In a social gaming landscape saturated with farms, cities, and mobsters, TipCat Interactive’s new release Zombie Party appears at first to be a novel experience, putting you in a wasteland infested with myriad zombies with only improvised weapons as a defense. In actuality, the gameplay of Zombie Party doesn’t much resemble either a party or zombie survival; it’s actually closer to the traditional resource collection and item building of other Facebook social games, with zombies presenting no real threat.

Zombie Party starts in a house with you, a weapons engineer, and several pieces of equipment that manufacture and store zombicidal weapons. The initial quests show you how to begin fighting the undead menace by researching new technologies, creating weapons, and erecting barricades and zombie lures.

You consume items like wood, rubber bands, stones, and rope to research cutting-edge weapons such as banana catapults, slingshots and crossbows. These “ingredients” can be found as random drops from zombies and rewards for completing quests. You can also purchase random ingredients at high cost from the in-game shop, or gift and trade with other players.

When ready, you can construct any of your researched items at “Production Machines”. These machines can produce items in varying amounts, but the more you want at a time, the longer it takes and the more it costs per weapon.  As you level, you can also construct more machines to increase your weapon production capabilities.

To begin eradicating the undead, you can assign light weapons to your employees, mount heavy weapons around the house, or place traps for hapless zombies to wander over. You gain experience points and zombie coins for every zombie you destroy, along with random drops of extra coins and weapon ingredients.

These zombies, unlike their counterparts in movies, seem to have interest in nothing except lawn ornaments called “Attractions”. Initially, you’re only capable of erecting “Pumpkinheads”, which attract normal zombies but as you level you’ll be able to construct more ornate attractions like the roulette table that attracts the stronger businessman zombies.

When a zombie sees an attractor relevant to its interests, it’ll shamble towards the attraction and beat upon it until either the zombie or the attractor is destroyed. If an attraction takes too much damage, it’ll break down and stop attracting zombies until the player fixes it for a small percentage of its original cost.

Aside from attractions and production machines, you can also add plants and other foliage to your yard. Besides the obvious utility of beautifying your lawn, plants obstruct the movement of zombies, allowing you to herd zombies and otherwise impede their movement, which gives your avatars more time to shoot them down. You can also customize the floor and walls of your house, as well as your own clothing and coloring, though these changes are purely cosmetic.

As in every Facebook sim, you’re encouraged to visit your friends and assist them in miscellaneous tasks. You can also trade ingredients, as well as request or send gifts. As you level, you can recruit more of your friends to help destroy zombies at your house, though currently there are no player attributes, leaving no reason to pick one friend over another. Accumulating more friends does unlock special items, though.

Zombie Party is a recent release, and so lacks polish and a smooth gaming experience. In addition to lag issues, clicking on specific items becomes difficult as the screen fills with more zombies and goodies. The game also seems to total up your zombie coins incorrectly, sometimes resulting in the total shown being significantly different from what you actually have. The localization is noticeably rough in a few dialogue boxes, and in general the game expresses some inconsistent behavior in how zombies appear, items appear, and in how quests resolve.

The actual gameplay may leave some dissatisfied as well; though it looks like a zombie game, Zombie Party plays more like a restaurant sim like Cafe World than Plants vs Zombies, with most of your time going to tending to production machines that fabricate weapons and harvesting the zombies that wander into your range of fire.

But Zombie Party may satisfy other players by sticking to the style of other popular games. Zombie Party’s art and gameplay have room to improve, but with its trendy theme and resemblance to popular titles, it could do well.

In the more than four months since Playdom was acquired by Disney, the company has been relatively quiet, releasing only one new game and letting its traffic numbers decline. Late last night we caught a brief look at the product of Playdom’s reevaluation of the social gaming market: Kogamu, a game unlike almost any other currently on Facebook.

Kogamu is effectively a lightweight MMO, although not because of the core gameplay, which will bring to mind arcade beat-em-ups like Captain Commando. All the action of the game takes place on side-scrolling screens occupied by randomly moving enemies that need to be beaten, shot, burned or otherwise killed off.

Groups of these screens, with exits in any of the four cardinal directions, make up areas in which your objective is to find and kill the enemy leader, sometimes as part of a quest. These different areas are tied together by the town, which is itself pretty sprawling, with numerous NPCs whose individualized dialogue indicate that Playdom intends for Kogamu to be a far-flung game, by Facebook standards.

