Here’s something all video game fans can appreciate. Late Friday afternoon, Electronic Arts branch, EA Mobile and The Tetris Company announced a rather curious Facebook application called “The Human Tetris Project.” Making use of Facebook’s social capabilities, the app is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 1985 game from Russian designer, Alexey Pajitnov.

The new app is intended as a physical representation of what is called the “Tetris Effect.” Essentially, this is when people devote so much time and attention to something, that it begins to overshadow normal thoughts (let’s face it, we’ve all thought about how real-world objects could fit together Tetris-style).

The new game accomplishes this by allowing Tetris fans to take the form of actual Tetris blocks, or “Tetriminos.” The process is simple enough: Users merely have to visit the app or stand-alone site (which redirects you anyway) and upload one of their Facebook photos. Upon doing so, they can put up to a 25-character message to go with the image, touting their fandom… or whatever else crosses their mind. Just be careful what you write, as anyone can click your image and visit your homepage. Once submitted, an ID number is granted that lets you search for your new Tetrimino image, and share it with friends.

As for the display itself, each image appears in one of the small blocks used to make up the colorful, larger ones we are all familiar with. As each one falls, we get a glimpse of who its made up of, see where they are from and whatever it is they wrote. Oh, and of course, this is all coupled with that all too nostalgic Tetris music – except since this is 2010 and not 1985, its received a bit of an electronic rock upgrade.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to play the game itself, and all the pieces are placed automatically, but it still pretty cool to see just how many people are participating and where they are from. Already, there are over 2000 fans, and they stem from not only the United States, but parts of Russia, France, Canada, Brazil, and other countries around the world.

Only 10 days after its launch on Facebook, Zynga’s newest game Treasure Isle has picked up an amazing 7.5 million users. Isle’s gains easily place it atop this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users; for that matter, it easily tops the charts for the month and year to date as well.

Although not all 7.5 million users were actually gained in just the last week (our AppData chart lagged behind the game’s launch), it’s fair to say that Zynga has a new hit, even if the growth drastically slows. But for the moment, there’s no sign of that happening. We discussed some of the key reasons for Isle’s instant success last Wednesday.

The bottom line is that it’s more than just advertising heft; note that the list is bracketed by Zynga’s other new game, Poker Blitz, which has been out for two weeks longer but gained a sixth as many users:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	7,547,472	+7,463,997	+8,941.60
2.	Hotel City	4,672,194	+2,268,473	+94.37
3.	Aquarium Life	2,400,828	+1,779,885	+286.64
4.	Family Feud	1,152,926	+629,069	+120.08
5.	Social City	12,173,968	+573,081	+4.94
6.	Zoo Paradise	3,141,547	+489,254	+18.45
7.	Bubble Island	5,212,566	+457,301	+9.62
8.	Tiki Resort	4,698,673	+307,603	+7.01
9.	Texas HoldEm Poker	30,074,788	+297,074	+1.00
10.	PetVille	21,462,857	+260,648	+1.23
11.	Games	2,337,509	+184,795	+8.58
12.	Towner	2,227,586	+175,276	+8.54
13.	Mall World	324,406	+160,383	+97.78
14.	My Stuff	3,525,876	+148,720	+4.40
15.	Hızlı Yaz	230,883	+147,381	+176.50
16.	Mafia Wars	25,441,953	+133,854	+0.53
17.	Ameba Pico	1,495,135	+132,876	+9.75
18.	Fish Friends	320,268	+132,795	+70.83
19.	Wild Ones	3,283,204	+128,438	+4.07
20.	Poker Blitz	1,244,979	+113,906	+10.07

Treasure Isle’s big gains almost obscure the fact that Hotel City, the new hotel management game from Playfish, is also growing extremely well, having just passed Country Story to become the third-largest game for Electronic Arts. It’s following in the footsteps of Social City, now Playdom’s largest game, which appears to be entering a growth plateau at number four.

Aquarium Life shows strong gains at number three, but its stats as reported by Facebook seem to be somewhat off. So Family Feud is probably the real bronze medalist with its social gaming take on the 80s game show.

