Last week showed a big surge in hiring among social game developers. But this week only five of the major developers are doing any hiring, and even these are are doing so lightly, according to data from LinkedIn. And, only four of the five are hiring new people, as Slide’s activity continues to stem from its acquisition by Google last month.

Of course, if your company is bringing on new people or doing a notable promotion, be sure to let us know. Email editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

If you’re looking for a job yourself, be sure to check out our Inside Network Job Board.

Here’s this week’s list:

CrowdStar

• Curtis Chiu — Formerly the Director of Product & Live Operations at Outspark, Chiu joins CrowdStar as their new Product Merchandising Manager.

Digital Chocolate

• Eduard Torras Cartañá — Cartañá joins Digital Chocolate as their newest Junior Programmer. Previously, he was a Scholar at DTM Eginyeria La Salle – Ramon Llull.

Playfish

• Carolin Krenzer — Joining Playfish as their newest Product Manager is Krenzer. Prior to this, she was a Consultant for Accenture.

Slide

• Tony Hauber — Hauber switches tags from Slide to Google, but keeps the same job role as Software Engineer.
• Leopold Xie –In a similar switch, Xie keeps his job title of Product Manager but switches from the Slide name to that of Google.
• Sergio Villarreal — Now under Google, Villarreal is a “Member of Technical Staff.” While at Slide, he was an Engineering Manager.
• Joanne Lee — Formerly a Staff Accountant at Slide, Lee is now a Slide Accountant under Google.

Zynga

• Matthias Mueller — Joining Zynga as a Customer Care Agent, Mueller’s prior experience stems from Customer Support at Freenet AG.
• Ana Beatriz Porto Rodrigues — Also becoming a Customer Care Agent for Zynga, this week, is Rodrigues who comes from Dune, where she was a Sales Assistant.
• Michael Lyden — Previously a Senior Product Manager for Bill Me Later, Inc., Lyden joins Zynga as their newest Product Manager.
• Spencer E Holtaway — Now a contracted User Interface Designer for Zynga, Holtaway was previously a Designer for Cunning.

In its latest move to improve its platform for developers, MySpace is adding three new viral features: an in-app sharing button, an in-game friending API, and a user-to-user gifting and invite API.

While similar to what you might see on other sites, like Facebook, the features should bolster MySpace’s ability to connect users and apps, and help it lock down its status as the second largest social gaming platform.

Here’s a closer look.

Share: The Share on MySpace button has already been available across the web. If you’re on another site, like YouTube, you can share the content — a video, or whatnot — back into your MySpace activity stream. The shared item will include an image and text, and a prominent link back to the source. The new feature, called Share for Games, is intended to provide similar functionality from within an app: you can share content from an app directly into the stream and get users clicking through that way. More, from the company:

Apps are able to share more types of content into the stream, like links and photos. Developers are also able to include an externally hosted image with the stream activity. This means developers can quickly customize and test photos associated with stream content. Currently, our Activities API only allows developers to include a photo that’s been uploaded to myspace.

MySpace says that tests show the Share option now accounting for between 10% to 20% of new installs per day in some games, with the feature already becoming the second-largest install source behind invites, and overall generating a 14-fold increase in stream click-through rates over the existing API.

In-Game Friending: Until now, MySpace users who find each other within games have had to separately friend each other on the site in order to access features of an app that required the friend connection. The new API will let people who find each other in a game then friend each other directly, without having to leave the application canvas page. The point, as MySpace describes, is to enable users to do things like connect with other engaged players even if their own friends don’t want to use the app.

MySpace says some developers are seeing friend acceptance rates of between 65% and 70%, with most users accepting friends within several hours; it also says that gift sending has gone up 16% as a result.

User-to-User App Requests: This API lets a user send one or more other users a virtual gift or other request, featuring a custom image and text. If the recipient hasn’t added the app yet, the request will include an invite to do so. This is an improvement on MySpace’s existing app-to-user communication, which can feel less personal than direct friend communication.

