The first app spawned from the launch of Facebook Places is out today: InCrowd, a location-based iPhone game by MyTown creator Booyah.

InCrowd was created by Booyah in under a month, but that doesn’t mean the new game isn’t interesting. Using art from its Facebook game, Nightclub City, Booyah gives players customizable avatars that they can use to virtually interact with each other in their real-life location.

“We stepped back and said hey, we don’t want to just federate check-ins, we want a brand new experience and brand-new app,” says Booyah CEO Keith Lee. “We’re trying to push the envelope in terms of how we can create new experiences or new gameplay based on location.”

For now, InCrowd is pretty simple; Lee compares it to poke apps in the early days of social networking. Users can interact with other people in their location with actions like hi-fives or dropkicks, which are immediately sent to their friend in the app and on Facebook. “One of the things that has been missing on Facebook is real-time social interaction,” says Lee.

Over time, poke apps evolved point systems and a sort of light gaming element (the Vampire series being perhaps the penultimate example). InCrowd is starting out with a similar system. The hi-five, for example, will add popularity points to the receiving user, while the dropkick will take points away.

InCrowd isn’t just a one-off experiment; Booyah will add to it progressively over time. One upcoming feature is customized virtual spaces for different locations, so that a particular baseball park or store is identifiable as the actual location. The store might even include a non-player character to guide or give information about the store. The virtual item system from Nightclub City might also migrate over in some form.

“What we’re really trying to do is build a hub and platform,” says Lee.  “It’s a lot more elegant than a boring check-in app that just has a pop-up coupon.”

The key to the future is in how players use the new app, though. Lee expects a younger audience for InCrowd. “You’ll start to see some really interesting use-cases. Imagine how people in high school or college would use it,” he says. “You have a sense people are from your dorm but you may not know them, so you have a new way of interacting with them.”

Less trafficked places could experience another kind of interesting user behavior, Lee speculates. Since the app will show the last 30 or so check-ins, a place that isn’t visited much could allow asynchronous interaction and discovery of new people. “Besides checking into your office, maybe you check-in to an antique bookstore… in places that aren’t frequented as much, you want to find people who are similar.”

It also remains to be seen how many new users Places will bring to Booyah, which already has over three million users with MyTown, but Lee expects a significant number to appear due to increased virality in the feed.

For more, check out our analysis of the future of location-based games o Places, published earlier this morning.

Once upon a time, Electronic Arts stated that it would be bringing the Madden franchise to Facebook. Now, almost nine months later, that promise has come to fruition with the release of Madden NFL Superstars from EA/Playfish.

With the launch of Madden NFL 2011 and the pending start of the NFL regular season, the release is timed, with EA’s typical marketing savvy, to springboard off of both the popularity of the season start and the console game, which reliably sells millions of copies each year.

EA has some prior experience in placing big sports titles on Facebook, too, having first launched FIFA Superstars, which now has about four million monthly active users. The reuse of the “Superstars” name for Madden suggests that the company is attempting to create a Facebook brand of sports-oriented applications.

Madden, though, is by far the larger of the two EA franchises. Considering the the success of the yearly console releases of Madden, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Madden NFL Superstars head into the double-digit millions during the football season.

Obviously, the central objective to Madden is to build up a championship team and take them to the Super Bowl. However, that’s actually much simpler than one might think. Rather than dealing with drafts, auctions, and trades as one would in the traditional game, Playfish and EA take a trading card spin, asking players to purchase packs of digital football cards, using either the earnable in-game currency or the paid premium virtual currency, Playfish Cash.

Depending on the type of pack purchased, higher- or lower-quality players will be found within them. A Bronze Pack is the cheapest with five low ranking NFL players, while an Ultimate Pack is the costliest (and requires level 20, unless one uses Playfish Cash) but contains the highest ranking players. Furthermore, since EA has licensing rights with the National Football League, these are, of course, all real players.