The remainder of the top ten is filled out by CrowdStar, Wooga, Playdom and Zynga, leaving no more room for smaller developers. But the rest of the list holds several independents; it starts with the simply-named Games, which is doing well with the game-portal strategy that made MindJolt successful.

Nexon Adds Offer-Based Advertising – While most free-to-play, social MMOs make most of their revenue off the direct sale of virtual items and currency, Nexon will also be adding offer-based advertising as an alternative method of earning currency for the company’s popular titles, such as MapleStory. In order to incorporate this new feature, Nexon America will be turning to monetization firm Peanut Labs.

Embee Mobile, Sparkplay Media, and CyberSports will also be adding offers to their games, according to the company.

Data Mining Social Games – Turiya Media is a new startup trying to data-mine games to figure out which players are buying the most virtual goods, and why.

Essentially, the company uses techniques similar to those employed when detecting online fraud in order to to figure out and predict what players will do based on things they have done in past games and their style of play. It then categorizes users into up to 15 different groups such as collectors, explorers, social gamers, and so on.

Like some other analytics services, it is also able to deduce the potential “lifetime” value of a user. This information can add a level of finesse to how social games utilize pop-up offers for buying virtual currency or goods (i.e. a player who is likely to play only once or twice is unlikely to buy anything unless offered). Turiya is also able to make specific recommendations, based on what the user, or similar users, have bought for X, Y, and Z games.

Ubisoft Talks About the Gaming Market – In a good interview with VentureBeat this past week, Ubisoft‘s Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Tony Key, discussed his thoughts on the potential paradigm shift in gaming towards Facebook. He notes that using Facebook to get people to interact more with your product is a new, and tremendous part of game marketing nowadays. Even if you sell it in stores, and Facebook isn’t the core (or even if it provides no game play value at all, for that matter), at the very least, you are building some sort of buzz around it.

That said, however, Key does point out that just because Facebook is popular now, does not mean that is going to take over as the dominate force in the gaming industry as a whole. Rather, he feels that part of the massive social boom, has been due to the economic recession. While Facebook can enhance the experience of most games, it can hardly match the “immersive game experience” that consoles offer.

Android Grows – Google’s Android Android operating system is gaining on the iPhone and other rivals, according to a report from comScore covering US mobile usage in February.

While the iPhone has been the most significant smartphone mobile gaming platform to date, some developers we’ve spoken with say Android needs to get a lot bigger before building mobile social gaming apps becomes a serious business.

Currently, 45.4 million people in America own a smartphone. Of those millions, however, 42.1% is held by RIM, 25.4% by Apple, 15.1% by Microsoft, 9.0% by Google, and 5.4% by Palm. Android’s percentage change was positive at 5.2%. RIM’s, Apple’s, Microsoft’s, and Palm’s changes were +1.3%, -0.1%, -4.0%, and -1.8% respectively.

Xbox Live Gets Minor Improvements to its Virtual Currency – For the most part, Microsoft has been relatively quiet, with the only major Xbox Live addition being the launch of the Virtual Game Room. However, for those that spend any significant amount of time on Live, you may have noticed a rather convenient change to how Microsoft Points are sold.

You can now purchase the virtual currency in smaller increments of 400 at the cost of $4.99. Basically, it makes it easier to buy the exact amount of Points you need to purchase a virtual item, downloadable content, or Xbox Live Arcade title, rather than buy more than you need and be left with extra points you can’t do anything with.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online Comes… Online – A while back we covered the addition of Facebook Connect to the beta renditon of Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online. Well, now the quasi-massively multiplayer online title is live and ready for users to play through. With features ranging from single player practice modes, to full scale tournaments, and even the social “fan” sponsoring of your friends, the launch marks one of Electronic Arts’ bigger franchises to make use of social gaming features.

[Key image via VentureBeat]

A variety of analytics tool providers launched on Facebook’s platform in the early days of 2007 and 2008, but most of them have since moved elsewhere. Kontagent, meanwhile, has stayed put, quietly building its product and its client list, and today the San Francisco-based company is sharing a couple big news items.

