Another week has gone by, and Treasure Isle’s fantastic growth has hardly slowed at all. The new Zynga game easily maintains its lead on our weekly list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users with 6.9 million new MAU; last week it had claimed about 7.5 million new players.

As we point out this morning over at Inside Facebook, Treasure Isle is poised to break into the top 10 games overall on Facebook (the full AppData list is here) over the course of this week, where it would join six other Zynga games and push out RockYou’s Zoo World. That outcome is by no means assured, but Zynga, of course, is in a dominant position and flush with cash for a continued advertising blitz.

That big company advantage can be seen not only in Treasure Isle’s growth, but also in the number two position on our AppData list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	14,409,959	+6,862,487	+90.92
2.	Hotel City	8,663,088	+3,990,894	+85.42
3.	Family Feud	1,929,908	+968,616	+100.76
4.	Zoo Paradise	3,852,816	+711,269	+22.64
5.	Mall World	881,206	+676,705	+330.91
6.	Tiki Resort	5,221,827	+523,154	+11.13
7.	Bubble Island	5,724,107	+511,541	+9.81
8.	Fish Friends	727,350	+407,082	+127.11
9.	Kingdoms of Camelot	1,725,862	+207,800	+13.69
10.	¡Teclas Machucadas!	193,927	+179,445	+1,239.09
11.	Car Madness	623,972	+154,960	+33.04
12.	Songs	2,210,000	+128,729	+6.19
13.	Evony	275,494	+126,703	+85.16
14.	Bola	1,334,756	+116,629	+9.57
15.	Hızlı Yaz	305,828	+113,126	+58.71
16.	WPT Texas Hold ‘Em Poker	148,527	+106,304	+251.77
17.	RockFREE	392,341	+88,758	+29.24
18.	武俠風雲	323,861	+87,471	+37.00
19.	Happy Hotel	1,053,342	+84,537	+8.73
20.	World at War	1,164,366	+80,353	+7.41

Hotel City, of course, is by Playfish, which is backed up by Electronic Arts. The hotel management game is proving to be no slouch; over a month into its run on Facebook, the game’s growth is actually speeding up. It’s now EA’s third-largest game.

Coming in at number three with a million new MAU — much less than Zynga or EA’s new games, but still very respectable — is Family Feud, which has the advantage of nostalgia on its side. The game show-inspired app is co-listed under iWin, Inc. and Backstage, and is by far the greatest Facebook success to date for either company.

Zoo Paradise, the CrowdStar challenger to Zoo World (which is actually losing some of its 18 million MAU), is still growing nicely, and even retains more of its MAU as daily active users than does its larger competitor.

It’s followed by Mall World, an incredibly girly game that we reviewed last week. But so far, girly seems to be working — which makes sense, given that we already knew that many women enjoy shopping for clothes online. Putting that paradigm in a social game only moves the virtual element one step further out, with the added benefit of the player knowing that whatever they buy, will most certainly fit.

Blizzard Dives Deeper Into Virtual Goods – With the subscription revenue from World of Warcraft reaching a plateau, Blizzard has been focusing more on virtual goods within the realm of Azeroth, releasing a third set of virtual items. Now, players will be able to purchase a non-combat pet called Lil’ XT for $10 that rolls around, blowing up other robot pets as well as the company’s first buyable mount, the Celestial Steed.

Here’s the kicker: This cosmic mount both runs and flys, is usable on any character, new or old and costs $25. Think that’s too much? Think again. As of last night, at, oh, around 8pm EST (about eight hours after release) there was a queue within the Blizzard online store that was a couple 100,000 people long when we bought one and tried to check out. Assuming that each of those people actually bought one – meaning their internet connection didn’t crash before they reached the end of the queue – that means Blizzard just made a couple million in revenue in less than half a day.

Turbine Introduces and Removes Offer Wall from Dungeons and Dragons Online – MMO developer Turbine added a new way for users to buy virtual goods in its Dungeons and Dragons game this week: an offer wall. It let users take third party offers that could earn anywhere from 15 to 2600 of the game’s virtual currency, Turbine Points.

