Last Friday, we ran the first segment of an interview series with leading international social game publishers. We started in Asia, talking first to the Hong Kong publisher 6waves.

This week we’ve moved slightly further east, into Japan. That’s where RockYou, a leading social game publisher in the United States, is working to secure a new foothold for itself. And it’s not alone.

Zynga, for instance, recently took a $147 million investment from Japan’s SoftBank, and appears to be planning to publish its titles with Yahoo’s local subsidiary. CrowdStar, also a leading light in social gaming, has its own plans to break into Japan.

RockYou went into Japan earlier than other companies, so we talked to co-founder and chief technical officer Jia Shen to find out what they’ve learned.

Inside Social Games: What is RockYou’s high-level take on localization?

Jia Shen: RockYou does games and applications in the US, but we’re doing the same stuff in Asia as well. It’s not that different from the console world; you’ve got to figure out language and content first, then in the broader scope figure out the game types and display formats. One thing you have to focus more on in the Japan market is mobile, since the social networks here are primarily on phones. Technically there are three large social networks in Japan — one is only mobile, another is 70% mobile and web. It’s a broader problem than just content.

ISG: How do you handle translation? Is it an internal team or do you contract out?

Shen: With the localized translation stuff we do both. We work with outsourced teams who do the localization, then take two or three passes. The external team does the first and maybe even second pass, then internally you definitely do the final pass with people more associated with the content. Words may not translate over properly unless you know the context for things like actions, and what the user interface looks like.

ISG: Japanese is known as a hard language for English speakers. Does that carry over to translating game content?

Shen: Definitely. There are also formatting problems. Ultimately you’re doing creatives in both languages. Content is kind of a blurry word, but whether you’re doing the local for a game or a banner [advertisement], all that stuff is a lot different. You can translate it, but you want to also touch on nuances that incentivize people, so you have to do more culturally oriented changes.

ISG: Is it too difficult for most Western companies to break into Japan?

It’s definitely a hard market. If you look back at the ecosystem of game companies that have been successful here, they’re not from the West — the barriers are not just about language. Games can be thought of as a cultural consumption, and there are differences in not just interaction, but how you perceive colors and other things. China and Japan are very different from the US. [For example,] the US doesn’t like game connotations that are negative, but here it’s OK to do that to friends. And the platforms here are far more closed.

ISG: What makes Asian platforms more closed?

Shen: With Facebook there’s a lot of transparency in terms of statistics, who’s doing well. You get less transparency here. You don’t know the daily active user counts for any other applications. You just know they’re doing OK, but you don’t know how the number one app is related to the tenth like we would in the US market. It’s a lot harder to do competitive analysis and see how the landscape is changing.

ISG: How do you deal with not being able to see the numbers for competing games anymore?

Shen: You have to sniff around. In the US I can just hop on AppData. Here I have to look for different bellwethers. In any industry, competitive analysis is an important thing. In the US it’s a luxury we have. Transparency breeds competition, and that has been very good for the US. Japan wants to be a little more closed. Asia, in general, doesn’t understand open as much. Open source doesn’t exist here, they don’t see the benefits like the US does.

ISG: What about the social gamers in Japan? Are they radically different as well?

Shen: It’s no different from when FarmVille took off in the US — you have hardcore gamers and then all these people who didn’t care about games before. They’re playing because the games are fun in different ways than the hardcore games. But here there are also a lot more hardcore gamers who are actually participating [in social games]. In the US, hardcore gamers can’t drive a social application to be successful by themselves.

ISG: What are the differences in payment systems?

Shen: All of the platforms come with virtual currency built in and payments. The funny part is that Facebook is running after these guys, rather than the other way around, when it comes to payments.

RockYou US has gotten more margins from tuning our payments, whereas here there’s less control over it because the social networks have established all that. The cool part is, virtual currency is new in the US but not here, and that’s why Japan’s ARPU is higher. People are used to paying for stuff that’s virtual or in a game. The payment models that are evolving in the US are also pretty prevalent — payment cards, mobile payments.

ISG: You mentioned that mobile is big. Is the web developing more in Japan or will mobile remain the focus?

Shen: There’s a lot of evolution there. One of the big announcements recently was that DNAMobile is launching a big PC platform. It’s not that people don’t use PCs, it’s just a different demographic, an older one. There’s plenty of room to actually grow, but people haven’t been focusing on it previously.