One is that it is is officially releasing the 1.5 version of its software — it has been testing the version for the past few months, and says it has seen a big uptick in new clients as a result. Another item is that the company is currently tracking a total of 50 million monthly active users across all of its clients. And, it is disclosing funding information for the first time: it has raised a total of $1.25 million from a group of angel and seed-stage investors. You can find the full lists of clients and investors, below.

Here’s a little more on Kontagent’s market position now. The 10-person company, led by co-founders and serial entrepreneurs Albert Lai and Jeffery Tseng, has spent the last year incorporating “best practices” in social game metrics measurement. It started out providing granular ways of measuring the effectiveness of viral channels — invites, friend requests, etc. — and types of users based on age, location and gender. It has expanded features in the past 12 months to include things like tracking revenue per user during the entire time they use an app, the effectiveness of traffic sources (like Facebook ad campaigns) and custom goals and charts for seeing how particular changes affect particular types of users.

Here’s the list of the most major new features, from Lai:

- Custom Charts Creation
- Improved Ad Traffic and Traffic Source Tracking
- Improved Viral A/B Testing Platform
- Retention Analysis & Stickiness Tracking
- Deep Virtual Currency Transactions and Revenue Analysis
- Full Data Export Capability
- Improve On-boarding and Instrumentation
- Robust User Class Based Access Controls

Analytics tools typically work by tracking users’ browser cookies or by providing general frameworks that provide a view basic tools for things like the amount of time users spend on the app. Kontagent’s software has developers send it personal data they get from Facebook about users, including users’ unique Facebook IDs. The company anonymizes this information, retaining demographic data for ongoing use. So one person might only spend a few bucks in an app — or no money at all — but invite a lot of friends. Lai tells us that despite its ability get this much detail on individuals, it anonymizes all data in a way that complies with Facebook’s terms of service prohibiting platform companies from storing and repurposing profile information.

The result of Kontagent’s data approach is that it can answer important developer questions like “how much money can I make from 18 to 25 year old males in California when friends invite them to play my mafia role-playing game.” The features get about as granular as many developers will want. For example, developers can compare the effect of an invite that went out yesterday versus one that went out a month ago to see which was more effective in the game overall. The company has a live demo available here.

When we covered the company in 2008, we compared it to machine tools that allowed manufacturers to build massive factories during the industrial revolution and beyond. The concept is that firms in an industry need to focus their energies on building their core products, and use third parties to help them build the many machines they need to create those products. Kontagent’s analytics service takes this role for many social game developers today, in that it allows them to focus on building applications rather than having to also focus on building advanced measurement tools.

One catch here is that many of the top game developers have built in-house tools in the past couple years, even as Kontagent has grown. Lai explains that a few things are happening in its favor. The most major one is what you’d expect, that Kontagent’s focus on tools means that its service is constantly improving, even as all developers have to focus on the apps themselves. This specialization means that Kontagent’s product can potentially improve versus in-house options over time, just as machine tools companies did in the last centuries, and as analytics tools have done on the wider web in the last couple decades.

While most of Kontagent’s clients have mid-sized social games, he says he has heard repeatedly that his company is becoming increasingly competitive with what big developers are doing in-house, and he tells us to expect some more partnership announcements in the coming weeks.

Many leading developers consider data analysis for game design, growth and monetization as something they need to keep in-house. They view their knowledge and abilities in this area to be a key part of what makes their companies valuable. Kontagent is doing well in the ecosystem so far, and it is looking especially ambitious with this string of announcements, so we’ll be watching its market position closely.

And now for some more details on pricing, investors and clients.

Pricing, as you’d expect is basically an enterprise model, with a basic free service for available for some features and expensive high-end features like dedicated servers and support staff. Take a look at the list below for all the details, or check it out here.