Despite keeping old methods of getting points (purchase or earning them in-game), the new feature was met with significant negative feedback. Massively notes that the majority of player qualms with the addition were not with the offer wall itself, but “the release of information associated with [it].” That release of information was apparently the result of the game’s virtual economy provider, PlaySpan, accidentally passing along unencrypted usernames and email addresses to the offer provider, Super Rewards. The offer wall is now gone as Turbine begins contemplating its next move.

Zynga Sues PlayerAuctions.com – For most people that have been around online games, specifically massively multiplayer titles, it’s more or less common knowledge that people are going to try and buy and sell the game’s currencies and in-game items. In the past few years or so, however, the problem has spread to social games with the most recent legal case being social developer Zynga’s suit against the third-party virtual goods reseller, PlayerAuctions.com.

The issue is an alleged violation of Zynga’s Terms of Service as well as copyright infringements in allowing players to individually sell Zynga’s virtual goods and currencies for real money. The company has a number of similar suits over the years, and we expect it to win against PlayerAuctions.com.

Absolu Telecom Comes to North America – While mobile payment services such as Zong have been an option for those seeking to make virtual goods and currency purchases for some time now, the European company Absolu Telecom, is adding its name to the mix this week. It’s launching its pay-by-phone service in both the United States and Canada.

TBG Signs Up Playfish - Although many gaming companies have for years been quietly working with third parties to run advertising campaigns on Facebook’s performance ad system, one deal in this area was just publicly announced. EA’s Playfish will be using the services of TBG, one of a number of companies that uses Facebook’s Ads API to run targetd Facebook ad campaigns in bulk for US and European markets.

Facebook Connected iPhone Apps Have Creditials Deleted – A few more iPhone developers whose apps communicate with Facebook had their developer credentials deleted by the social network this past week. Essentially, this means the Facebook API that talks with the iPhone will no longer function, and basically breaks the application for anyone that attempts to use. Evidently, the issue involves copyright infringement on Facebook’s intellectual property, something that Facebook regularly enforces against — in fact, it already did against an unofficial Facebook iPad app.

Among the “victims,” as it were, are Chris Diskin and Ky Vu of the applications Emoti for Facebook and iLoader respectively, CNET reports, with copyright issues stemming from the use of “Facebook” in the former’s title and the “F” in the latter’s icon. Of course, the developers have stated they will make the changes as needed, assuming these are the changes needed (apparently Facebook wasn’t too clear), but feel it would have been more prudent to actually contact them about the specific issue before, basically, breaking their applications.

Mobile Gaming Makes Significant Shift to Smartphones - Okay, yes, they are smartphones, so of course more games would be made for them. However, the latest numbers out of ComScore reports some rather drastic numbers, noting a 35% drop over the past year in games played on less powerful phones. Conversely, smartphone games played increased by 60%. Oh yeah, and this rise was despite a 13% in overall US mobile gamers.

FrontierVille Coming Soon? – Considering the relative size of Zynga, at this point, it certainly isn’t out of the question that yet another game will be coming out, hot on the heels of Poker Blitz and Treasure Isle.  Evidently, the title will be FrontierVille, according to a post from TechCrunch. Of course, the specifics are unknown, but according to the description, players will chop trees, construct buildings, raise livestock, plant crops (of course), and raise a family.

Zynga Gets a New Homepage - In a move that might be interpreted as flattering, the social games developer has revamped its home page in a way that is strikingly similar to Playfish’s site. See, for example, the central multi-game animation on the top part of both sites, or the tick-tocky side animations.

Korea Limits Teen Playtime in Freemium MMOs – It’s no secret that freemium games are huge in Korea. However, they have become so popular that the Korean government fears the rising number of teenagers who it deems “addicted” to video games. To that end, South Korea’s Ministry of Culture have passed a law dubbed the “night-time shutdown” that, according to The Korea Herald, will ban overnight playing of top free-to-play MMOs such as Maple Story. 19 games, in total, have been selected thus far.