This interview is part of an ongoing series on localization. Past coverage includes:
6waves: Localizing for Asia

Farming games may have saturated the Facebook platform, but the iPhone has seen considerably fewer. Obviously, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, as Farm Story is just one of several examples. Developed by TeamLava, this older title has been recently updated with a few new social mechanics, which appears to have been enough to briefly push it above FarmVille on iPhone.

Farm Story itself is nothing terribly new to those that saw the farming foray that took place on Facebook last year. In fact it does little, in terms of its core, to really differentiate itself from a game like Farm Town, except for being on the iPhone instead of Facebook. But that isn’t to say that there aren’t a few different features. On the contrary, Farm Story actually does a better job in the social department than most farming titles.

As with any farming game, the player’s objective is to grow the biggest and best-looking farm they can. Right from the start, players are granted a sizable amount of land in which to decorate and till. Moreover, the controls are all quite easy and simplistic, as everything is controlled through context-sensitive tapping. Tap an empty piece of land, and a second tap will plow it. Tap a crop, and a second tap will harvest it. Of course, users can always select these specific tools from the game’s menus manually as well.

Like any other farming game, players plant crops that grow at varying rates, ranging from five minutes to a day or more, with the slower growing products generally being worth more. Should they forget to return for them, the plants wither and die, and must be replanted unless the user decides to utilize the virtual currency, Gems, to revive them.

This marks the primary means of monetization for TeamLava as users can purchase Gems directly from the application in quantities of 24, 105, and 275 for $4.99, $19.99, and $49.99 respectively. These can then be used to not only revive withered plants (which costs a large amount of Gems, depending on how many are dead), but also special plants, fertilizer to make things grow quicker, in-game coins, and decorative items.

Regarding décor, it’s about the same as any other Facebook farming title and is merely there for aesthetic value. However, there are some functional items beyond crops that can look nice, like animals and trees. Like others of their ilk, these are harvestable after a set amount of time, and thankfully, never wither. It is worth noting, however, that some of the items that do cost Gems are surprisingly expensive. A corgi or dachshund, for example, cost 55 Gems, making their cost about $10.

It isn’t uncommon for a virtual item to cost this much — Blizzard’s Pandaren Monk virtual pet for World of Warcraft cost $10 and sold hundreds of thousands — but such virtual items do a lot more than just stand there. In the Blizzard example, the pet that was purchased was forever bound to the user’s account, allowing them to have it on any character or server, past, present, or future, and actually looked fantastic and full of style. It even did kung fu; it goes without saying that your Farm Story corgi will not.

Moving into social features, Farm Story begins to outshine its competitors. Unlike virtually every farming game on Facebook, Farm Story does not force players to only interact with friends that the player adds as neighbors. Should the user wish, they can actually visit and water a limited number of crops at random users’ farms as well. Doing so will earn points toward a Star Rating and an extra reward.

As for the Star Rating element, the more the user visits other people — there appears to be no limit to how many they can — and the more crops they water, the higher ranked their profile will become, eventually leading it to the top of the social charts and making it more visible for other random users to see.

In addition to this, players can also post comments and see a feed of happenings and going-ons on both in their own and other users’ virtual farms. Adding to the social elements, the recent update also allows players to take pictures of their virtual spaces and share them on Facebook.

This makes for a rather interesting business choice, as this functionality appears to be granted through another downloadable app from TeamLava, Farm Story Snap. Additionally, those that search the App Store may also notice Farm Story Summer and Farm Story Flowers as well. Each download connects to the main game (like an expansion pack), granting the user free Gems along with exclusive items such as tulips or a summer home. As to why TeamLava took this approach, rather than just update Farm Story itself, it’s unclear, but it may have been a means to make the title more noticeable in the highly saturated App Store. Unusual, yes, but since the game has breached Apple’s top free apps list before in the past, it appears to be working.

Overall, Farm Story is a pretty standard farming game. It doesn’t bring much fresh to the table as far as the farming concept goes, and a number of its virtual goods are a bit overpriced. However, on the social side, it does a significantly better job than most iPhone titles, allowing players to interact and help strangers as much as friends. Granted, it may not be as interesting as farming with wizards or zombies, but for what it is, Farm Story is still pretty solid.

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. It was previously posted on Inside Facebook.]

Last month we shared data for selected Facebook apps that showed diverse audiences across some of the top social gaming titles on the social network. Today we’re following up with stats on another popular set of games that have one key difference: they’re much newer than those we examined in June.