Based on each NFL players’ statistics (speed, strength, positions, etc.) they will add a set rating to the overall team, represented by one to five stars. However, since the player must build their entire offense and defense of 23 positions, it’s hard to tell just how much a single player can affect a team.

The star rating of the entire team can be improved with practices. This is somewhat similar to practicing in FIFA Superstars, with the teams running some form of drill to improve their capabilities. However, the benefit is only comes into effect so long as the player returns to refresh practice sessions after they are complete, in an analogue to withering crops in farming games.

As far as the football games themselves go, this is where the Facebook title takes the largest departure from its console progenitor. Every game is fully automated and presented to the player as still shots with a Ken Burns pan-and-scan effect and commentary streaming along the bottom. Normally, the higher rated team will win, but players also activate special abilities called “game changers” that have a percentage chance of succeeding (meaning they score some form of points). Purchasable with both Playfish Cash and in-game currency, these consist of plays such as onside recoveries, kickoff returns, field goal kicks, and so on.

As players play and win games, they progress through increasingly difficult seasons. It’s a bit of a slow progression though, as the gating mechanism for number of plays per day are “Game Tickets” that take over an hour to regenerate after use. Typically, one game equals one ticket, but some require more.

The game also has a moderate virtual space element to it, allowing users to purchase amenities for their home stadium — although a nicer stadium doesn’t equal more fans. Those are instead gained through leveling up, purchasing them in the store, or receiving them as gifts from friends. Fans appear to be used for later-game features like going to the Super Bowl or unlocking new teams in a higher level mode called the “Pro League”.

Socially, the game has typical achievements, leaderboards, and gifting among friends, but it also comes with a nice scrimmage feature that allows users to compete against one another without using up a Game Ticket, with a result that’s recorded for posterity. Other than that, there is also the likely addition of playing other users’ teams as part of the main game, which isn’t immediately available, but is probably on its way.

Madden NFL Superstars is, in the end analysis, a very well built game, but compared to other sports management games on Facebook, Madden is nowhere near as in-depth as others we have seen in the past. This is likely because such games almost never do well on Facebook, and as FIFA Superstars has proved, catering to a wider, more casual/social audience can be more lucrative than a small niche.

Playdom has published its latest Facebook title built by an outside developer: Terranova, by Atakama Labs. Atakama is an advocate of “meaningful games,” and this eco-friendly application — complete with environmental factoids — is about using a virtual space to terraform a desolate desert world.

Terranova doesn’t innovate much within the virtual space genre, but it does have an off-beat premise that offers the user a satisfying visual sense of progression. Nevertheless, this the the kind of game we’ve come to expect from Playdom: technically perfect, but repetitive and dull after a while.

Players play the role of a crashed spaceman (or spacegirl) who must transform a wasteland planet into a thriving, livable, environment. To do this, players plant various forms of flora ranging  from simple cacti to tropical palms. The idea is to slowly build up the planet’s “bio health”, as indicated by a gauge at the top of the screen. Different plants will improve bio health rating by different amounts. Each plant must also be watered periodically, costing both energy and water.

The challenge is that there is not a lot of fertile ground in the beginning.  As players level up, more and more of the ground becomes green and lush — this is the visually satisfying part.  Decorating a world is nice, but watching the world transform is gratifying.

However, changing the whole world is going to take a while. It is a big world with a lot of space, compared to most virtual space games. At the lowest levels, there are six sizeable areas to explore and decorate. Many areas have special items that can be placed there.

Items are introduced through a quests, which act as a secondary tutorial in the beginning. For example, the first quest is to find a glacier. Once discovered, players can use the virtual currency Terracash to purchase a machine called a water drill.

Like most games that require players to spend energy to advance, both energy and water generate slowly. However, machines like the water drill will produce water more quickly. Other machines grant similar bonuses such as refilling energy, increasing water capacity, and so on. But every machine the player builds takes away from the bio health of the planet, so a balance must be kept.

Every couple of hours, the user can perform a “Bio Audit.” With this mechanic, a monetary reward is granted based on factors such as bio health, biodiversity (the variety of plants one has), daily bonuses, and how many friends play too.