Essentially, underage players must select a six-hour, consecutive period between midnight and 8:00 AM in which they will be unable to access the game. Additionally, underage players that are active within an MMO for an extended period of time will experience dramatically slower internet speeds.

MySpace notified developers that it would be making a change to how applications appear in 10% of users’ home pages, earlier this week. We’ve gathered a few details on what’s going on. First, from the company developer blog:

Starting Thursday, April 15th, Myspace will be changing the way apps display on the user home page. We will be piloting this new format for a week, and we would love your feedback. Our goal is to achieve a more efficient use of space on this page by removing the applications from the right hand side. Furthermore, this should also significantly increase both performance as well as user interaction. This test will only affect 10% of the users who hit this page, and will not affect how app canvas or profile pages are displayed.

Specifically, the “My Apps” module on users’s home pages will be removed, and replaced with a persistent toolbar that runs across the bottom of the page, that will show apps. This is only a small, limited test, however. The company is trying to see if the toolbar can help drive engagement. Taking the module out of the page may also help decrease its load-time.

We’ve seen many companies experiment with bottom toolbars of this sort; some users like them, some users don’t. In this case, MySpace is trying to figure out if the feature is right for its users.

April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is now officially sold out. We are very excited by the response to our inaugural event and to have so many industry leaders attending.

We hope everyone coming on Tuesday takes the time to meet many fellow attendees, speakers, and sponsors you don’t already know. From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you then!

Note: If you weren’t able to obtain a pass, we’ll be providing coverage here on Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games throughout the day – more details to come.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

On April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event, many of the leading developers from around the world will be gathering to discuss the future of monetization inside social apps and games on Facebook and beyond.

At Inside Social Apps 2010, executives and experts from leading social game and app developers, payment services, advertising providers, and investors will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective. The event will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, located at 1675 Owens St in San Francisco (map). The full agenda for the day is available here.

The full list of speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010 is below:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Jens Begemann, CEO, Wooga
• Jim Bobowski, Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix
  
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Steven Goh, CEO, mig33
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
  
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Maha Ibrahim, General Partner, Canaan Partners
  
• Benjamin Joffe, Founder, +8*
  
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
  
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Alex Rampell, CEO, TrialPay
  
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom, and Investor
  
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes
  

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Like a Duran Duran cover band in the 1990s, Fish Friends seems somewhat out of place atop this week’s list of emerging Facebook games still under a million users, as measured by gains in monthly active users. The fish fad hit its peak several months ago (lifetimes, in the eyeblink world of social games), but the Playdom game is defying the trend cycles to become quite popular.

Facebook actually hasn’t updated Fish Friends’ stats for several days, so it probably has even more new users than you’re seeing on our AppData list below:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Fish Friends	505,480	+232,227	+84.99
2.	Mall World	401,686	+214,043	+114.07
3.	Hızlı Yaz	249,918	+92,731	+58.99
4.	Car Madness	533,794	+73,880	+16.06
5.	Evony	202,660	+68,257	+50.79
6.	武俠風雲	275,226	+65,094	+30.98
7.	My Tribe	314,296	+60,527	+23.85
8.	Daily Tarot Cards	264,017	+52,994	+25.11
9.	NanoTowns	468,912	+51,901	+12.45
10.	RockFREE	341,091	+49,268	+16.88
11.	Fashion City	418,998	+47,579	+12.81
12.	Warstorm	762,009	+42,107	+5.85
13.	Island Life	635,835	+41,562	+6.99
14.	Platinum Life: Web Edition BETA	116,728	+38,894	+49.97
15.	Safari Kingdom	121,989	+37,821	+44.94
16.	Know-It-All Trivia	782,014	+36,397	+4.88
17.	Spot The Difference	616,202	+35,572	+6.13
18.	Top Gun	272,785	+34,926	+14.68
19.	DoubleDown Casino Blackjack	155,188	+32,797	+26.80
20.	Keyboard SMASH!	215,374	+32,579	+17.82

Coming in second is Mall World, a game by indie developer 50 Cubes that’s actually fairly unusual in its misandristic attention to the shopping habits of women (you can’t even pick a male avatar). We just reviewed the game yesterday.