Conclusion

MySpace’s initial tests are only with some developers, and its stats do not indicate the size of the apps trying them out — results may vary, of course. Still, all of these features are along the lines of what Facebook has iterated to in the last few of years, and are at this point industry best practices. That’s not accident. MySpace hired Lolapps product executive Manu Rehki earlier this year to help lead its game platform development; Lolapps and Rehki have been in the trenches of Facebook app development for years, and he no doubt came into the new job with clear ideas for what features to build out.

Overall, MySpace has been busy this year making app-focused improvements. In March, for example, it released a redesign that made apps more prominent in main sections of the site interface. More recently, it has tested out other features, like a Games filter in the stream, and better app search options.

We also got a few more stats from MySpace about activity on the platform. Around a third of the site’s nearly 100 million users are regularly playing games, it tells us, with men representing more than half of all players, at 55%. The 20 most engaging apps are getting an average of 80 minutes playing time per user per month, with the average game at 10 minutes. Vanity-focused apps are doing particularly well, including “What’s your Street Reputation?” and “Tag Me.” For more, see our monthly list of the 25 largest games on the platform.

In sum, these changes won’t themselves make Myspace the leading social gaming platform, but they do help developers build more engaging apps, and that could lead to more traffic growth down the road.

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

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Brooklyn Packet, iWin, Arkadium, Atari, and 6waves.

• iPhone Enginer – Mobile social games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• UI Designer – Mobile social games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Server Engineer – Mobile social games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Social Game Designer – Mobile social games (San Francisco, CA)

• Sr. Product Manager – Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Sr. Game Designer – Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Market Data Analyst – Social Games (San Francisco, CA)

• Associate Analyst (New York, NY)
  
• Marketing Associate (New York, NY)

• Game Producer – Online and Mobile – Atari (Los Angeles, CA)

• Product Manager, Growth & New Products (San Francisco, CA)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets 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.

CrowdStar chairman Peter Relan’s incubator, YouWeb, is looking for the magic formula in mobile gaming. Its latest attempt to find that formula is called iSwifter, a company that bears a lot of resemblance to the streaming game services Gaikai and OnLive.

YouWeb’s most recently launched company before iSwifter is Sibblingz, which wants to do cross-platform development between web and mobile games. ISwifter aims shortcut that process by streaming Flash games from the web. Essentially, it will stream an interactive video of the game to the user.

Core gamers have spent a great deal of time discussing the practicality of game streaming, and whether it’s possible for a service like OnLive to reliably stream a high-definition action game over broadband. In one sense, the streaming puzzle is even tougher for iSwifter, which will have to work with notoriously unreliable mobile data connections.

But Relan says that the nature of mobile games will make iSwifter’s idea less challenging. “I think when we change the focus of the market, the product changes,” he tells us. “Flash by nature is a lot more compact and a lot less demanding [than in core games], as well as the end user. We’re talking about low investment, short bursty sessions of gameplay, with lower expectations.”

Smartphone users are already learning to deal with always-connected games, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that they may also be willing to deal with a stuttering streamed game — assuming the average user would even know the difference.

As for why iSwifter seems like a good idea, Relan and the company’s founder, Rajat Gupta, point to the web-based flash game community, which they say is moving far too slowly toward mobile platforms. Is their solution, then, content partnerships? No, not exactly.

The odd, and somewhat amusing, truth about iSwifter is that the company plans to stream most of its content without first asking the publishers for permission. Gupta thinks that’s fine, since users will see any ads, and use any in-game monetization, just as if they were playing a non-streamed version.

“I think the beauty of the technology and the gaming service is that there’s no work to be done at the developer’s end, there’s no work to be done by the distributor, meaning we can pretty much go to any gaming portal and bring it as-is to the iDevice,” says Gupta.