But money can be earned other ways. Every plant, and some of the decorations, produce collection bonuses. Plants produce a small amount of coin, while items like a beehive produce sellable honey. Like Zynga’s FrontierVille, trash, toxic geysers, and toxic waste from machines fill up the land and must be cleaned up. With the proper equipment, these can be collected and disposed of for coin as well.

The social features of Terranova feel a bit drab. They are basic, standardized elements: leaderboards, visiting friends’ virtual spaces, and gifting.  But the occasional social quests stand out. One involves finding and unlocking a hidden treasure chest and requires friends to send specific gifts (e.g. a key) to help users accomplish it.

Terranova does a pretty good job at bringing the world to life with a number of details that add flair to the world, e.g. insects are attracted to certain items. There is always a gratifying sense of progression, but most of the game is unoriginal. The concept is still plant, water, harvest. The bio health stat helps to mitigate these time-worn mechanics, but it just doesn’t make a big difference. It’s still farming game — only in space.

Facebook Places was released two weeks ago, potentially allowing every Facebook user to make location-based check-ins. What does it mean for game companies?

Many of the stories on Places so far have discussed its potential uses as a marketing tool, doling out coupons, promotions and incentives to users who visit real-world businesses at the right time.

There’s obviously a lot of potential here. Every physical business wants better ways to promote locally, and will happily pay location-based companies that are capable of bringing customers through the door.

However, game developers should think twice about trying to beat marketers at their own business. Straightforward local marketing — for example, giving users an in-game virtual good or virtual currency for visiting a business — will become highly competitive soon as marketing service providers push to secure the ad dollars that businesses allocate to location services.

While game companies might benefit from partnering with marketers, their internal creative energies can be better spent on what games are all about: fun and engagement.

With that advice in mind, we take a look at how game companies can think more deeply about Places, below — specifically looking at how structure and rules, fictional themes, group cooperation and time tricks can take advantage of the emerging gaming medium. But first, here’s a reminder of what Facebook has to offer as it introduces its APIs.

Integration with Facebook

The first step is getting connected to Places. While this is obvious, the service is still at an early stage, so it’s worth going over the details. (If you don’t care for the technicalities, feel free to skip on down.)

Like other Facebook services, Places is accessed through developer APIs, in this case read, search and write. A large majority of third-party developers will be limited to the read and search APIs, for now.

The read API essentially offers access to Places’ own data on user check-ins. To give an example, if John checks into Starbucks, Facebook will record and keep that information for itself. If John then gives a third-party application permission to look at his check-ins, the developer of that app can check John’s info at will.

There’s a problem with read privileges: John’s direct interaction is with Places, not a third-party mobile app, and the developer also has to get John to go through the steps of agreeing to share his info. Read will work fine for existing Facebook games that want to add a location feature or challenge. It may not be enough for a new iPhone app that wants to use Places, but is separated from the user by Facebook.

The write API is the solution to this problem. With write, a third-party iPhone app can log John in through Facebook Connect, perform the check-in itself and report it back to Places and the feed, the latter step potentially helping with viral growth. John is kept in the user interface of the app — which may be especially vital for an immersive game.

Facebook hasn’t yet announced when the write API will leave private beta. For now, only five companies who have launched apps have access: Booyah, Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR and Yelp.

Locating the game

However, it seems likely that Facebook will give write API access to more developers with clearly innovative apps, and high business practice standards. With that in mind, it’s time for companies to start planning how to best use Places.

Thinking past what location-based developers have done in the past will be the first challenge. When Loopt, Where and others in the first wave of smartphone-powered LBS startups began adding features several years ago, tie-ins with services like Yelp made sense to gather data on actual locations, most of which were in fact businesses.

From there, the tendency to favor marketing-based mechanics developed naturally. With only a small market at hand, due to the limited penetration of smartphones, LBS startups needed to make money where possible. That couldn’t be the user, so direct relationships with businesses began to appear.