Hızlı Yaz is a Turkish-language app that seems to be about typing fast. It’s followed up by Car Madness, from Apps-O-Rama, which balances out Mall World with a big dose of muscle car testosterone. Madness has been around for a year, but its MAU had dipped before picking up again a few weeks ago.

Evony is another game that we recently reviewed; you’ll recognize the name from the company’s ubiquitous and rather trashy ads. It’s a strategy game with its own website that uses Facebook Connect, much like some other recently popular and similarly complex games like Sony’s Poxnora.

That covers the top five. A few other names on the list also appeared last week: My Tribe and Island Life are both island games that have grown steadily for a few weeks, while NanoTowns is a up-and-coming city builder and RockFREE takes a shot at the Guitar Hero genre. And if Mall World keeps doing well, it’s also worth keeping an eye on Fashion City, which uses some of the same themes.

Facebook has been expanding payment options for Facebook Credits, its universal virtual currency used in Platform applications, in recent months. Today, it is partnering for the first time with two offer providers so users can earn Credits without having to pay directly.

For users, this means another way to get Credits without paying — this may increase spending on Credits for social games and other applications on Facebook. For developers, that means Credits might be able to bring in more money than they have to date. And for other offer providers, Facebook is now more of a direct competitor, although the payment option is only in early beta testing at this point, and the company’s long-term plans are not yet clear.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

It goes without saying, that Facebook users enjoy the whole farming concept that has seeped its way into the core of most social games. To that end, developers have had to find ways to make the concept feel fresh and new. Well, one of these ways has been to change the overall feel of the games, such as tropical island farming. However, German company Gameforge is going a different route and taking all that land tilling to Africa in its new app, Funfari.

Once they’ve been whisked away to the nearest savanna, players are tasked with the creation of a sort of wildlife preserve within the African setting. In order to fund your preserve, you do the typical farming chores: Plow land, plant crop, water crop, harvest, plant tree, harvest tree…. You know the drill. If you don’t like doing that sort of activity in general, then you probably won’t enjoy it here.

Funfari does make up for it with the other major half of the game, decorative virtual spaces. Yes, yes, everyone and their mother has these nowadays, but the fact is they enjoy it, and the potential decorations in this app are phenomenal.

Décor is two-fold: Static stuff, and animals. The static elements consist of everything from simple rocks to elaborate buildings, but here’s the deal: There are a ton of items to choose from, and frankly more than most new games of this ilk. It usually takes a few updates to build up such a selection, which basically means that you can create extraordinarily intricate preserves that look distinct from anyone else’s. Oh, and that’s before you buy animals.

Currently, there are 26 different animals you can buy, ranging from cheap parrots to exotic pandas. Unfortunately, they don’t roam around your preserve. But they do animate, carry the typical animal characteristics of their species, and even earn you some extra cash now and then.

This is where a slightly different nuance comes into play, literally. Every couple of hours, users have to feed their animal buddies. Okay, so that’s not too original, but periodically, they can become bored and you have to “play” with them. While this keeps them happy, it also decreases the time until they need to be fed next, which, in turn, allows the player to progress, level-wise, a bit faster.

As you’d expect, this is prudent as level requirements must be met in order to purchase the bigger and better animals and décor. Sadly, however, leveling is still a bit slow, and there aren’t many fun animals to buy – besides the parrot – at the early stages in the game. Thankfully, Gameforge throws players a small bone by tossing you a lion (which requires level 66) right from the start. Of course, it is a little unnerving to have it leer at you with a food thought bubble hovering over its head as soon as you start the game up.

