The mobile panel at our Inside Social Apps conference today was confident: mobile is the right bet. These are companies that, in some cases, had a choice of developing Facebook games or going to the iPhone. Today, they’re much smaller than a company like Zynga or Playfish — but growing quickly.

Here’s the panelist list:

Jason Oberfest, VP Social, ngmoco
Keith Lee, CEO, Booyah
Doug Bewsher, CMO, mig33
Shervin Pishevar, Chairman, SGN
Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies (Moderator)

Despite the high level of agreement across the panel that mobile will blossom very soon, there was some disagreement over what it will look like.

Bewsher thinks that there will be many platforms, just as there are in his overseas market. To Pishevar, the market will soon divide into different smartphone camps like iPhone and Android — replaying the Mac and PC split from the 1990s. And the iPhone remains the enabler — Apple’s new Game Center is “the fuel that we’ll all be able to grow on,” he said. “We couldn’t do it until we had all the pieces.”

The last part of the panel went to audience questions, during which several independent developers got up to ask how to advance in their market. The answer: create promotional materials and buzz for your game ahead of time, just like a traditional game. And Pishevar welcomed other companies to contact SGN or Ngmoco for cross-promotion.

Two pieces of advice were more specific to the iPhone. The first is that hitting the charts is critical. An app has to reach the top 50 to succeed at all, and inclusion in the top 25 is the cutoff for really getting traction. Once in that upper echelon, users will tend to flood into an app. And Oberfest, asked whether the social component in iPhone games is really needed, responded that it’s more than helpful: making games social is “critical”.