To start, iSwifter’s iPhone app will offer content from AOL Games, Facebook, Kongregate, Yahoo Games and, of course, CrowdStar. It will also use the existing ratings and rankings on those sites to initially surface good content for users, with their feedback modifying what floats to the top over time.

In the end, success for iSwifter will probably hinge not on its streaming element or plan for acquiring content, but on smartphone user reactions to web-based content.

As Relan admits, social games ported to mobile devices haven’t done terribly well. Mobile users may prefer sticking to the App Store over playing a free Yahoo game. But until iSwifter tries, nobody will know for sure. For more on how iSwifter works, we’ve embedded their video below.

Japanese powerhouse DeNA, creator of the iPhone social network MiniNation, has expanded it with a collection of social and casual applications. Pirate Nation, released at the end of last month, is a free-to-play title on the iPhone network that takes users out to the high seas as pirates.

It’s a simple game of battles and collection with several amusing, twitch-based mini-games. Players can also customize their ships — to a limited degree.

In Pirate Nation, you set sail to the seven seas and seek out treasure. Becoming the top pirate in the process isn’t a bad either. You start out with a torn-up bucket of a ship and are immediately off and sailing. Sailing the ocean is simple, as you are only given one direction to at a time. Each tap in this direction takes the you to a new patch of water and consumes 20 energy (once energy reaches zero, no further actions can be made).

At each stop, your ship might encounter an enemy pirate ship or sunken treasure. Approaching any enemy ship presents the opportunity to engage in battle. Thus far, all enemy ships appear to be non-player ships, but they do become more challenging as you level up. To fire, tap the enemy ship as it quickly moves about. You must destroy the enemy before they take down you, with successive hits doing more damage.

Once the enemy ship sinks, you receive the random treasures your enemies were hoarding. These treasures become part of a collection and are used in the completion of various quests. Quests provide a boost to income (Doubloons) and reward ship parts to customize and upgrade your ship.

Ship parts are also found in sunken treasure. Sunken treasure is represented by a glowing spot on the ocean. You can lower your crane and pull up cloth, ivory, driftwood, and so on by using the iPhone’s tilt sensor to steer the crane to the ocean bottom, then back up once you have the treasure. But be careful of the rocks, jellyfish, and sharks in the way — hitting them takes away from the crane’s health. The more you tilt the iPhone, the more the crane sways, exponentially decreasing  control and making this mini-game challenging.

Once you have some ship parts, you can take your vessel back to port and begin customizing it. Unfortunately, only four parts to the ship can be customized: the mast, stern, bow and hull. Further, you can only build specific designs based on the parts you have. Adding new parts improves the appearance of your ship and increases battle stats.

You can also purchase new cannons and cranes to better augment your capabilities in the mini-games.

When it comes to social mechanics, you can visit the ships of any player on Pirate Nation and “scrub their deck.” This will build up a stat called “Matey Points” used to replenish energy. Scrubbing another player’s deck will also regenerate a small portion of their energy. After you’re done cleaning, you can post messages to their wall, or request to add them as a “Matey” (friend) to earn extra Matey Points to scrub their deck.

The game also has online leaderboards and the OpenFeint network, and can import Facebook, Twitter, or OpenFeint friends. Since this is an app from MiniNation, you have access to that social network as well, which comes complete with personal walls and customizable avatars.

Overall, Pirate Nation is a pretty simple, but  fun application. It’s not overly complicated, and there is a strong sense of progression. Though we would like to see more personalization for the pirate ships, they already look great and it’s gratifying to upgrade them. The social elements are not complex, but they do enhance the title, and will do more once MiniNation further implements OpenFeint.

Football season is finally underway, and a number of developers are seeking to springboard off the NFL’s popularity with their own social, football-oriented applications on Facebook. One of the biggest is CBS, which has developed CBSSports.com’s Franchise Football in conjunction with long time social sports maker, Fantasy Moguls. The game appeared on our most recent list of the fastest-growing Facebook games and currently has around 412,600 monthly active users.