So what makes Kogamu an MMO? That rarest of all things on Facebook: synchronous multiplayer. After completing the tutorial, you’re exposed to the game’s other players, who don’t necessarily have to be your friends. You can form small parties of these players to invade areas together, playing in real time. You can also duel other players, but unlike the rest of the game, this is entirely automated.

There’s plenty more about Kogamu that looks interesting. For instance, gameplay is not just open in the physical, movement-based sense; it looks like Playdom also intends for players to be able to engage in long gameplay sessions, with the only gating mechanism we can see being a diminutive energy bar hidden off in the corner (energy is used for the initial visit to an area).

That theory is supported by the player’s “salary”, a button on the screen that refills every five minutes with coins. As long as you’re around, you can collect the money. The first crafting recipe in the game is similar, a crystal that can be manufactured in five minutes to sell for profit.

There’s also a storyline of some sort, involving both high technology and magic, and a choice of classes — although right now only one, the Gunner, is available. We’ll have to wait to get better access before we can find out more.

Kogamu is not a small bet; the game likely took a significant investment to pull off, and the synchronous play will involve more server resources and balancing issues than the average game. There’s also the question of whether this kind of game will fly at all on Facebook.

Several months back, the answer might well have been “no”. But more recently, there are growing numbers of players for games of all stripes; even if Kogamu’s style and gameplay doesn’t appeal to the Western, middle-aged women who are supposedly social gaming’s core audience, it quite possibly could catch on with a younger, more international set.

Here’s a game that’s been milling about the top grossing Apple apps list for a while: Smurfs’ Village from Capcom Mobile. Free to play on the iPad and iPhone, it’s a simple little game that brings a combination of basic city-building and farming to the old television cartoon — though with its high quality visual and nostalgia, it’s a game that tends to stand out from most others of its genre.

As the game starts, the evil Gargamel has found the Smurf village and the Smurfs have scattered through the forest, abandoning their home. The player must rebuild their village in a new, hidden, location, while trying to bring back all the memorable characters from the cartoon. The first step, is to build up a Smurfy economy.

This is where farming mechanics come into play, as users construct gardens in which to grow a variety of crops. As per the standard, crops that take longer to grow yield greater reward. Should the player not return in time to harvest them (which is not an issue if users enable push notifications) they will spoil.

Of course, in order to tend to the garden, Smurfs will be necessary. This is where basic city-building comes in, as players must balance out a very basic population mechanic through the construction of little Smurf mushroom-huts. One hut equals one Smurf, and for each job being done — be it growing crops or building said huts — one of the populace will be used. Also, in order to keep players from just building dozens of huts, a maximum is implemented for each level.

As one might expect, leveling unlocks more than just more populace potential. It also allows for better decorative items and better crops. What is of particular interest, however, is that as the user reaches new level milestones, some of the more famous Smurfs begin to make appearances. Greedy, Jokey, Handy. All the Smurfs users have grown up with are present and accounted for.

When they make their “appearance,” players will need to send out one of their Smurfs to find them. Upon their return (which only takes a few minutes at low levels), the user will be able to construct that character’s own unique home. Once completed, it unlocks simple mini-games that can be played a limited number of times a day and will reward both experience and coin.

These mini-games are certainly tailored for a younger audience (as with the rest of the game), as they consist of very basic mechanics. As an example, Papa Smurf has users shaking a the iDevice to mix a potion until it is the right color, while the cook, Greedy Smurf has a timing game that tasks users with removing bakery treats from the oven before they burn. Additionally, the games are timed, and many give added bonus based on how well the user does.

Socially, players can add their friends and view their villages via a forest map. The level of interaction is very low, and only really consists of gifting. Keeping that in mind, Capcom has a nice extra that allows users to visit other random players of Smurfs’ Village to see what they are doing with their virtual space. Not everyone is a master designer, so there is also a great addition that allows players to view “Featured Villages,” that will take them to some of the nicest and best looking Smurf Villages in the game.

Another plus to the game is the visual style. Aside from the nostalgia and implementation of classic Smurf characters, the game actually looks very good; holding true to the original style of the cartoon (only brighter). Also, with all the Smurfs moving about and working, the town truly does feel alive and is a great title for younger audiences. Nevertheless, since its primary monetization is through the purchase of virtual currency (“Smurfberries”), it’s something to supervise. As noted by The Star, kids have a tendency to rack up credit card charges with this and other similar titles, which sometimes sends parents onto the internet in search of justice.