We chose four: FrontierVille and Treasure Isle, both by Zynga; Social City by Playdom; and Hotel City by Playfish. All date back no earlier than March. Looking at newer games allows us to gain some insight into how the audience has changed in the hectic first half of this year.

The first and most obvious insight we came across is that these apps, among the most popular of 2010, have a higher percentage of women than our last sample, which found about a 60/40 split between women and men:

As you can see, the gender distribution has swung even more strongly toward women. In part, this is because there have been few male-friendly hits released this year, like Zynga’s classic Texas HoldEm Poker.

Here’s how the breakdowns look for all four apps:

Women have long been the dominant force in the casual gaming industry, helping to produce estrogen-friendly hits like Diner Dash. While it’s also common knowledge that women play games in greater numbers on Facebook as well, the divide appears to be becoming starker than it was last year.

Of course, the force in casual gaming isn’t just women; it’s middle-aged women. Our next chart shows the age distribution for each of the four games:

Here, we have an interesting split. While the Zynga and Playfish games are almost identical in their age splits (Treasure Isle was exempted for clarity, but is very similar to FrontierVille), Hotel City stands out from the pack with a much younger audience.

Without the presence of Hotel City, it might seem that Facebook gaming is destined for the same almost exclusively female and older audience that casual games target. However, it’s entirely possible that developers are simply playing to the largest audience, while underserving the men and younger players.

For marketers, these results are also notable, for their suggestion that young people and kids who are gaming are moving (or being pushed) into more niche titles — even Hotel City, with its huge base of 8.3 million monthly active users, is smaller than the other games shown above.

The full demographic breakdown by app, as well as extensive audience demographic data for Facebook’s markets around the world, is only available to members of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service. To learn more or join, please see gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook

This week, we launched the Inside Network Job Board – dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

We’re offering a special launch discount code for new listings placed this week. Just use the discount code “INSJOB30” by this Friday, July 23rd, to receive a 30% discount on all jobs you post.

Here are this week’s new listings from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at, Electronic Arts / EA2D, Storm8, iWin, ZipZapPlay, Lionside, Lolapps, and Context Optional:

• Flash Rockstar – EA2D (Redwood City, CA)
• Platform Engineer – EA2D (Redwood City, CA)
• Lead Engineer – Server – EA2D (Redwood City, CA)
• Software Engineer – Client Side, EA2D (Redwood City, CA)
• Research Analyst – Contractor (Redwood City, CA)
  
• Game Data Analyst – Contractor (San Francisco, CA)
• Market Analyst – Contractor (San Francisco, CA)
  

• Social Game Designer (Redwood City, CA)
  
• Senior Game Production Artist (Redwood City, CA)

• Game Designer, Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Product Manager, Social Games (San Francisco, CA)

• Social Games Backend & Performance Architect (San Francisco, CA)
• Social Games Software Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

• Social Game Software Engineer – Java (San Francisco, CA)

• Performance Architect (San Francisco, CA)
• Flash Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

• Facebook Application Developer (San Francisco, CA)
• Sales Manager, Strategic Accounts (San Francisco, CA)

When you place job listings on the Inside Network Job Board, they’ll be distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts highlighting new job listings, as well as through widgets you see here on the sites. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

[Editor's note: This interview with CrowdStar chairman Peter Relan is a companion piece to another published immediately before it, The Case Against Facebook Credits.]

Among the many developers that have now tested out or exclusively adopted Facebook Credits, none has been a more vocal proponent than CrowdStar. The social gaming company first incorporated Credits into its game Happy Island last December, and has since championed the virtual currency’s ability to bring in more paying users.

We asked Peter Relan, CrowdStar’s chairman and founder, to give us his case for Credits; the results are below. Once again, if you want to take a look at our own lengthy examination of Credits, which contain many of the points in both interviews, see our recent coverage on Inside Facebook.

Inside Social Games: Give us a broad overview of your thoughts on Credits.

Peter Relan: The big picture is that Facebook Credits is all about increasing the size of the pie that we developers can participate in. That’s the single big concept that I think people aren’t getting. They’re assuming a single size of pie and fighting for every bit of margin.