The desire to interact with businesses is clearly visible in the most popular location mechanics today. Take check-ins for example. Competing to become the mayor or owner of a property is a mildly amusing, playful task for most users, but the clearest beneficiary from the feature is the coffee shop or store that gets a bevy of repeat customers.

More complicated mechanics like “appointment”, which makes a game of getting the user to return to a location at a particular time, could be interesting for both users and businesses — but remain far more so for the latter.

Location-based apps should be in the position to make bigger creative bets soon. Places has access to millions of mobile users, and by extension, the other 500-odd million people on Facebook who can see shared Places, and be tagged in them. As in the early days of social gaming, location apps can now focus on convincing an existing mass market that their application is the most fun.

So how should location startups that want to focus on gaming think about the problem? Here are suggestions on how to start:

Structure

One major element of ordinary games, missing from the majority of location-based apps, is a sophisticated structure and set of rules.

A popular philosophy today is that location apps should encourage users to get out and experience new things. But how often do, say, World of Warcraft users hear the same advice? Millions of game players consistently prefer to stay indoors, glued to a screen.

Their reason isn’t a secret desire to be an orc or widespread heliophobia. It’s the structure of games, which keep players on track through feedback loops — truly sticky games, from chess to FarmVille to MMOs, create worlds with strict boundaries and rules.

Real life contains few feedback loops that don’t relate to food or sex. Location-based apps are based in real life. But does that mean they can’t create new feedback loops?

Most location apps already make use of trophies and leaderboards, which are certainly game-like. Yet both of those mechanics were created as additions to full-featured games on platforms like the Xbox, to get players more engaged in experiences that were already engaging on their own. Trophies and badges are icing, but they’re missing the cake.

The trick is thinking of gamelike mechanics for real life. SCVNGR, started this May, allows challenges based around specific locations, like creating origami from the foil in a burrito shop. Booyah’s MyTown virtual real estate game drew over three million players before Places launched, with gameplay inspired by Monopoly. These rule-based games are probably just a starting point for a new niche of the game industry.

Fiction and Fantasy

Closely connected to the need for structure is the idea of theme and story in location-based apps. In ten years, it may seem odd in retrospect that location games started out with a reality obsession. Why should a house, park or store necessarily be the same in its virtual, device-based representation as it is in real life?

Here there are again examples to look at. Gbanga Famiglia, released in April by a European developer, is much like MyTown but creates a alternate reality overlay for users to pretend that they’re part of a mafia; it’s the demo for a platform which could conceivably be used for any game theme. Zombie, Run! has players try to escape in a city from a virtual horde of zombies.

The qualities that make a fantasy world or story attractive to players are hard to pin down, especially before those worlds have been created. But good alternate-reality fiction is already proven to work by movies, books, theater — it simply hasn’t found the perfect place in this new form of gaming.

Interaction

Some of the above-mentioned games, like Gbanga, riff on a social theme: player groups like guilds and, of course, mafias. It’s easy to forget with a location-based app, that location itself can just be a means to the end of having fun. Social features may be especially key with Places, since user interaction is Facebook’s specialty.

Interestingly, a few relatively successful location games have gone all the way to the other end of the spectrum, mostly involving cooperation between strangers with a locational payoff only coming at the end. Geocaching and DARPA’s balloon contest are prime examples of users working together for long periods to find locations, rather than first finding the place and then playing a game.

Existing services are also pondering how to bring together many users at once. Foursquare, for instance, is developing a group specials feature that could form shopping flash mobs.

Facebook may be more interested in seeing apps create personal experiences between friends, though. It’s easy to come up with simple ideas for this; for instance, SCVNGR’s challenge mechanic could be combined with geocaching for an ordinary guy to leave a trail of clues for his girlfriend, leading to a special dinner date. But again, the best concepts probably have yet to be invented.

Time tricks

Time is going to be a major challenge for location-based apps of all sorts. Not only does it take quite a long time just to go from place to place, but the daily routine for a great many people is limited to home, work, perhaps a grocery trip, and then home again — and there’s no time or energy left for anything else.