Overall, the look and feel of Funfari is fantastic as well. It has this sort of Lion King feel to it, and the colors are wonderfully vibrant and artwork fantastically well done. Curiously enough, even the music plays a great role in the creation of that mood, even if it is a bit over the top. Basically, it has a Lion King meets Chronicles of Narnia sort of sound to it. It’s oddly epic for a farming game. Nevertheless, and even though it will eventually get muted for most people, it is nice while it lasts.

If there were any negatives to be had with Gameforge’s latest title, it’s really that the game is a tired concept that’s been given a new coat of paint. Despite the fact that it looks good, and provides users with a new palette to create with, the essense of the title is something that most players have done before. If you’re looking for something fresh and new as far as design goes, that’s not something that is going to be found here. Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a new area to expand your agricultural skills into, then Funfari might be the app for you. Just… make sure to feed the lions.

[Editor's note: In the post below, entrepreneur and consultant Sean Ryan explains why he believes the Open Social developer standard is due for big growth this year. Although we expect that not all of our readers will agree with his points, we think they are worth consideration.]

OpenSocial is a set of social networking interfaces (APIs) created by a group originally led by Google and MySpace, but supported by a coalition of large sites in response to the growing power of the Facebook platform standard (FBML). Launched with great fanfare in late 2007, but adopted primarily by MySpace (and Orkut in Brazil), the standard languished for the next 2 years, although the community continued to evolve it until the 1.0 version was recently released in Q1, 2010.

Why did it languish? Primarily because every developer in the world was focused solely on Facebook as the best publisher platform and because the other social networks (SNS) didn’t fully understand how lucrative online gaming was, and it too long for OpenSocial standard to evolve, at least until the last 6 months. I consult with various SNS about their gaming strategies, as well as with a variety of game developers, so I see it from both angles, and what we now see in the marketplace in 2010 is a growing focus on OpenSocial, with a massive surge in adoption of the OS platform coming this year.

Why? The first reason is that it has become abundantly clear to anyone not living in a cave that social gaming is the only truly profitable feature of a social network. And even better, it drives higher user engagement, not just revenue, since users return repeatedly to the site and often contact friends in order to get them to participate in games. Since the Facebook FBML set of APIs is fully owned by Facebook, the top player in social network services, it is a significant danger for Facebook competitors to adopt that standard, especially as Facebook becomes a tougher place to do business for everyone. Therefore, social networks with any IQ points are rapidly throwing away their home-built proprietary standards in order to adopt OpenSocial so they can roll out a compelling gaming solution.

The second reason is that to everyone’s apparent surprise, Facebook has finally become a much tougher place to do business for game developers – in fact it almost resembles a traditional retail environment these days. There is an oversupply of content, Facebook is levying a 30% “tax” with Facebook Credits, and with significantly reduced virality due to platform changes, most developers are spending at least another 30% of revenue on advertising on Facebook, all of which is significantly reducing margins. This is all obviously great news for Facebook, but it means the gravy train of “free traffic and great virality” is over, making the site a much more difficult place for mid-sized and small developers, even though the core site features and massive traffic are still the best on the planet. Therefore, smart developers are again looking for Facebook alternatives.

So what should Facebook competitors do? Given that gaming is immensely profitable and that Facebook is starting to be less hospitable to many developers, it’s becoming clear that all social networks should launch OpenSocial-compliant containers, striking deals with a select set of developers to feature their games in return for a relatively big revenue share. However, these smaller social sites must become an attractive destination for content developers, even though they have less traffic than Facebook. The key is that the OS container must be fully OpenSocial compliant so that developers can easily port their applications to a wide set of smaller sites with almost no work – if it takes a lot of work for each site, then the return on investment won’t be worth it to the developer, and the site will struggle to attract strong enough games. Now that there is an agreed upon 1.0 OS standard, all sites should move to adopt it in order to make the developer experience more consistent. I also don’t recommend that the SNS offer a big open platform since it’s really hard to manage thousands of games and their developers without a huge staff – instead, feature a smaller set of games which pay a revenue split in return for the promotion/placement, and then market the hell out of them – the success of Tagged and MyYearbook in following this more focused approach are great examples of this approach and they continue to expand their offerings.