The game follows behind titles like Madden NFL Superstars and Ultimate Fan, but unlike its predecessors, the game play is more oriented around Fantasy Moguls’ sports manager titles, Galacticos Football and Galacticos South Africa.

Franchise Football’s play is simple, consisting of very minimal strategy, but plenty of progression. Because of the limited strategy, the app may not sate the appetite of the avid sports manager fan.

Players start Franchise Football with a starting lineup of 23 players. The idea is to gradually improve this team in hopes of forming a football dynasty. Improvement comes not so much from growing individual players, but through recruiting new and better ones.

Each football player has a number rating associated with them. The higher this number, the more “skilled” that individual is. Depending on the position of the player, their rating will be broken up into stats such as Passing and Rushing (each skill can also be in fractions). Each team members’ rating is then added up to create the team’s overall offensive, defensive and kicking ratings that determines a player’s chance of winning a game.

The games are automated match ups against random Franchise Football players of the player’s level (though there is an option to play higher level individuals). Player’s earn a sum of money for each game they play and winning attracts the attention of free agents. Free agents are typically better than football players already on the user’s roster and can be signed to the team. However, there can only ever be 23 active team members, so for each team member gained, another is released. Releasing  a team member grants the user a slight refund of the released player’s contract.

These contracts appear to be one time fees. This is a good because better football players are more expensive and, at early levels, game wins only earn around $500k.  But  it’s easy to progress in Franchise Football because many games can be played in quick succession.

At the start, the user is able to play 16 games and upon leveling up four more are made available. Users can also challenge their friends to both scrimmages and exhibition games. Scrimmages don’t require the friend to actually play, but can replenish up to eight regular games a day. “Polite” and “embarrassing” boasts are available as wall posts after scrimmages. Exhibition games grant the same rewards as regular games, but are limited to Facebook friends.

In addition to monetary and player rewards, each game also rewards a virtual currency called Reputation Points. Reputation points are the primary tool of strategy. They can be used to purchase special power ups that will boost parts of a team (e.g. Receivers). They can also be used to buy more games per day or even increase the total amount of funds. Better yet, at each level users can take part in a draft for new players. Unfortunately, their draft turn is pretty high (7-12), but Reputation Points can be used to purchase a better pick position.

Players are able to acquire real NFL players from both the past and present and can eventually unlock games to play professional franchises for trophies.

Franchise Football isn’t exactly a deep game, without a whole lot of strategy;  it’s basically play, recruit, repeat, and thus in-depth sports manager fans may not find enough to do. But the average Facebook user will find it gratifying to watch a team evolve and grow quickly, which may help explain why this game is growing so quickly.

The long-awaited Android version of OpenFeint is finally arriving this morning. The mobile social platform will include most of the same features as the existing iOS version, and will be accompanied by some strategic efforts to help with app discovery.

OpenFeint’s Android version was only announced a few months ago, but developers who started out on Android earlier this year have been waiting for longer than that.

Parent company Aurora Feint held off for months on purpose, according to CEO Jason Citron, who says he wasn’t fully convinced about the platform. Now, he has changed his mind. “I think everyone believes that Android has the potential to overtake the iPhone and spread across the world,” he says.

For now, OpenFeint for Android will offer leaderboards, achievements, friend lists and social discovery, with challenges, synchronous play, cross-platform play and real-time voice chat coming later this year. However, Citron still doesn’t think that Android is the perfect platform, so Aurora Feint will also be putting effort into promoting specific developers and apps.

The problem with Android, says Citron, is that its content discovery and payment mechanisms are a shambles. Users have thus learned to stay away from the app market, which starts a vicious circle — developers see that users aren’t buying or engaging with their apps, so they give up or head back to the iPhone.

It’s premature to get discouraged, though. “The appetite for good content is definitely there. [When] the Angry Birds beta launched on Android everyone lost their minds,” says Citron.