Honestly, growing the market is the thing that Facebook’s trying to do. In the process they’re taking heat, but if I were in charge I’d do the same thing. They have to make sure the ecosystem has room to grow. They’re trying to increase the size by providing a single liquid currency across the userbase, and once it’s there we’ll all stop arguing. If you went to Amazon and every category had its own currency, you’d pay less — a single currency just removes friction. Why do you think, on the iPhone, they make billions? It’s because of a single system.

Let’s say that I’m in FarmVille and I buy Farm Cash. Later I have 200 of that currency left over, which I can’t use when I come to Happy Aquarium. I paid good money for it, I just can’t use it. How would you like that in Amazon? That issue is called liquidity. We have no cross-game liquidity now. That means that I’ll spend less liberally, and try to manage my spend to my anticipated purchase.

ISG: Couldn’t another company offer a cross-game currency?

PR: Why doesn’t Apple have some random company offering payment points? Generally you need a trustworthy source — it has to be a big brand, and very rarely can that brand be someone other than the platform. It’s like saying hey, in the United States, why doesn’t someone offer a point system? You want a government-backed dollar. Usually, the platform is the only stable scaled player who can provide any assurance — currencies are about consumer confidence. There are runs on banks when people lose their confidence. So Facebook has to be the bad guy.

ISG: An undertone to the debate about Credits is that it’s not fair for Facebook to push out other payment providers and promote Credits. Is that a valid argument?

PR: I think on Facebook.com there’s no question — it’s like asking whether on the iPhone Apple’s 30 percent is worth it. That 30 percent is the gold standard, for Microsoft as well.

Then there’s the question of what the market will bear off the platform when Connect is driving it. There are two arguments. One is that at the end of the day, Connect represents the tentacles of the core, meaning that it’s still one organism and 30 percent is still right.

Another is that since it’s the tentacle and not the core, the social graph is worth less. I think the market will determine that. We’re not off the platform, so it’s very difficult to say.

ISG: OK, that’s the overview. What are your secondary points?

PR: There’s a host of other things. With Credits the user’s payment experience becomes universal — you get a universal Facebook Credits user interface. For dollars, the dollar bill is the user interface. Here, there are three screens that everyone will get used to. On the iPhone, when I see something asking me to purchase from iTunes, I just say yes. That payment process is so fluid, I don’t think about it.

Fraud management and chargebacks are a key thing for consumers. If you have a payment option, you’ve got one source to deal with, Facebook, instead of seven different games and payment options.

By the way, Facebook for developers is also promoting Credits, and that’s a short-term benefit that everyone can take advantage of. If you’re playing a game in which Credits are the preferred choice, they’re willing to say, here are 5 Credits for free. This is huge in removing friction.

ISG: So you think now is the right time for developers to go ahead and implement Credits?

PR: I think the bigger developers should do it right away, and the smaller ones might want to wait — but the smaller players are also the ones who will get the promotion benefits, and they need those. The bigger players can wait this out, but it’s the small guys who need the distribution, the promotion, the help. They should definitely go for it. The big ones should go for a different reason, the size of the pie. It’s hard for a small player to say, ‘yeah, there will be a bigger pie,’  and take the hit. But my view is that they need the promotion.

ISG: If Credits really can expand the market, then by how much?

PR: We know that a user who’s paid with Credits before is an order of magnitude more likely to follow through with a purchase than one who’s never used Credits before.

I would venture to say that the pie could be three or four times larger. Today one to two percent of people in social games are actually paying users. The stat could be 5-10 percent in my opinion. When you have a 5-10x improvement, I’m not worried about the 20 percent extra I give to Credits. It’s a 20 percent delta versus 500 to a thousand percent increase. That gives you a feel for it, quantitatively.

ISG: How quickly could that 5-10x growth come about? When does it start?

PR: I’d say starting now. In 2011, maybe even Q4 of this year, you’ll start to see liquidity, and by 2012 a much larger pie.

ISG: You’ve made a few comparisons to Apple, which has a system of set price points. Could Facebook have done that to avoid the complexities of a currency?

PR: Apple’s iTunes system is a very high-level microtransaction system, but not a very granular one. Apple’s pricing came from the music industry, with 99 cents per song. Then when they came out with the App Store, they just stuck with that, going to 1.99, 2.99, etc. You can’t buy something for 5.49. Apple’s system is not like a virtual currency system, in which you can translate the money to other systems.

Apple is saying, I’m not a virtual currency, so game developers say fine, I’ll provide my virtual currency atop your currency price points, which goes to the same problem of cross-game liquidity. So I think in the long term, Apple will have to deal with this. As long as there was no virtual currency, things were working great. And there aren’t that many virtual currency games on the iPhone. But over time, if there were a billion-dollar virtual currency system, they’d have to have all the same discussions we’re having.