In addition, I realize everyone loves to hate MySpace, but it has significantly improved its product and its developer relations. At Meez, for example, we now have almost 500,000 active users after 6 weeks on MySpace, which was helped significantly by our promotional deal with them, as well as having a great app — so MySpace has again become viable as a good partner. Finally, there are numerous other social networks who will launch gaming solutions in 2010, all working closely with a small set of developers, but they are often still looking for more content partnerships.

What should social game developers with less than 100 employees do? For developers outside of the big 5-10, you really need to give up the FB dream – you’re not going to be Zynga or Playdom or Crowd Star. As of today, out of the top 20 games on Facebook, the almost all of them are from 4 developers, with a few remaining outliers, primarily veteran games like Farm Town or single games from massive app providers like Rock You – we’re not seeing big breakthrough game start-ups any more because the easy phase is over. The numbers I’m hearing from many talented, but smaller developers are simply horrific in many cases, with customer lifetime values less than $.50 and actual customer lifetimes being less than 30 days – it’s especially tough now that the Facebook advertising cost-per-click (CPC) rate has gone up in many cases to above $.50, so the customer acquisition versus revenue calculus just doesn’t work anymore.

I’d strongly recommend producing a great OpenSocial version of your game and trying to strike deals with a set of SNS not named Facebook – there are lots of them around the world with 10 million or more monthly unique users, many of whom are going to adopt the social games that are put in front of them if they’re good games and if they can play them with their core friends on those smaller networks. There is a theory going around that gaming works best on Facebook because it uses real world profiles, but the data from the other social networks shows that tight relationships can form with only online profiles, so that won’t be an issue with gaming. The revenue share idea seems expensive on the surface, but given the resulting increased promotion and reduced competition from other similar games on these sites, it’s absolutely worth it, especially versus the increased costs and worsening odds on the Facebook platform.

Facebook is still a world class developer and user platform – but no one can pretend that the landscape hasn’t changed in the past tw years. Smart developers and Facebook competitors are moving quickly to launch robust OpenSocial gaming solutions to drive their businesses – otherwise they will just continue to be demolished by Facebook, as we’re seeing in many cases around the world.

By now, most everyone on Facebook is probably familiar, in some way, shape, or form, with Playfish’s Pet Society. As with any successful game (regardless of platform) it sees a lot of clones. In fact, the concept of virtual pet caring has been around since before Facebook.

But we’ve just looked at Meromero Park from Tokyo-based online marketing firm MicroAd — and it manages to be unique, and good.

At first glance, it looks like just another Pet Society. However, upon closer inspection, only the core aspect of the game is the same. Players are given a very simple, and dull-looking creature called a “Mero.” Don’t worry though, it won’t stay dull for long, as the whole point of the game is to care for your Mero as it grows, while decorating its 2D home and adding clothing.

This is where the similarities to predecessors cease. There is no grooming or bathing. There is just feeding. Similar to how Zynga’s PetVille does it, players buy a piece of food that will last for X amount of time, and place it in a bowl. Periodically, your Mero feeds from it and once it’s finished you’ll get a gem that grants you not experience and gold but “Smiles” and “Pearls.”

Regular feeding is among a handful of things that earns players experience, ahem, smiles, towards new levels. As you’d expect, this is what gates a player from buying the best items right off the bat (well, that and the price tag). Interestingly enough, it is done in a much more creative and gratifying way.

You see, the gating is applied to the Mero’s clothing, but rather than just saying “Requires Level 8,” each level represents an amount physical growth for your pet. At the start, they are boring, dull, blobs of basic color, but with every level, they get bigger, get more color, grow new limbs (i.e. actual arms), and by extension, can wear new clothing. As a basic example, there are items that you can decorate their back with, such as tails, but while you can buy the item, you can’t actually don it until, well, they are more than just a walking head.