All in all, Smurfs’ Village is a good iDevice title that gives players a high quality, and cute, virtual space app that incorporates some of the more basic farming and city-building elements. Along with some simple social implementations, appearances of classic characters, and a wonderful visual, it’s a great game that will be suited to either kids or adults.

[Editor's note: Brenda Brathwaite is a game designer with over 20 years of experience and credits on classic titles like Jagged Alliance and the Wizardry series. She is currently creative director at social game developer LOLapps.]

The most exclusive game on Facebook is also the most lucrative and intense: the game design of the games themselves. For designers in the space, particularly those from the traditional game industry, game design has become its own game, complete with a leaderboard.

“Every night at midnight, I check AppData,” says John Romero, a veteran video game designer, consultant and lead designer of Ravenwood Fair. The site has become a de facto leaderboard for many developers, backed up by weekly top games lists.

Imbued by a deep love of game play, many designers view social game design, and the competition it creates with other designers, as a real-time strategy game, complete with in-depth stats and armies composed of coders, artists, animators and product managers. Indeed, our ability to respond to the current state of the game — both the actual game on Facebook and the larger meta game of game design — is critical.

Don Daglow, another veteran game designer, watches the numbers like a general. “Social game design is unique,” he says, “because you get a score for every facet of your performance every day. It’s like SEO on speed. How many first-time players came back the next day after the latest tutorial tweaks? What’s our DAU? How is monetization changing since we adjusted item prices? Did the test players like the new gorilla suit costume? All of business is a game, but the social games business has 24-hour scoreboards on every corner.”

As much as we respond to the player behavior in our games, game designers also must respond to the other “players” in the meta game of design, too. If one player makes a move, invents a particularly clever tactic or introduces a new mechanic or theme, the other “players” respond accordingly by trying out the move themselves, watching their ARPU or doing recon behind enemy lines. The mass proliferation of games about farming, cooking, and running resorts serve as perfect examples.

The idea of game design as a game in itself first occurred to me in an active, front-of-the-brain kind of way when I was on stage at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco with fellow game designers Steve Meretzky, VP of game design at Playdom, Brian Reynolds, chief game designer at Zynga, and Noah Falstein, president of The Inspiracy. We were there to talk as video game veterans who had entered the social game space. As the room began to fill, we talked of the things we’ve talked of for the decades we’ve known one another, but there was something else there, too: a new gamestate between us.

Brian was the obvious current leader at Zynga, and every day, his numbers just kept rising. As we talked of the games we were working on, our numbers and, in a veiled way, our future plans, it quickly became apparent that our conversation had all the earmarks of hardcore board game players yapping about their current gamestate while keeping their next move carefully guarded. That we four actually do regularly play board games together made the comparison all the more obvious, amusing and interesting. “Finally, game design is a game,” I said to the audience. It was promptly tweeted and retweeted dozens of times.

Says Falstein, “I look at my design job partly as a social status issue with my fellow designers. I want to improve the best of their games’ features while adding my own innovations, thereby earning status points at our next board game party, as well as earning RMT equivalents for my client – and therefore, me too.” Meretzky even jokingly alluded to the resource management that happens behind closed doors. “I beg my co-workers for resources. After asking four or five times, I often have everything I need to complete a task!” The rush and instant feedback is particularly exciting for game designers entering the space after years in the traditional AAA console game industry.

“Good games have regular feedback loops and social game development has these in spades,” says John Passfield, creative director at 3 Blokes Studios. “The majority of time in traditional game development is spent building a game behind closed doors which is more like training for the Olympics. Whereas social game development puts you smack in the middle of a full season where you’re constantly adjusting your game by listening to your coach (product manager), watching the other team and playing to the fans. It’s about being in the moment, not preparing for the moment.”

That moment, that hour and that day, each allows for iteration and tweaking of the meta-game state and a hopeful resultant climb in DAU. Quick to compare it to his own game, Reynolds said, “Every week I  harvest my features and plant some more, and then we run around collecting all the doobers!”

From a game designer’s perspective, it is a wonderful, exciting time to be a “player” in the game of game design. The play space feels wide open, like a game of Civilization Revolution only a few minutes in, with lots of room to explore and many things to discover. Games are being made with small teams about unique topics for new audiences, and in many ways, say the game industry vets, it feels like 1981 again. It is good, too, that we remember 1983, the year of the North American video game crash, and can adjust our strategy accordingly.

