing what comes next.

We’ve seen a number of casual gaming companies try to take their games from the web and desktop clients into Facebook, and one is standing out as a clear winner: Bejeweled Blitz, from Popcap Games.

The game, already popular in web and download form, has been steadily growing, and recently reached more than 10 million monthly active users, with around a third of those people coming back every day. It’s now the tenth largest game on Facebook, according to AppData. What’s the secret?

Partly, of course, it’s that a lot of people already know and love the game from its non-Facebook versions. The Tetris-like game mechanics are basically the same as the other versions. On a two-dimensional board, you try to line up three sets of the same-colored gems, either horizontally or vertically, to make them disappear, and attempt to clear the entire board before time runs out.

But Popcap has also done a good job of making the game increasingly social, since it first launched earlier this year. There’s a very obvious leaderboard showing how you stack up against your friends. There’s a tournament that happens every weekday, which the company has told us accounts for its increase in daily active users in the middle of the week. There are also options to play against friends — just click their name on the leaderboard.

There’s also a contest based on team scores. Teams are calculated by adding together the total number of points between you and your Facebook friends in the game. But you have to sign up individually — with the individual winning, and receiving things like free access to more complex, for-fee, “deluxe” games on Popcap’s home site. There are tiers of prizes, with teams needing to reach a certain total point threshold to be eligible for the better ones. The top prize is a free laptop computer loaded with Popcap games.

And, of course, you can share your activities from the game into your  news feed and on to your profile wall. All in all, the game’s success is a good example of how other casual games can help spread their games on Facebook. Popcap also recently raised $22.5 million, the first outside funding in its decade of making casual games, with the intention to focus more on social games. The company is clearly on the right track.

There’s no doubt that women are a big force in social gaming. But what are their actual habits? Q Interactive tries to answer that question with a 2,000 woman study it just released.

Q’s main takeaways are that women tend to spend a lot of time on a small set of favorite games, and don’t seem to mind having brands or branded virtual goods present. The report paints a positive picture of the women’s overall engagement with today’s apps and games:

• 74 percent started using apps because they saw or heard about a friend playing
• 57 percent believe virtual gifting is as meaningful as real life gifting
• 95 percent use their virtual currency for gifts or in-game advancement

So far, so good. Women enjoy using virtual economies, and go out of their way give gifts to friends and use money to kit out their characters. These trends extend to men, too; our own Inside Virtual Goods report gives more detail on the subject. However, what about direct payments?

• 10 percent of women have paid directly in a social game, and
• 85 percent of that group have spent less than $100, total

Q Interactive says in its release that women are “actively engaging with brands.” The suggestion is that if women aren’t paying out of pocket for virtual currency and goods, it means they must like branded offerings. While that is increasingly the case, it doesn’t necessarily mean the players always appreciate the brands they’re looking at, or that if they sign up for a credit card or free gift online they’ll follow up by using the card or buying a product. Besides deceptive ads, increasing the number of branded ads that users truly find valuable is one of the major challenges facing offer-based virtual currency monetization.

At the end of the day though, incentivized offers do present great opportunities for brands that target women to integrate with social games that women play. We’re still very early in the game though – the more high quality ads from big brands, the better.

This is a guest post by Chris Morrison.

A few months ago we got the chance to sit down and talk with Hive7 CEO Max Skibinsky about the inner workings of the company and his perspectives on the development of social massive multiplayer online games. It was during this time that we took our first look at the latest in the list of Hive7 creations: The soccer role-playing game, Kick Off. Now, the new, 1.0 version is available.

The game concept is simple enough. Players are tasked with putting together a soccer team of your Facebook buddies and attempting to be the best competitors out there. When you first begin, you walk through a simple tutorial of how to play and set up the field positions for everyone on your team (Goalie, defenders, midfield, and forwards). The game will automatically default to a suggested set up, but manual control is always available.