Investors:

• Naval Ravikant, The Hit Forge
• Extreme Venture Partners
• Facebook’s fbFund, which put $250,000 into the company (the highest level of funding it has provided to date)
• Jameson Hsu, the co-founder of Mochi Media (which was reqcently acquired by Shanda Games)
• James Hong, co-founder of HotOrNot
• Benjamin Sun, co-founder of CommunityConnect
• Auren Hoffman, founder of RapLeaf;
• Greg Thomson, founder of TallTreeGames and previously creator of YoVille (acquired by Zynga)
• Mike Sego, the current Chief Product Officer at Gaia and creator of (Fluff)Friends (acquired by SGN)

Clients:

• Cafe.com
• CBS
• Conduit Labs
• Gaia Online
• GameDuell
• GameHouse
• HitGrab
• King.com
• MetaPlace
• PlayFirst
• Paramount
• PopCap Games
• Real
• Sandlot Games
• TallTreeGames
• Tencent
• ThreeRings
• Wooga
• XPD

Also, here’s a full presentation from the company on its features:

Small and new developers feature prominently on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook games still under a million monthly active users, but that’s not telling the whole story. Since we don’t feature any games that have passed a million MAU, you’re not seeing a pair of new games from big developers that haven’t been around very long, but are quickly becoming very popular.

One is Playfish’s Hotel City, which jumped from about half a million players to almost two million over the past week. The other is Zynga’s newest game, Treasure Isle, which soared onto the charts with an astounding 5.4 million new players in its first week. We reviewed Isle last Friday, when it was released, and covered its explosive growth on Wednesday.

But smaller developers shouldn’t feel too bad; Playfish and Zynga probably had to spend quite a bit to grow so quickly. And as you can see below, smaller games can still enjoy fast growth:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Family Feud	775,816	+494,093	+175.38
2.	Happy Hotel	955,037	+156,014	+19.53
3.	My Tribe	253,769	+141,264	+125.56
4.	PoxNora	604,247	+135,897	+29.02
5.	Hızlı Yaz	157,187	+132,185	+528.70
6.	Fish Friends	273,253	+128,977	+89.40
7.	Evony	134,403	+128,743	+2,274.61
8.	Daily Tarot Cards	211,023	+110,615	+110.17
9.	RockFREE	291,823	+109,489	+60.05
10.	三國風雲 – 問天下誰是英雄！	305,535	+104,894	+52.28
11.	Funflow	959,493	+102,553	+11.97
12.	TransForce – Robot strategy browser game of 2010	204,733	+93,095	+83.39
13.	Aquarium Life	657,603	+87,421	+15.33
14.	NanoTowns	417,011	+82,334	+24.60
15.	Island Life	594,273	+66,722	+12.65
16.	武俠風雲	210,132	+66,589	+46.39
17.	Mall World	187,643	+66,309	+54.65
18.	Keyboard SMASH!	182,795	+66,129	+56.68
19.	Okey Oyna	631,059	+65,249	+11.53
20.	Little Rock Pool	810,449	+64,154	+8.60

Family Feud, at the top of the list, is a Facebook adaptation of the popular gameshow by iWin and Backstage. Nostalgia seems to be driving players to the game (although Feud still airs), but quite a few are complaining that the game strictly limits how many times they can play per day.

Happy Hotel, from 6 waves, is growing very well despite the larger success of Hotel City. Happy Hotel is actually a quite different game from City, with bright, attractive artwork; when we reviewed the game in January, its clever design led us to correctly guess that hotel management games would be one of Facebook’s next big genres. The game should easily cross a million players this week.

The island town-management game My Tribe, by Big Fish Games, didn’t do particularly well when it was first released, but is thriving now at number three. Right below it is PoxNora, a Sony strategy game that is fairly unusual for Facebook because of its lengthy play-times and traditional gaming feel.

At five, we have Hızlı Yaz, a Turkish-language game that seems to be about typing quickly — as is Keyboard SMASH!, down at 18. Finally, we’ll point out Fish Friends, a Playdom game that was rather late to the fish genre on Facebook. After an initial nose-dive in new users, the game started making a comeback a couple weeks ago.

Apple made a potentially big move into social gaming earlier today, announcing that it planned to introduce a new “Game Center” along with the fourth version of its iPhone operating system.

The Game Center  will take the form of an app that comes pre-installed with the OS, from what we can see in Apple’s presentation today, and the preview will be available in the summer before it fully launches in the fall.