Farming games are one of the older genres of social games on Facebook, and as the declining numbers have shown with top title, FarmVille, the genre has lost steam. However, a farming game from Plarium is actually growing. The app is Farmandia, and despite sticking to many standard mechanics, its user base has slowly climbed to over 703,000 MAU.

Most players are familiar with the farm routine by now: plow land, plant crop, wait, harvest, and repeat. From vegetables, to fruit, to vibrant flowers, everything is presented in a more 3D and “realistic” style than other examples of the farming genre. Other basics present include harvesting animals and trees on a daily basis.

Another fairly common mechanic implemented within Farmandia is the concept of functional buildings. While most structures are mere decoration, “factories” will allow the processing of one product to another (e.g. a mill turns wheat into wheat flour) for extra profit. This is a mechanic also seen in games such as Country Life.

Additionally, players can also raise income with more exotic animals such as camels or buffalo. No the latter doesn’t produce wings, but most of these stranger choices create some form of harvestable fabric that can be processed with the above noted factories. One of particular interest is the panda, who grants the user, on a bi-daily basis, a “Surprize Chest” that can contain coins, experience, decorative gifts, or even the virtual currency, Diamonds.

Like most social games nowadays, virtual currency is still the primary monetization method and the gate for many of the game’s best items. However, it is Plarium’s virtual currency reward system that is likely one of the biggest contributors to its growth. Players don’t have to fumble around with offers and ads to earn it, but actually acquire it within the game itself. Beyond a level up reward, players actually receive Diamonds for returning to the game on a regular basis, a feature that probably contributes significantly to the title’s near 100,000 DAU.

There is also a nice collection element inspired by games from Zynga and others, called “Crafts.” As players harvest different types of products, they collect ingredients to food products such as a pizza (cheese, ketchup, flour, and bacon are needed). Upon completion of the Craft, more virtual currency is rewarded. There is even an added photography Craft that tasks users to snap a picture of various butterfly species that randomly wander into one’s space. Though there is no actual camera tool, the cursor will contextually change itself to one when this event occurs. To add on to this, the game also has an “Awards” system with tasks to accomplish (e.g. process 15,000 farm products) that grant the same Diamond rewards.

Socially, Farmandia has the standard, visitation of friends’ farms. Of course, one doesn’t fertilize their crops, they “water” them instead. It’s an important distinction to make. The only other noticeable social play, aside from leaderboards and gifting, are the few buildings that require friends to “help” (via clicks) build, such as a tequila factory (salud!).

At its core, Farmandia really isn’t any better or worse than most other farming games currently on the market. It has a different look, with some rather outlandish animals and buildings, that some might find more appealing. But the biggest reason behind its growth is probably the rewards it grants to players, which aren’t enough to truly give anyone a significant advantage, but certainly sates the appetite and is a lot less obnoxious than jumping through offer and advertisement hoops.

Zynga is the big story on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users, but Playdom and CrowdStar definitely play a part as well. The top app is CityVille, which is now up to 22 million MAU — a measure that’s actually not visible on this list, since Facebook’s reporting was running a bit behind at time of writing.

We gave CityVille plenty of room earlier this morning in an analysis of its growth. Here we’ll leave it at noting that FarmVille and FrontierVille have added another 1.6 million MAU to Zynga’s total, which had dropped below 200 million MAU before CityVille (it’s now over 210 million). Several weeks from now, we’ll start to see whether CityVille is actually cannibalizing players of other Zynga games.

Here’s the full list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	12,941,177	+12,276,238	+1,846%
2.	FarmVille	54,528,558	+933,544	+2%
3.	FrontierVille	30,393,785	+678,369	+2%
4.	City of Wonder	7,520,929	+576,514	+8%
5.	Die Herausforderung der Städte	534,608	+526,662	+6,628%
6.	Mighty Pirates	1,441,254	+516,089	+56%
7.	Game of Truth	2,360,184	+471,422	+25%
8.	Ravenwood Fair	4,933,184	+464,738	+10%
9.	Vegas City	3,936,761	+437,770	+13%
10.	德州撲克(中文版)	4,030,139	+422,730	+12%
11.	MindJolt Games	10,412,720	+416,310	+4%
12.	Epic Fighters	1,508,391	+359,836	+31%
13.	Bar World	1,454,459	+347,913	+31%
14.	Games	6,557,290	+344,156	+6%
15.	Island God	2,308,500	+299,233	+15%
16.	Farm Bonuses	604,307	+296,713	+96%
17.	Millionaire City	13,074,212	+285,207	+2%
18.	Monster World	5,766,022	+247,801	+4%
19.	Pool Master 2	536,953	+234,246	+77%
20.	超級職場 — 超人氣！免費休閒養成遊戲！	437,959	+230,101	+111%

City of Wonder is recovering some of the users it lost after Disney acquired Playdom and stopped advertising its new subsidiary’s properties. We’re seeing a few other signs of activity from Playdom lately, including Social City Europe, a localized version of Social City that the developer spun off a couple weeks ago.