Aurora Feint’s solution is to work with hand-picked developers to promote their games through the major North American wireless carriers (which ones hasn’t yet been announced). The carriers will feature these games prominently in their own app stores, notifying users that there are good games and giving a few developers a foothold. Aurora Feint has 16 initial developers picked out, including Glu, Mediatonic and Halfbrick Studios (whose game Fruit Ninja is shown above).

Citron, unlike many, doesn’t think the carriers are a worse option than Google. “Google’s imperative is, I think, to just get as many Android phones out there as possible so people will use it and see their ads,” he says. “Google’s incentives are not necessarily aligned with developers, but the carriers’ are. They need to convince people to buy the phone.” The way to do that, of course, is partially through great apps and games.

The next version of OpenFeint, 3.0, will add more options in the form of social discovery. The company isn’t talking about specifics yet, although Citron did share a few ideas about virality with us last month.

Aurora Feint isn’t the only mobile social platform worried about discovery on Android devices. We’ve also recently covered PapayaMobile’s featured apps site, and Scoreloop’s stand-alone social discovery app.

FrontierVille may be leading this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users, but the real action is with a set of mid-sized games that have made quite significant gains over the past week.

Here’s the full top 20:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	FrontierVille	7,298,649	+298,203	+4%
2.	Millionaire City	1,532,091	+183,668	+14%
3.	Kingdoms of Camelot	867,681	+153,589	+22%
4.	Games	1,219,795	+150,107	+14%
5.	YoVille	1,220,663	+144,739	+13%
6.	小小戰爭	127,223	+126,980	+52,255%
7.	City of Wonder	1,075,063	+122,795	+13%
8.	Car Town	944,165	+120,255	+15%
9.	Madden NFL Superstars	118,290	+105,048	+793%
10.	Fashion World	1,179,023	+100,674	+9%
11.	FantaBook	133,734	+98,491	+279%
12.	Ikariam – The free browser game	116,168	+96,822	+500%
13.	Backyard Monsters	314,423	+76,701	+32%
14.	Fantasy Football 2010	117,675	+68,283	+138%
15.	Social City	680,493	+64,133	+10%
16.	Resort World	458,956	+60,786	+15%
17.	Happy Pets	1,060,130	+57,424	+6%
18.	Critter Island	106,442	+52,212	+96%
19.	Cafe Life	442,092	+48,103	+12%
20.	Lucky Train	169,995	+46,810	+38%

Millionaire City comes in at number two. By DAU, this Digital Chocolate game is now far and away the largest city builder on Facebook, despite the good performance of City of Wonder, which comes in further down. The past week’s gains helped to further consolidate that lead, with Millionaire City growing by 14 percent — impressive growth, for an app that’s over three months old now.

Kingdoms of Camelot is number three. Not only is KoC even older than Millionaire City, with about 10 months under its belt now, the game also clocked in with an even higher gain of 22 percent. Some of that gain is down to a bump that several apps show last Wednesday, but KoC’s growth has been trending strongly upward over the past few weeks anyway.

At number four, Games deserves a closer look. This GSN portal game portal has a number of successful gambling and card games that seem to be driving it into ever more players’ bookmark lists, even as the portal patriarch, MindJolt Games, slowly declines. Oddly, Games is promoting a version of Wheel of Fortune different from the one that GSN just released, which we reviewed earlier this morning.

There’s another app worth taking note of: Madden NFL Superstars. This recently-released Electronic Arts adaptation of its mega-franchise is doing decently well so far, although it’s certainly not approaching the millions of units the console version moves just yet. However, the past four days have seen an uptick in Madden’s growth, so it’s too early to say what will happen just yet.

There seems to be a rising trend of Faceook apps that are remakes of old game shows. Joining social renditions of The Price is Right and Family Feud, the latest is Wheel of Fortune from GSN.  This new title has been growing quickly over the past seven days.