The Game Center appears similar to the social layers that have been around for years on console games rather than ones driven by your existing relationships and communication channels. It looks like a variety of mobile social platform developers have been trying to create, including Aurora Feint’s Open Feint, Ngmoco’s Plus+ and Scoreloop. We’ve gotten responses from these companies on the news, which we’ll get to below.

But first, here’s some more details on what Game Center appears to be — or not be. It will include ways to invite friends, matchmaking, leaderboards and achievements. It’s not clear how matchmaking will specifically work, but this is how Apple explained it today: “We do automatic matchmaking, we’ll find others with a similar ability and match them against you.” The feature, along with leaderboards and achievements, are all great mechanics for some types of games, and should be a good fit with the console-style ones that have been especially popular on the OS so far.

But the Game Center probably won’t instantly lead to the next FarmVille, or other games that tens of millions of people of all ages casually play all the time. Apple still doesn’t have a pre-existing social network to build on top of. There are no Apple “friends” to invite like there are Facebook and MySpace friends.

Or maybe there are.

We don’t normally spend much time scrutinizing fuzzy Apple screenshots, but one in particular from the company’s presentation today is worth a closer look. It’s of somebody inviting a friend to play a game. You can see a notification in the screenshot with the text “Invitation from [unclear name] to play ‘TouchFighter.’ Will you join me and play a game of TouchFighter?”

Who is your friend, and how does Apple know their name? It could be something basic, like users registering within Game Center, then being able to contact or friend other iPhone players who have done the same. But Apple has the chance to do something much more interesting, in terms of actual social gaming: Use phone numbers to let people invite their real friends. Obviously, Apple would need to carefully manage how this would work. One way would be to use the Game Center to show you friends who have downloaded the same game, or similar games, and let you invite them. Building on top of people’s existing contacts is what makes social games “social” — well, that and communication channels, like the invite notification Apple showed in the screenshot.

Anyway, Game Center is shaping up to be a serious new social gaming platform. Other companies, as we’ve been covering, have themselves started to see traction with their own mobile social gaming networks. Apple founder Steve Jobs said today that “Game Center won’t necessarily supplant other independently-created social platforms such as OpenFeint,” according to Gamasutra. But given that each platform has somewhat different features, and that Apple hasn’t disclosed many important details about the Game Center, here’s what the developers themselves think, verbatim.

Ngmoco’s vice president of social applications, Jason Oberfest:

We have anticipated these Apple initiatives for some time and are actually quite excited about them. On the social side, we are super excited about what Apple is doing with Game Center. We think a more seamless integration of social features within the Apple OS is a good thing for consumers and developers — Apple is in the best position to create a foundation for social interaction on the iPhone and iPad platforms, and we are excited to build on what they offer. Over the last few months we have been hard at work expanding the scope of plus+ to be a broad set of services for developers which we announced at GDC. We have learned by trial and error how to make free to play social games work on the platform and along the way have built software for running these businesses that we think can be of great value to the developer community.

Scoreloop’s chief executive, Marc Gumpinger:

Given the huge potential of the mobile social gaming market, I clearly see the rationale behind Apple’s announcement. How could any device manufacturer or carrier not want to add social glue by providing some form of social gaming infrastructure? It allows them to engage and increase their user base by accessing their users’ friends. Xbox proved that, as did Facebook (or rather Zynga, Playfish and others).

Apple positions Game Center around basic social connectivity, which represents the base layer of Scoreloop’s infrastructure. But with its virtual goods architecture and in-game monetization fully in effect, Scoreloop’s functionalities go far beyond what was announced today. Our infrastructure enables any developer to be the next Zynga – and that on the even bigger scale with billions of handsets in the mobile market.

Let’s not forget that the mobile market is fragmented and consists of far more than the iPhone. Chances are high that not all friends are on an iPhone but on an Android, Nokia, BlackBerry, BREW, Samsung or LG device. That means a device specific platform like the Apple Game Center does not allow you to interact with all of your friends. Scoreloop’s focus has been cross-platform from the very beginning. We have invested significant efforts outside the iPhone, and it now pays off. While Scoreloop is already the market leader on Android, we’re extending our infrastructure to the other important platforms for complete full coverage.