Furniture, on the other hand, has no limit. You can buy it at any time, so long as you have enough pearls. Most of it is very bright with extremely vibrant, pastel colors, so most people will probably either completely love it or hate it. Of course, there is a little bit of in-between with some nice Japanese decorum such as teahouse benches, ume lamps, and kanji scrolls.

Sadly, the amount of space one has to work with, decoration-wise, is a bit limited with only one, single-frame room. Thankfully, players are able to maximize the use of this space with the ability to put any item anywhere. Want a lamp to hang down all the way to the floor? Not a problem. Want to put a vase floating in the middle of no where? You can do that too.

In addition to the stores, players can also visit each other’s friends as often as they like. Just remember to say “Meroci” (hello) when you walk in. Beyond just seeing their home and playing with their stuff (yes, you can click on most furniture – and the Mero, for that matter – and it will do something), you can help them by squashing little cockroach-like critters that scurry about. Of course, if none of your friends want to play with you, it’s possible to make new ones by visiting the Onsen, which is basically a community, chat-supported, bath with other random players.

If you’re not looking for friends, and are more the entrepreneurial type, then you also have an option. Meromero Park comes with two mini-games which can earn you extra pearls. The first is a memory game with increasingly difficult stages in which you open pea-pod-like objects and attempt to match one colored critter with one of the same color. However, this game only grants you five lives per stage, so if you guess wrong and don’t make a match too many times, the game is over. The second is a sort of shooter game, where you say “meroci!” to everyone that passes by within X amount of time to score points.

As far as negatives go, there really aren’t a lot. The only significant issue with Meromero Park is that it really pushes hard on the virtual currency (Kiralin) sales. This isn’t a push in the sense of spamming the user to buy some, but in the fact that a tremendous amount of the items within the clothing and furniture stores – which is at least half – are only available if you spend real money, and not earnable with the in-game pearls

Nevertheless, Meromero Park is still a very nice title. It has taken the core pet-caring concept and morphed it into something that feels new. That said, there is a stark cultural difference in the design, but even if you don’t care for it that much, the game is amusing enough, in its own right, to make most people smile. Now, if you don’t mind, the Mero is hungry again….

Google’s latest high-profile hire will work with game developers to make their trade faster and cheaper when working with the search giant. Mark DeLoura, the new “developer advocate”, is a consultant with experience at Nintendo, Ubisoft and other high-profile companies, as well as the author of Game Progamming Gems, a series of eight (soon nine) books.

Although DeLoura posted on his blog about being hired a couple days ago, there’s not much specific information about what he’ll be doing. He does mention a few Google products of interest: SketchUp and 3D Warehouse, both of which are design software that DeLoura implies Google has been quietly working hard on; O3D, an open-source API for 3D apps; and Android, the now-widespread mobile OS.

Android is certainly the most visible of those listed, and there’s plenty of evidence that Google could use a concerted push to get games onto the platform. As it stands today, Android still lags far behind the iPhone in terms of the number and quality of games offered, and top game developers like Ngmoco have yet to make a real push at Android development.

Unmentioned by DeLoura is Google’s Orkut social network and Open Social, which has helped other companies like MySpace launch their own platforms for social game development. It’s reasonable to assume that DeLoura will work on all of Google’s initiatives, though, and the company has expressed plenty of interest in social games in the past, including its Lively virtual environment, which it gave up on in 2008.

Strategically, this is also a great time for Google to reach out to game makers, especially in mobile. Apple has recently annoyed and angered a lot of developers in its attempts to make cross-platform development harder (or, for the less cynical, keep standards high). By reaching out at the right time, Google could come off as the good guy.

Not that looking good or bad is the key to getting the best games on any platform; overriding factors in that case is how many devices are in consumer’s hands, and how much money can be earned from a well-made game. But Google is at least moving in the right direction, and it wouldn’t surprise us to hear of some high-profile developers working with Android and Google’s other platforms soon.