Wheel of Fortune  is a close replica of the original game show, coming with a number of challenging word puzzles to solve. While there are social mechanics, there is no synchronous multiplayer mode of the sort we’ve seen in other recent apps.

Just as in the game show, players spin the big wheel for cash, and guess consonants in order to figure out a word puzzle. The catch here is that players only get five turns to guess correctly. Of course, just like in the show, the player can buy a vowel after each spin, using the cash (called Wheel Bucks) they’ve racked up from past spins.

Players are given vague clues to the puzzles (e.g. “An Event”) and can choose to solve it at any time. Puzzles generally consist of phrases or sayings and can be quite challenging to solve.

Typically the player gets 15 seconds to either spin, solve, or guess a letter. There is also a virtual currency called Wheel Gold, which can be used to purchase a handful of powerups to boost the chances of solving a puzzle. These consist of Timeout, Reveal Letter, Double Bucks, and Free Play; they grant the user extra time per turn, reveal a random letter, earn double cash on their next spin, or give them a free turn respectively.

Wheel Gold can be purchased, but it can also be earned via “Collections.” These are virtual items made up of different parts of the game show, such as wheel tiles, letters, and so on. Once a Collection is complete, the game rewards the player with a respectable amount of virtual currency. However, the bigger and more rewarding Collections are gated by level, and leveling up is achieved by winning more Wheel Bucks.

Leveling up can take a long time. Players are only given two games to play (dubbed “Episodes”) a day, unless they purchase more episodes or win a daily bonus game.

At the end of each game, players are also given a bonus round puzzle to solve. This is where the first social mechanic comes into play. These bonus puzzles will grant a handful of random letters, but only allow the player to guess three more consonants and one vowel. It’s surprisingly hard, but users can opt for friend participation, and have them try to help — via a wall post — solve the puzzle. Should they succeed, $1000 Wheel Bucks and a new level are rewarded to both parties.

Beyond this, friends can gift various bonus powerups, and compete via an online leaderboard. Unlike the game show, this Wheel of Fortune is completely single player and asynchronous. Given the growing success of sychronous games like The Price is Right, we expected this one to be as well, but it isn’t. Additionally, limiting the player to only five guesses makes the games very short and difficult.

Due to the difficulty and brevity of the games, the app is sometimes more frustrating than entertaining. There is also no active competitiveness in an asynchronous game show.

The developers state that Wheel Bucks can be traded in for cash prizes. That makes for a nice incentive, but after perusing the app for some time, we could not find this option. The game is new, so it just may not be active yet.

Overall, Wheel of Fortune on Facebook is okay. It has all the parts of the classic game show, but it loses much of the competitive feel without synchronous play. Additionally, only five turns per puzzle and the low number of daily games makes the game experience exceedingly short. We just didn’t feel that this game is as strong as it could be.

DeNA, a Japan-based mobile company with a presence in California, is continuing to ramp up its involvement in the American mobile and social gaming industry. The company is announcing its acquisition today of Gameview, an iPhone developer with several social titles (also known as Bayview Labs).

Gameview is an interesting target for DeNA, which has already shown interest in mobile social gaming through its investment in Aurora Feint. We recently reviewed several Gameview games, finding them to be close analogues to Facebook farming and pet titles.

That’s still an unusual strategy on mobile, where casual and puzzle games rule the roost (think Angry Birds).

But DeNA has a wider focus than most companies. Its parent company, DeNA Global, claims it will make $1 billion in revenue this year from its activities across Japan, including its ownership of the mobile social network Mobage Town.

Facebook doesn’t have much of a presence in Japan, and much of the social networking done in the country is through mobile networks. The success of Mobage in that environment has likely given DeNA more confidence than American developers have that social gaming will work on mobile devices.

We wrote about DeNA’s plan to invest $27.5 million in American social gaming companies in June. The company also recently announced a partnership with Namco Bandai, placing that developer’s titles on Mobage Town.