Scoreloop is the only mobile social infrastructure connecting players no matter what device they’re on. So we’re not only the perfect partner for studios and publishers alike, but also for OEMs and OS makers, Apple included.

And finally, here’s the press release Aurora Feint put out this afternoon:

April 8, 2010- Aurora Feint, creator of the OpenFeint platform, welcomed Apple’s launch of Game Center today and endorses it as a major step forward in online mobile games for the Apple gaming ecosystem. Aurora Feint runs OpenFeint as a free online service primarily for leaderboards and achievements, which currently reaches 19 million iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch gamers. The company will drive revenue growth for the mobile gaming industry with its OpenFeint X virtual goods social gaming platform for operating free to play micro-transaction based games with no server operations. All OpenFeint player accounts will automatically become OpenFeint X Player accounts when OpenFeint X goes live for the general public, so the OpenFeint community will continue to thrive.

“OpenFeint X is currently built on top of OpenFeint and in the future it will also sit on Apple’s Game Center social graph, achievements and leaderboards so developers and gamers don’t miss a step,” said Jason Citron, CEO of Aurora Feint. “Apple is a key partner and we are delighted that they have validated the first half of the OpenFeint vision and we can now fulfill the second half: OpenFeint X and Virtual Goods based Social Games. Our developers can be 100 percent assured that we will continue to invest in OpenFeint so our 1500 live games, 2000 games in development and 19M players have a flawless experience with OpenFeint and Game Center.”

OpenFeint X, launched in February, is a virtual goods social gaming platform that enables virtual goods management for free to play games with ZERO server operations. OpenFeint X is live today in Aurora Feint 3 for the iPad.

“OpenFeint has become a de-facto standard in core online game services such as leaderboards and achievements,” said Peter Relan, Chairman of Aurora Feint. “That’s the first step, but the real money opportunity is in allowing developers to create the next Zynga or CrowdStar, which will happen with the virtual goods social games platform that we’ve created in OpenFeint X.”

OpenFeint X features include a full virtual goods store, detailed analytics, a game-specific currency wallet, and downloadable game assets so game content can be pushed live in real time. The OpenFeint X developer program will only be open to OpenFeint game developers who will work with OpenFeint to transition to Game Center in the future.

Screenshots via Apple’s presentation video.

Since its appearance on Facebook in a year ago, PopCap’s social rendition of its top casual game, Bejeweled has grown to be one of the most successful traditional casual games on the platform. And now the developer is bringing it back to the PC as a download — but using Facebook Connect.

Sitting comfortably at #15 in this month’s list of top 25 Facebook games, Bejeweled Blitz currently holds around 10.6 million monthly active users. Bejeweled is the original “match three” type puzzle game, while Bejeweled Blitz is a 60-second version of its predecessor. The objective is to score has high as possible within 60 seconds, earn achievements, and brag about it to your friends.

What makes Blitz stand out is the level of polish the game comes with, like its sound, effects, power-ups, and social features. This is one reason why PopCap has launched a new, Windows-based, PC version of the popular Facebook version, rather than building out the original.

The new PC version of Bejeweled Blitz comes with full screen capabilities and extraordinarily improved sound and visuals. Of course, the epic sounding effects and music that has always gone with Bejeweled still feels a bit of a strange choice for a game about matching up gems, but we’re not complaining.

The game also comes new achievements and badges to earn. But more than that, there is the virtual currency feature already available in the Facebook version, called Blitz Coins. The currency can be earned through game play or purchased, and can be used to buy various power ups, such as scrambling the board, placing detonator gems, and so on. These virtual goods are intended to help players boost their scores. Couple this with other new score-boosting effects – a personal favorite is “Last Hurrah” that uses any special gems you have left on the board at the end of a round – and PopCap has truly perfected the concept of “beat my high score.”

You can play the game without being logged in to Facebook, but if you want to publish high scores and medals for your Facebook friends to see you’ll need to log in first.

Of course, if you read our review of Bejeweled Blitz 12 months ago, or have played that version yourself, then you have played this game. Honestly, the only downside to the PC version is that it costs $20, but considering the popularity of the game, that’s probably not a problem for most people. Even if it is, there is still a free trial. In the end, between these “box” sales, the Blitz Coins virtual currency, and the Facebook version, Bejeweled Blitz could be making good money.