[Ed. note: To move on to the case against Facebook credits, click here.]

[Editor's note: This interview with Jambool CEO Vikas Gupta is a companion piece to another published immediately after it, The Case For Facebook Credits.]

Since Facebook first launched Credits, its own in-game virtual currency, for externally developed applications in May of 2009, app developers have been worried about the potential the hefty 30 percent fee Facebook charges for the currency and the potential that it might enforce their use for all apps.

But another group had been watching, and worrying about, Credits for much longer: payment and monetization companies. If Credits are made mandatory across Facebook, a whole swathe of payment companies started on the platform will be at risk.

One of those companies is Jambool, which was founded by two former Amazon.com payment executives. Despite the threat from Credits, Jambool is still hard at work with its Social Gold payment platform on Facebook and elsewhere; this morning, in fact, it’s releasing a significant update to its inventory management, Flash payment, analytics and other features.

However, CEO and co-founder Vikas Gupta has also made no secret of his opposition to Credits. Below, we interview Gupta to get an in-depth look at his arguments against the currency.

Note that some of the arguments below assume specific policies and actions from Facebook that the company has not yet made clear; we covered many of these uncertainties in our own June article.

Inside Social Games: You’ve said that you’re not completely against Credits.

Vikas Gupta: I think there are definitely some advantages to Credits, that we believe in and have always believed in. For example, I believe Credits as a store value system makes sense for certain kinds of purchases. Credits also does well at eliminating the need for a developer to have multiple different currencies around the world.

The third thing they have as an advantage is that more consumers would have trust and loyalty to Facebook with Credits. How much of an additional benefit that will have is the question, but it’s definitely an intangible benefit that we see Credits could bring. And from the user’s point of view there’s an advantage in being able to use their Credits across multiple applications.

ISG: OK, now let’s talk about the downsides. What’s the big picture?

VG: There are definitely cons to Facebook Credits as a universal currency. The first one is the way many of these games work — they’re mini-economies of their own. If you look at games like FarmVille, the currency is an integral part of the game.

Facebook has been saying that Credits will work like the Euro, which works across the European economies, but we believe that’s very wrong. Credits is a stored value system — the only people who participate are those who purchase credits.

Right now there are only 1-2 percent who will spend money to buy goods in a game. That’s a big distinction between this and a true economy. In a true economy it should be in the hands of 50-60 percent of the people. Facebook hasn’t seeded credits through its own platform — it is relying on the applications to help spread their adoption.

They have experimented with Credits on their site but we haven’t seen any of those experiments succeed — for example, they’ve even shut down the gift store. Developers are helping Facebook build the Credits, and it is evolving into a pre-paid stored value system, that as we discussed sits in the hands of a small percentage of the user base.

Facebook Credits doesn’t really work like the Euro — the applications do not contribute to the currency. As an example, problems in Greece’s economy resulted in the entire Euro being affected. However, any one application on the Facebook platform cannot disrupt Credits or any other application. Instead of a universal currency, it works as a stored value system — where users can buy credits from Facebook and spend it in applications.

ISG: What’s the difference between a real currency and what Facebook is doing, then?

VG: One example of a real currency is a [Second Life] Linden Dollar. It has many aspects in which it works like a real currency, there’s a lot more transparency into where people get it and what people can do with it. The Linden Dollar did not need an external ecosystem to build it — it evolved amongst its users and content. The way Credits work is more like prepaid cards. So how many people would buy prepaid cards anywhere?

Pre-paid systems have traditionally had limited success. They’ve had lower conversion and lower adoption because people have to commit to buying more up front, even though they don’t know how much they’ll spend or in what amounts. That leads to breakage. An example is Amazon gift certificates — you could  buy them but there’s always a large amount of remnant value on the card that isn’t used. In an economy like this platform, that will lead to developers never seeing the value even though they created it.

ISG: Let’s move on to other potential problems with Credits.

VG: The second thing that has come up a lot is the fee. There’s a 30 percent fee, and this is the first time ever on the web that someone has taken such a high a fee for payments. People have taken that fee on closed platforms, but on the web it’s the first time. And when you add in things like breakage, it’s more like 50 percent.