You see, each player has a set of stats attributed to them that focus on skills such as control, dribbling, shooting, power, foul avoidance, and so on. This means certain skills are better for certain positions. Also, skills are earned through experience, and obviously, the more you play, the greater the experience earned. However, for an individual player to gain said experience, they must be on the active roster before a match starts.

Matches are also broken up into three categories: Challenges, Tournaments, and Championship. Each mode has its own perks (though Championship never seems to want to load), with Challenges being a simple “friendly” match to earn experience from and Tournament granting rewards such as “Staff.”

This is actually one of the cooler parts of the game. In addition to items like health packs, players can also hire staff members like a doctor, a masseur, or tacticians to help boost their entire team in regards to things such as mitigating injuries, improving fitness, and increasing experience gain. Unfortunately, they require credits to buy, which, you guessed it, have to be purchased or earned through offers.

Frankly, the premise of Kick Off is solid, but there are some drawbacks. Perhaps the most obnoxious of all is leveling up players. While it may be just in a place that is overlooked (which is another equally bad issue entirely), teammates must be “contracted” in order to have stat points (awarded for leveling up) distributed. This means that you must request a contract, which is sort of like an invite to play. If they do not accept… they cannot be upgraded (and by the looks of it, they do it, not you… not the actual coach). This means that you have to have 11 people accept or you can’t use that experience earned.

This leads to annoyance #2. Each game is simulated in real-time. Sounds cool on paper, but there isn’t much to really see except some pictures moving about a soccer ball and scrolling text. And, guess what… you can’t skip it! Yes, you have to sit there for five minutes, or however long it takes, before you can see the results and move on.

In the end, Kick Off has some things to work out for the next version. But the idea and much of the game are good enough to be worth a try.

Electronic Arts is planning to release three new renditions of classic board games for the iPhone this winter: Battleship, Connect Four, and Monopoly Classic.

The three games stem from the license deal between EA and the toy maker, Hasbro. They’ll be joing other digitized board games such as Boggle, Scrabble, and The Game of Life.

Each game will play, more or less, the same as their analog counterparts, with a few digital differences.

Battleship will contain three different play modes called Classic, Salvo, and Super Weapons. Furthermore, it would seem EA is learning the social elements of gaming (not to mention board games are meant to be played with multiple people) as the app will include local multiplayer using Bluetooth and WiFi. It’s not clear whether asynchronous play online will be available. Based on screenshots, the game also looks like it will have some form of simple cinematic sequences when you finally sink that battleship.

Connect Four also utilizes Bluetooth and WiFi for local multiplayer. However, it looks like multiple people will also be able to play on the same iPhone or iPod Touch. In addition, single player will include modes by the names of Classic, Challenge, Powerchips, Max Score, and PopOut along with 25 unlockable achievements.

The last title is Monopoly Classic (not to be confused with the previously released Monopoly: Here and Now). This new title is meant to reinvigorate the classic, not to mention cut-throat and anger inducing, version of the exorbitantly long board game. Supporting up to four players locally through WiFi or on the same device (Bluetooth only supports two players), users compete for those ever coveted hotels and that colorful Monopoly cash. Making use of the technology, dice rolls are now done with iPhone shakes, you can now save games  — rather than, say, leave game pieces strewn across a table. You can also access your iPod music library.

Unfortunately, the exact release dates are still unknown, but it would make sense to get them out in time for holiday sales. It’s not clear what other social features the games might come with. The Scrabble iPhone game, for example, launched first then added Facebook Connect back in April.

[images via Slide to Play]

First, it was sheep-throwing, then it was mafia battles, then it was farming, and now it’s fishing and aquarium-caring. If one is to judge society by trends in popular social games, you’d think the world is becoming a more peaceful, meditative place. And we suppose the social gaming industry is meditative, when it comes to closely examining competitors’ games. After a school of fish games emerged in the last couple of months (note: we will try to avoid the fish puns from now on in the article) big game developers have been quick to follow up. We already looked at Zynga’s new FishVille game last Friday. Today, we have another fish game: Top Fish, from Slide.