Justin Beck, the CEO of Parallel Kingdom creator PerBlue, told VentureBeat that his location-based game started out forcing players to move through the real world to make progress in the virtual game. “The feedback we got from our first iteration was almost uniform: It sucks!,” he said.

There may be multiple ways to address this problem. One is to make actions that the user already performs in their daily life more meaningful. Alternately, developers can just make location a tightly-integrated feature of their existing short-session games.

This might be where the most opportunity lies. An existing Facebook game like Mafia Wars could easily run an Italian-restaurant storyline that offers players the chance to get further ahead in the game if they visit certain locations. The challenge is integrating such features with gameplay in a way that meaningful to the existing story.

Conclusion

Right now, developers are still in the first phase of innovation, and most existing gameplay mechanics remain rough around the edges.

Part of the evolution here will be decided by Facebook’s approach. Social gaming as we know it — games built on friendships and communication channels for reaching those friends — was made possible by Facebook’s open platform. Facebook’s master plan has never been to becoming a social gaming platform, as much as social gaming has been discovered and refined by third-party developers. But the process has been messy at times, with spam and scams being prevalent even as developers figured out where the real value was. Facebook’s approach to restricting the write API today is intended to curb abuse this time around, especially because location information is, for many users, considered even more private than friend relationships. The company will need to find a balance in how it opens up write access, both preventing abuse while helping developers realize the full potential of the concept.

There are other complications. Users have also sometimes expressed wariness toward location services. And then there’s the matter of convincing good designers and investors that it’s a viable field. Social gaming itself had no shortage of critics and detractors in its early days, but Western investors and entrepreneurs also had the proven model of South Korea, China and Japan to work from — much of their experimentation on the platform was figuring out what aspects of the free-to-play virtual goods model fit best with Facebook users.

There’s no equivalent multi-billion dollar industry to compare against here — just a relatively new technology and millions of potential users, now more accessible than ever through Places. Many of those users may continue to prefer not to share their location on a regular basis, and there are still plenty of other challenges in creating a new location-based service. But Facebook is motivated to succeed in location, and has the scale to change the market; smart entrepreneurs can handle the rest.

AvatarLabs released a new iPad and iPhone app earlier this summer called Rhythm Racer 2 HD. This second generation title follows the original iPhone Rhythm Racer by taking the popular rhythm genre to a new mechanic, in which tapping and strumming become driving.

The concept of Rhythm Racer 2 is an iteration of a much older game concept called Audiosurf. But this iDevice game is free to download (Audiosurf costs $9.99).

The objective is to race around a futuristic, space-age track, collecting multi-colored orbs. Using the iPad’s tilt sensor, players steer their racer through the course, attempting to pick up as many orbs as possible. The difficulty level — Practice, Pro, or Master — determines the number of tracks on the course. Floating rings can also be collected by hitting small ramps that periodically appear around the track.

Missing an orb will end any streaks a player has going and will also dull the sound of the music track being played.

The visuals of the game are not bad for an iPad title. While many of the 3D elements are reminiscent of late PlayStation or early PlayStation 2 quality, the backgrounds and static artwork are extremely well done and quite aesthetically pleasing. Surprisingly, it is the core collection aspect that is the least visually stimulating.

In all of the best rhythm games — Tap Tap Revenge, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, etc. — there is a visually pleasing effect upon hitting notes. In Rhythm Racer 2, there is nothing. The orb simply disappears from the track and temporarily reappears at the bottom of the screen.

Unfortunately, while the music is surprisingly good in most cases, the selection is paltry. The game also suffers from rather obnoxious control issues and the mechanics don’t give a true rhythm-based game experience.

But the most glaring fault of Rhythm Racer 2 is that there no rhythm based mechanics! In other games in the genre, players must tap their fingers on the screen in time with the song. This game requires little rhythm; so long as the racer touches the orbs, the track plays properly.  The player collects orbs using their eyes only, and the steering is, in no way, in rhythm with the song. This defeats the purpose of the rhythm genre and prevents the game from playing on the fantasy of being a musician.