Apple plans to launch a “social gaming network” this summer, along with a number of other major upgrades coming in its 4.0 version of the iPhone operating system. It’s also launching an ad network that is designed for apps and uses features like location to target ads.

The company downplayed these business moves — focusing much of the announcement on product upgrades like multi-tasking that many consumers will be thinking about first. But it is more than ever trying to be a software platform company that relies on the web, not just a hardware and operating system maker. Here’s a closer look.

Game-Related Features Announced Today

Gaming has not been especially social on the iPhone, so far. Today at the launch press event, the company said new “Game Center” features will include some of the standard functionality seen in game console systems, games on social networks and in third-party mobile social platforms including Aurora Feint’s Open Feint, Scoreloop and Ngmoco’s Plus+.

“We wanted to make this even better — we’ve added a social gaming network.” said Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iPhone Software, at the launch event today in Cupertino, Calif. “We do automatic matchmaking, we’ll find others with a similar ability and match them against you. You can see how you’re progressing in a game with achievements.”

It’s not clear how these specific features will work, but the signs indicate that they will. Aurora Feint and Ngmoco have been reporting social game-style growth on their own iPhone apps, and in some third parties who use their mobile social platforms. They’re offering games for free and in many cases monetizing using virtual goods. These games monetize using their iTunes to; in Ngmoco’s hit new game, medieval city builder We Rule, you pay for virtual currency that you use to buy virtual goods.

Having nailed the virtual currency platform revenue model already with iTunes, Apple is also getting in to ads today — another way for developers to monetize. Apple founder Steve Jobs demoed the company’s new iAds system, which basically provides interactive ad formats that developers can build into their games and other apps, that advertisers can run ads in. An important point is that these ads can use all the regular app features, like the accelerometer or location — so ads can be targeted for local businesses, for example. Developers will get a 60% cut. Apple will host the ad content. Jobs’s explanation for this move: “What some [app developers] are starting to do is put mobile ads in their apps… and most of this advertising sucks. We want to help developers make money with ads so they can keep their free apps free.”

Monetizing Mobile Apps

When you add up what Apple announced today, you get the sense that the company wants a piece of the social gaming action that Facebook has been enjoying. The social features will help smaller developers grow more than they have been, potentially, because friends can tell each other and users can find competitive or cooperative players at their own skill level. That in turn means more people to sell virtual goods or show advertising to.

Facebook, and to some degree other social networks, has benefited from providing an ecosystem that allows developers to find users for free, then monetize them primarily through virtual goods. Facebook has made money from this platform because its advertising system allows developers to buy advertising from it that allows them to reach new game players. It is also working on its own virtual currency, Credits, to run inside third party games and get a cut of virtual goods revenue.

Note: To get an in-depth look at the size of the US virtual goods market, and the social gaming market specifically, check out our in-depth market research reports: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010 and Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010.

The first comparison many are making here is to Xbox Live or other console-driven gaming systems. Those include the same sorts of basic features like leaderboards and achievements that Apple is planning to introduce. And so far, games and game distribution on the iPhone has looked quite similar to these systems. But Apple showed a graph of the number of gaming apps (50,000) versus dedicated competing devices like Nintendo’s DS (4,321) and Sony’s PSP (2,477), with a very clear point: Its platform is significant for lots of third parties, and the others aren’t. Console systems tend to be dominated by a few big players who can afford to build the most complex, highest quality games and market them to typically serious gamers who buy the devices.

So far, Apple’s system has had many of the characteristics of a console system, as distribution has been through Apple’s App Store — just a few leaderboards, and favorited items from iTunes employees. Apps have grown because they’re high-quality, cheap, easily accessible, and people do hear about them through word of mouth. But Game Center could make the iPhone operating system a better place for social games that grow by friends and like-minded people to share games. That in turn will help the free-to-play model work even better, and make its developer ecosystem even more attractive. As Jobs said today: “Well, we’ve got a lot of free apps — we like that, users like that, but these developers have to find a way to make some money, and we’d like to help them.”