And fraud is a very serious issue with Facebook. It’s not that fraud gets built into the 30 percent, and Facebook won’t issue money back to developers. The assumption is that Facebook is giving the Credits earnings to the game even if they’re generated from fraud. What we’re hearing is that’s not what’s happening. If the money came from fraud it never makes it to the game developer.

ISG: Let’s talk about some of these points in more depth, starting with the last. Isn’t fraud already a problem for developers?

VG: When I am building my game and people are buying my currency, I see the complete process end to end. When I see fraud, it affects me and I can manage and control that. But when people are coming through an intermediate step, it’s very difficult to figure out who perpetrated the fraud and how it affects any game using Credits.

ISG: So transparency is a problem in fraud. Is it also a problem elsewhere?

VG: When a user is playing my game, the user comes in and spends maybe $10. I know the fact that they spent $10, and that’s how much currency I’m giving away. When it comes to using a third party system, I don’t know what they spent overall, there’s just what they spent in my game. I don’t know how much the user could have spent in the game.

When the user spends $10 today I can actually change the game experience to get the gamer to spend all that currency in the game. I can’t do that as effectively when only Facebook knows how much they spent. That’s a bigger issue when, at the end of the month, you get paid and you don’t know anything about the users. It’s more effective when developers can see the end-to-end flow of money.

ISG: You brought up breakage. What are the issues around that?

VG: Right now, when a user knows they have money that can be spent across games, they’ll become very cautious about where they spend the money. There was a promotion in Hello City, in which they gave away 5 Credits. I got them, and never spent them — they’re in my account today. That’s because I know that I can spend it anywhere.

The thing with virtual currency is that it should feel very cheap. Now you have this system of currency that you can spend in other places, so users are perceiving value in it, and they don’t want to spend it as easily in a particular game. Users will be very cautious about where they actually spend the money, because they have the option to spend it on other games, not just the game they’re playing right now.

A less obvious problem is that on Facebook there have been a lot of similar games being built, farming games and so forth. In any genre there are multiple titles. For users there have been high switching costs, because a user who couldn’t switch their currency couldn’t move. Now you can have a game that convinced the user to spend money on virtual currency, but the user can take it elsewhere. The switching costs with currency, especially, have gone down. Can games keep users engaged, or can other developers take the users away along with the money they got them to spend?

ISG: Is Facebook justified in charging 30 percent?

VG: There has never been a precedent where someone took 30 percent on the web purely for payments. If it was done in a way that developers saw value, or if it was really cheap and easy, it would be understandable. But I think that we all know at this point that Facebook is not that straightforward for distribution — we all have to spend money on distribution. So you’re not just paying 30 percent for payments, you have to spend on top of that for advertising. If all I was doing was spending for distribution, it would be a lot easier, you’d have that extra 25 percent margin.

A big difference between Facebook and Apple or Microsoft is that there’s no other distribution channel other than Facebook itself. On the Xbox, if I’m building a game, I’m selling directly to users in the retail channel, and the distribution channel is up to me; the viral channels are not dependent on Microsoft. But here’s a platform that I’m dependent on for distribution as well as monetization — that’s a problem.

I believe we’ll start seeing that there will be a lack of motivation for people to build on Facebook. That’s a big thing we’ve seen in the last few months, that every developer is much more excited about building for off-Facebook distribution.

[Ed. note: To move on to the case for Facebook credits, click here.]

Last year, Mixpanel released its tools and found its first clients for its Facebook app analytics tool. Today the company is expanding onto another platform: the iPhone.

There are already a few iPhone analytics tools out there. Flurry is well known, as well as Distimo, and there are others like Motally and Medialets. Jeremy Richardson, the head of business development for Mixpanel, likens these other services to Google Analytics — mostly free and aimed at relatively simple use-cases.

What’s needed, according to Mixpanel, is a heavy-duty analytics program that tracks every move users make within an app, allowing the same exacting optimization that game developers employ on Facebook.

There have been bumpy spots in the past for iPhone analytics programs. Steve Jobs has spoken out against advertising-oriented analytics firms like Flurry, and in April, Apple changed the rules for analytics companies, apparently giving itself an option to kick out analytics services. Mixpanel will probably get a pass for being aimed at helping to improve apps.

“Analytics are crucial for social gaming. Our customers literally tweak their product every hour of every day,” says Richardson. “Right now social gaming people are always iterating and looking at analytics. IPhone developers may not be doing that, but once they have the tools to do it they’ll probably develop that mindset as well.”