The steering in the game is also unbelievably sensitive. Even the slightest turn of the iPad can send the player careening off course, which will force most players to reduce the sensitivity to its lowest possible setting.

The initial download comes with very few songs. There are more available, but these must be purchased from within the app itself. But, there are some well known artists in the bunch, including Filter and All American Rejects.

Social features are enabled through the OpenFeint mobile social network. Competitive leaderboards are available for each of the songs, difficulty settings and unlocked achievements. The game also syncs with both Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to post and/or tweet their in-game accomplishments.

All in all, Rhythm Racer 2 HD offers something new in lieu of the many iterations of the Tap Tap franchise, and is, for the most part, visually pleasing. But the mechanics are off target for a rhythm game. It can be fun, but the game is hindered by overly sensitive steering.  It’s hard to say when or even if improvements will come, as neither the iPad or iPhone versions have seen any updates in the two months they’ve been out.

PapayaMobile isn’t a particularly well-known name among the small group of mobile social platforms, having only launched in June. However, it claims to already have four million users, many playing games the Beijing-based company created itself to show off the platform.

Like various competitors, PapayaMobile is primarily an added service for game developers, who can use it to introduce news feeds, leaderboards, challenges, virtual currency and other features to their games. But on Android, the only platform PapayaMobile has a presence on, developers also need help with getting their games to users.

The solution for PapayaMobile is a new site, called AndroidAppOfTheDay.net, where developers can have their game featured in exchange for giving users a discount. Each past day’s offering will also be shown on a calendar, allowing users to effectively go through a featured game archive.

Earlier today, we noted Scoreloop’s new standalone Android app, which is made for social discovery between users. PapayaMobile already has its own app, which acts as a sort of social network for its mostly-youthful users; AndroidAppOfTheDay is an addition that co-founder Si Shen thinks is necessary to help games, especially paid downloads, get more recognition (unlike the iPhone, at least half of the Android’s apps are free).

In the longer term, Shen hopes that PapayaMobile can become a destination network like Japan’s Mobage Town. She’s not dissuaded by the commonly-held idea that the US and Asian markets are fundamentally different: “In China the biggest networks, like RenRen, are just copycats of Facebook. That means there are some fundamental similarities between the two markets,” she says.

As for mobile games, Shen thinks that developers need to imitate the best features of Facebook games. “We prefer games to be more social. We tell developers that if they’re social in nature, it will be easier to acquire more users,” Shen tells us.

At its platform launch in June, Papaya also announced a $4 million funding led by DCM.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Android’s shortcomings in game discovery. While the Apple App Store has its flaws, the Android Market does an even worse job of surfacing good games and apps. Google also has yet to match Apple’s announcement of Game Center, a forthcoming social network for iDevice gamers.

A Google solution may be best, but in the meantime, the private market is beginning to step in. Scoreloop, a mobile social platform, is first this morning with its its own game discovery app (we’ll have a story about a competing offering later this morning).

Scoreloop, like competitors OpenFeint and Plus+, plays mostly in the background. Game developers integrate it into their apps to add features like leaderboards, challenges and notifications. But since these companies end up with millions of user profiles, it also makes sense for them to branch out into social game discovery.

The new Scoreloop app has three tabs: Popular, New and Friends’ Games. The last of the three, showing which games your friends on the network are playing, is most important, according to CEO Marc Gumpinger. “Finding out what your friends are doing is a very good indication of what you might like — not just the games, but the activity stats for people playing those games,” he says.

It remains to be seen how many players will download a standalone game discovery app, but the number could be significant if finding good apps is as painful an experience on Android devices as some developers seem to think. The iPhone, meanwhile, is getting its own discovery apps; last week, Chomp released general-purpose app search for iDevices.