Apple Has Bigger Plans

Parsing Jobs’ comments, you can find all sorts of clues about the company’s developer and web focus.

When talking about how mobile apps work, he seemed to be targeting Google: “On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop. [Users are] spending all their time on these apps — they’re using apps to get to data on the internet, not generalized search.”

When answering an audience question about make apps easier to discover on the App Store, he seemed to hint at significant upgrades, that could include features for games beyond the Game Center: “A few things: number one, the App Store is not part of OS 4 or any release, it’s a service and it’s programmed on the server side, and we can enhance it without waiting for a major release. … We’re constantly interested in improving that, and do so fairly frequently. In terms of discoverability, we’ve added things like Genius recommendations, but I also see an infrastructure evolve to help users find apps.

When asked if iAds shows Apple wants to be an ad agency, Jobs said both no and yes: “We do not have plans to be a worldwide ad agency. We don’t know a lot about advertising, but we’re learning. We tried to buy AdMob, but Google snatched them up because they didn’t want us to have them, so we bought another smaller company, Quattro. But we’re babes in the woods.”

Apple has a long way to go before it’s a full-blown web service like Google or Facebook, but its deeper and deeper moves into areas like developer platforms and advertising suggest it could be planning more offenses against web companies in the future. Developers can get early access to the new version of the OS, here.

Images and quotes from the presentation via Gdgt and MobileCrunch.

April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is now only a few days away – and almost sold out, so we encourage you to register now to reserve your spot. 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
  

Finally, the last set of “general admission” tickets is now available through Friday at a price of $429. This price will change after Friday, and space is very limited and nearly sold out, so we encourage you to register now.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

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.

Register Now

The last set of “general admission” tickets is available through Friday at a price of $429. This price will change after Friday, and space is almost sold out, so we encourage you to register as soon as possible.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

When I first started InsideFacebook.com in 2006, Facebook was already a staple of college life and a sign of the future of the social web. Since then, it has grown to become a very widely adopted communications and identity service, a powerful advertising and entertainment platform, and a household name as one of the world’s largest websites. But even today, Facebook’s full potential still lies ahead in the years to come as the social graph becomes more embedded in media, applications, and devices all around us.

These days, Facebook’s business has become a big deal for brands marketing to the millions of users logging in on a daily basis, for entrepreneurs building businesses on its platform, and for analysts and investors interested in charting Facebook’s growing revenues. Facebook is no longer simply a social networking website – it has become a broad online ecosystem, supporting thousands of related businesses and on track to doing over $1 billion in revenues this year.

It’s this extraordinary growth and potential, and also the underlying complexities and unknowns, that have attracted the attention of so many. With InsideFacebook.com, AppData.com, and reports like the upcoming Facebook Quarterly Business Review (we’ll have more info soon), we at Inside Network have sought to deeply analyze and understand Facebook’s potential as a social utility, a platform for developers and advertisers to do business, and a growing business itself. But, readers have consistently requested more business-focused analysis and in-depth coverage of key ecosystem issues.

All these reasons make us very excited to announce Inside Facebook Gold, an exclusive new analysis and data membership service specifically dedicated to tracking Facebook’s business and growth around the world – and the impact of Facebook’s product and policy decisions on the thousands of businesses worldwide that are investing in it.

Inside Facebook Gold is directed at entrepreneurs, agencies, analysts, and investors who want to stay ahead of Facebook’s rapid worldwide growth, make more informed business decisions based on Facebook product and policy developments, and understand the full scope of opportunities the Facebook ecosystem presents.

Inside Facebook Gold includes weekly in-depth analysis that is not available on InsideFacebook.com, comprehensive quarterly business reviews detailing every aspect of Facebook’s business, and regular global trend and data insights to help you track change and opportunity around the world. We’ll be posting updates here as new reports are released to Inside Facebook Gold members.

>> Learn more about Inside Facebook Gold here.

Back in 2006, when we started InsideFacebook.com, no one could have expected Facebook to become what it has today.  With Inside Facebook Gold, we’re looking forward to bringing you data and analysis that will equip you to make critical decisions as the Facebook ecosystem continues to rapidly develop and grow in the years ahead.