Mixpanel’s iPhone library works much like its Facebook javascript library does; developers simply tag sections of their code with trackers that report back specific data on usage. After that, the app only needs an internet connection.

For now, Mixpanel’s iPhone analytics will use the same pricing plans as its Facebook services. Below is a video showing more:

It’s been a slightly busier week for the human resources departments at social gaming companies, judging by data from LinkedIn. Six companies have been picking up new team member, Zynga in particular. That said, as with last week, there wasn’t much in the way of major leadership changes.

Here’s the list:

CrowdStar

• Jason Weiser – Joining from Yola.com, – where he was Director of Customer Acquisition – Jason is now Sr. Manager of Customer Acquisition at CrowdStar.

Mindjolt

• Satori Canton – He joins Mindjolt this week as its newest Senior Software Developer. Prior to this, Satori was an ActionScript Consultant for Virtual Worlds at Zynga.

Playdom

• Mike Cook – Part of the Metaplace acquisition, Mike Cook takes his System Architect experience over to Playdom with the same title.
• Christopher Chapman – Also formerly of Metaplace, where he was Director of Web Development, Christopher becomes part of Playdom as a Senior Web Developer.

RockYou!

• Pauline Reader – Formerly a Senior Manager Dealer of Business at eBay, Pauline takes her skills over to RockYou! as their new Senior Director of International Business.
• Max Mao – Max joins RockYou! as a new Graphic Designer and HTML/CSS Programmer. Prior to this he was a Web Graphic Designer at Zipzoomfly.

Slide

• Jason Rubenstein – Slide gets a new Senior Software Engineer this week in the form of Jason Rubenstein. Formerly, he worked as a Software Engineer at Apture.

Zynga

• Driss Benamour – A former MBA Intern at Eventbrite, Driss is now a Product Manager for Zynga.
• Jason Schklar – Jason joins Zynga as a new Senior User Researcher. Prior to this, he was a User Experience Specialist for Social and Community Features at Amazon.com.
• Rick Johanson – Formerly involved with Events and Fan Relations at Lucasfilm, Rick now tailors his skill set to Artistic Recruiting and Development Programs at Zynga.
• Parikshit Agnihotry – He joins Zynga as one of its newest Software Engineers. Before this, he was an MS Computer Science student at the University of Southern California.
• Eric McGinnis – Zynga acquires some new Desktop Support in the form of Eric McGinnis, who comes from Tierra Technology, where he was an Administrator.
• Anshul Dhawan – Leaving his role as a Software Engineer Intern at ngmoco, Anshul joins Zynga as a full Software Engineer.
• Ilanit Manor – Previously a Messaging Administrator for Kaiser Permanente, Ilanit is now a Super Moderator for Zynga.

More big changes are coming to Facebook’s communication channels this year, as Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor told us in an interview recently. They’re worth a closer look, as they’re likely to impact all developers, and especially social game developers.

The first is an automated spam filter for all Facebook communication channels. Granted, the spam problem has lessened as Facebook has removed some entirely, like notifications, or scaled back others, like news feed stories and requests. Here’s the relevant excerpt, from Taylor:

So rather than saying you’re not allowed to do X, Y, and Z with a dialog box in your game, if you’re sending useless messages from your game, we just won’t deliver them, and we’ll give you that feedback. And then you can change the way you send messages to send higher signal-to-noise content. This is something that we just haven’t invested enough in, but we now have a very large team working on spam and quality. That will touch all of our communication channels, and news feed. This is going to be a year-long project though, because we’re not going to remove the policies until we know that the system that replaces it is high quality.

Expect Facebook to start sharing more about its plans here in the coming months. If it wasn’t obvious already, given Facebook’s changes to date, developers should think about how to provide useful communication in their apps.

But it’s not just more automated punishment ahead. Taylor also said that the company is giving social gaming a new focus, describing games as a “killer app” on the platform. From the interview:

The other initiative is we have a team exclusively focused on games now. Internally, we’ve always known this, but now we’re formally recognizing it, that just like photos, just like events, games are a killer app on Facebook, and a primary part of the user experience on Facebook. We have product managers and engineers who are extremely talented now working on it.

Right now we have a Games dashboard that I would say is pretty uninspired. It works, but it’s not something that I think is revolutionary. We have a team now who is responsible for making games successful on Facebook as a category, and when we make changes to our overall product, we’re going to track the effects on that category just like we track the effects on photos and events on Facebook.