Scoreloop is also releasing its latest SDK for developers this morning. The newest features also have to do with discovery — most notably, a cross-promotion tab that game developers can add. Like Facebook’s cross-promotion strips, Scoreloop’s version will be based on an exchange; for each user clicking on a game promoted with your app, you’ll get one click back from the network.

Early yesterday, we reported that CrowdStar had ported Happy Island to Android, marking one of the first times we’ve seen a successful Facebook game go to the mobile platform. Now Playdom says that it too has jumped into the fray, with an Android version of Social City.

Both Happy Island and Social City previously had iPhone versions, which is still fairly unusual even for Facebook’s most successful games (the two peaked at 12.3 and 12.6 million monthly active users respectively, according to AppData).

However, social game developers are slowly venturing back into mobile. Several companies, including Zynga, tried and then pulled away from the iPhone in 2009, but Zynga also helped revive the idea this year with the release of FarmVille for iPhone.

For now, CrowdStar and Playdom are alone among the top five Facebook developers in offering Android games. That’s not likely to last long, though. Android is growing quickly, enough so that some analysts are predicting that it will become the second-largest smartphone operating system this year, coming in right behind the iPhone.

Playdom’s partner for the launch was Moblyng, which also previously released HTML5 versions of Playdom’s games Mobsters and Sorority Life.

International game publisher i-Jet Media announced today that it would publish four unnamed Playdom games across Eastern Europe, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Facebook is weak in several countries in the region — most notably Russia, where the Facebook competitor Vkontakte reportedly has over 80 million users. I-Jet claims to reach 60 million users.

Although several US social gaming companies are focusing on reaching Asia, Europe or Latin America, few have looked seriously at the former Soviet markets, even though a growing number of developers are located in those countries. Playdom may be the first large company to do so, although the company hasn’t yet confirmed i-Jet’s release with us.

Along with the publishing deal, i-Jet also said that it’s entering an anti-piracy initiative with Playdom. That may help its cause, as Russia is often seen as a haven for copycats and piracy (Vkontakte itself being a case in point).

I-Jet claims to have already met with success, making $20 million on one game, Happy Farm, in 2009. It’s actively looking for other American developers to work with.

In its latest social acquisition, Google has bought mobile game developer SocialDeck, according to a letter posted by the company. SocialDeck is located in Waterloo, Ontario, close to a regional Google office.

SocialDeck’s games were downloaded about a million times in 2009. Its games include Shake & Spell, Color Connect and Pet Hero.

What makes this more interesting than just a game developer acquisition is that SocialDeck has significant cross-platform experience. A non-game product it offers, called Spark, provides social integration across Blackberry, the iPhone and Facebook, while Shake & Spell also works on all three of those platforms.

Google’s gaming interest is obviously with Android. But it’s also reportedly working on a social platform to rival Facebook; Google’s technology plans could be advanced by SocialDeck’s experience in extending the social experience across multiple devices.

Buying SocialDeck also seems to fit in with Google’s broader plans, which we wrote about following its acquisition of Slide. With Slide, Google is likely working on a broad, viral platform for both the web and its own mobile devices.

The effort is being headed up by Slide founder Max Levchin, as we reported last week; it’s possible he had a hand in buying SocialDeck, although the timing may have been too close.

As for SocialDeck’s team, founders Anish Acharya and Jeson Patel came from Amazon and Microsoft, while CEO Dan Servos was formerly head of casual and social game developer NeoEdge.

There’s no word yet on how much Google paid for SocialDeck. The company had raised $250,000 from the Blackberry Fund in 209.

The text of the letter:

SocialDeck is joining Google!

Big news! We’re super excited to announce that someone found our social games as fun as you have — in this case, that “someone” is Google. SocialDeck has been acquired and we’ve joined the Google team.

We started this company with the goal of connecting friends through social games on all kinds of exciting mobile devices. We’ve been amazed and humbled by all the stories and experiences our customers (you!) have shared with us.

Thank you for all your support and for being part of SocialDeck’s success so far.

Happy Shaking!

– The SocialDeck Team