Launched earlier last week, Top Fish is the latest installment in Slide’s effort to move not so much into social gaming but in to social virtual spaces. The company’s first move in this direction was SuperPoke Pets!, a virtual pet-caring game, of sorts. The most recent is SuperPocus, a Harry Potter-style magical virtual world, but with cute virtual animal avatars to clothe and teach spells to. Top Fish has a similar dynamic to SuperPocus, and to some of the other fish games, like Happy Aquarium.

You start with a virtual aquarium, you get some free coins and buy a couple virtual fish, you feed them and watch them grow over the course of hours. You can do things like buy more fish, or decorations for your aquarium, or you can go and check out your friends aquariums. You can also get points for doing things like cleaning your own aquarium, or even your friends.

For serious fish-game fans, there are some big differences. Happy Aquarium, the genre leader with 24.7 million monthly active users and 6.93 million daily active users, focuses on fish care. It’s more like an aquatic version of a game like Pet Society, or SuperPoke Pets, where users name their pets, train them in obstacle courses, mate them to create more fish, etc. Top Fish, while young, appears headed in this direction. Slide has said it’s less focused on competitive gaming and more focused on fun virtual environments. FishVille, Zynga’s new fish game, is designed more like its virtual farming hit, FarmVille — the game is driven by the “farming mechanic” of buying, feeding and harvesting rather than slow-and-steady nurturing.

How will Top Fish make money? From direct payments, not offers. Indeed, you can see Slide’s in-house payment system live on the site. It’s a very simple window for entering your credit card, cleaner than the logo-festooned windows available from many third-party payment services offer. The company is also planning to launch a part of the store that lets users create and sell their own virtual fish, a virtual goods component that hasn’t been common on social games but has worked well for virtual worlds like IMVU.

But how does Top Fish fit into Slide’s plans? Here’s what Keith Rabois, Slide’s Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, had to say:

Inside Social Games: How will the user-created goods marketplace work that’s different from what other Facebook apps have done to date? Do you plan to use offers at all in the game?

Keith Rabois: As far as a marketplace for user-created goods, there is no real precedent for this on Facebook today. SuperPoke! Pets is probably the only major application that enables users the ability to create items that are sold in the Pet Shop.

No, Slide does not resort to offers in order to monetize applications. As Sebastien from Playfish eloquently explained, users pay for 100% of their movie tickets. If they truly enjoy our products, they will pay directly for the entertainment we enable. The best gauge of the level of fun, passion, and importance of an application is a user’s willingness to substitute his or her time and money away from consumption of other entertainment options, whether a movie, a DVD or an NFL ticket.

ISG: Given the changes that Facebook has made to its news feed and will make to other features like notifications, how do you plan to grow Top Fish? Cross-promotion? Ads on Facebook? How do you plan to take on the big aquarium apps out there?

KR: Slide plans to grow Top Fish the way we grow all of our other communities. We’re focused on building engaging experiences that people voluntarily share with their network of friends. We’ve always been committed to fostering long-term and passionate communities engaged in self-expression, content creation and interacting with other users. Because we emphasize retention of users for the long-term, we don’t confront the high churn rates of games and hence are not required to pump in massive numbers of new users every day to replace bored or unsatisfied ones.

ISG: In general, how does Top Fish fit in with Slide’s plans to build games, or “virtual entertainment spaces” or whatever the appropriate term is on Facebook and other social networks? I noticed the Top Fish app has quite an interface that’s quite similar to one or two other new Slide apps out there….

KR: The plan for Slide is for all our active apps to turn into consumer-driven entertainment economies.  Given that Facebook users clearly love their aquarium simulations, we decided to try our hand at a consumer-driven economy… in a fish tank. In our next few releases you’ll see some real divergence between what Slide are other developers are doing with our respective aquariums.”