In other words, when Facebook makes larger changes — say, updates to the home page this fall — it will closely examine how that impacts social game developers. The company has no doubt done this in the past. Taylor’s point is more that it will now be very careful about how other changes might accidentally harm games. His conclusion on these changes:

Over the next 3-6 months those effects will be noticeable, I think they’ll have the effect that we won’t inadvertently affect the ecosystem by our own product changes. Then, we can slowly make our policies higher level and more “spirit of the law” instead of letter of the law because we’ll have these automated systems to enforce them in a more natural way.

Let’s face it, the corporate world isn’t exactly known for its entertainment value. But as satire, it’s brilliant — the routine nature and drab existence of the every day workplace provides the perfect canvas for a bit of humor. Thus we come to the brand new iPhone game Office Heroes, from Astroape Studios.

This particular game is all about moving up the corporate ladder. Well, sort of. Set in a tiny office, players perform the menial, everyday tasks of the cliché office worker as they, bit by bit, earn rapport and upgrade a brick of an office into an executive suite. Connected to Facebook, Office Heroes is a simple virtual space game with standard social elements, but its attractive visual style means that its lack of uniqueness in some areas can beeasily overlooked.

If Office Heroes were comparable to anything, it would be most similar to the Facebook farming genre. The difference, however, is that instead of crops, players do jobs, and instead of a farm, they have, well, an office.

Starting off with two functional pieces of furniture — a 1990s-looking computer and a corded phone — players begin performing their day-to-day tasks. This is where the somewhat dry and satirical office-based humor comes into play. For the most part, the work isn’t what one would consider “real work,” but users can actually take on jobs such as “Tweet,” “Chat,” or “Make a Personal Call.” Nothing that an employer would actually pay for, but all things employees tend to do nonetheless.

Each job will take a set amount of time that ranges from 30 seconds to several hours, and can earn one of two things. The first of the two is the in-game currency, “Career Points.”This is your primary pool of income used to purchase the various decorative objects needed to sate one’s aesthetic tastes.

The second is something called “Reputation,” which only seems to increase the amount of Career Points the player passively earns while logged off the game. Reputation can be increased, beyond just doing jobs that reward it, by visiting friends’ offices and helping them out. Conversely, it is lost if a player does not return to “complete” a job once it is finished (like letting crops wither).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like Astroape tailored this mechanic to its full potential. What Office Heroes does with Reputation is not bad thing, but it feels like it could hold a bit more style. This lack is further reflected in “helping” friends, which consists of the typical “help them” prompt upon visitation (though there is a nice feature of posting to their Facebook account from their office). The concept of having it earn more money is also fairly reminiscent of FrontierVille’s rep system, which, like it or not, is a much more interesting method of incorporating the same basic function.

Regardless, as players level up, they earn a number of interesting elements beyond just decorum. Some of the items unlocked are functional and offer more jobs (e.g. a filing cabinet). However, based on level, only so many can be owned at any given time. Additionally, as one increases their level — and, in turn, their office title (Slacker, Office Ninja, etc.) — higher rated functional items become available. This rating, indicated by a number of stars, will allow for much better paying jobs to be available once the object is purchased. It is also worth noting that the number of functional items allowed in an office is also gated by level.

Ironically, “Office Ninja” is a good example of office titles as it also has a very literal connotation. Office Heroes actually has an in-game virtual store that sells virtual goods that cost a virtual currency called “Paperclips.” This includes a myriad of themed item sets for both one’s office and avatar. Of the latter, two very cool sets include an Office Pirate and Office Ninja outfit that can truly exemplify one’s personal style.

As mentioned above, Office Heroes’ visual style is quite good, so the decoration element stands out. That said, it is a bit obnoxious to actually decorate, requiring the user to tap and hold an object to move it. It wouldn’t be that bad, except that the input seems a bit unresponsive, and when either moving a placed object or purchasing a new one (done by dragging it from the store to the office), we constantly ended up just moving the camera around. More often than not, it took three or more tries to get things where they were wanted them

All in in all, Office Heroes is still a pretty decent game for the iPhone. It has a nice visual and satirical style to it, and does work well for a virtual space sort of game. The downside for experienced gamers is that the play and social mechanics are a bit unoriginal, while the Reputation system feels unfinished. Nevertheless, the game has a strong base, and plenty of room to grow.