Mighty Pirates is the CrowdStar game on the list, with about half a million new MAU. The Pirate-themed RPG has grown more slightly than some other CrowdStar titles, but it was also released in a very rough state; now that some updates have gone in, it looks like it might do well.

One point to note is that Digital Chocolate appears to finally be slowing down a bit, with only Island God and Millionaire City appearing at relatively low positions. While DC was previously gaining several million MAU each week, it only picked up 1.3 million during the past week, and its daily active user count has stabilized at 4.1 million.

If CityVille were an actual city, it would now be the world’s second largest. Zynga’s newest game edged over 22 million monthly active users this morning, just eleven days after launching.

It’s often said that the days of jet-fueled app growth on Facebook are over, a common wisdom that is invalidated only by Zynga, which also saw FrontierVille rapidly grow to over 20 million players earlier this year. CityVille is far faster than FrontierVille; in June, when the latter was only 12 days old, we clocked it at 7.4 million MAU.

In fact, Zynga’s claim just a few days after launching CityVille that the game is its fastest-growing ever have proven to be quite correct.

Even when Facebook’s viral channels were vulnerable to any use developers could dream up, Zynga’s top growers like FarmVille, PetVille and FishVille only grew about half as fast as CityVille. The quickness with which Zynga was willing to crown CityVille its best-ever suggests that it had a good idea of how CityVille’s growth might unfold.

The broad strokes are pretty visible. We can see four major reasons for CityVille’s growth:

Cross-promotion

Although all game developers now engage in some form of cross-promotion, Zynga took promotion for CityVille far beyond the usual top-bar ad network. Although its efforts did start there: in Zynga’s huge, 200 million plus network, CityVille is the only Zynga game (other than the one that you’re currently playing) with an oversized button displaying its full name.

More additive to growth, there has been heavy promotion between FarmVille and CityVille. When you’re playing CityVille, it asks you to email FarmVille friends and encourage them to play; when you’re playing FarmVille, your top neighbor is now Sam, a character that pops up a link for CityVille.

Localization and international growth

During its preview of CityVille, Zynga pointed out that CityVille is the first game it has really put effort into localizing for an international audience (with the exception of the Chinese-language version of Texas Hold’em). The languages it translated to are strictly European: Spanish, French, Italian and German, which have somewhere between 100 and 200 million native speakers on Facebook.

But the international audience that Zynga is tapping goes far beyond Facebook. Although it’s too early for us to break out CityVille’s demographics with any accuracy, a look at the game’s various boards and reviews shows large numbers of Pacific Rim users in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as eastern European users whose native languages weren’t included.

International users could well be the biggest reason that CityVille has grown faster and larger than past Zynga titles, especially in the Asian region, where Facebook users are more likely to be active gamers. Facebook’s growth took off this year, leaving American users at around a quarter of the total population now, a trend we’ve been closely tracking with our Inside Facebook Gold subscription service.

Given recent signs, it’s easy to imagine a new normal of international users driving growth. Zynga probably will break out its specific numbers, but for a view into another popular game, check out the LOLapps slides for Ravenwood Fair that we posted earlier in December, which show over two-thirds of all traffic coming from points abroad.

More professional appearance and operation

Facebook games have clearly progressed both technically and artistically since FarmVille showed the huge potential of the genre, but this progress has been uneven. Many developers are better in one or the other field, and new games show much larger differences in appearance and performance than would titles released concurrently in the traditional games space.

Both matter. Starting with the technical side of games, it’s accepted practice to release buggy games and address issues over time. The downside is that major glitches suck the wind out of early growth. CityVille had a few early problems that we saw, but they were quickly fixed; in general the game loads faster, and performs better, than most competitors. Besides taking months before release to iron the problems out of CityVille, Zynga has likely made other sacrifices in this area — think of the all day and night crunches common in the traditional game industry when titles are about to be launched. Anecdotally, we’ve heard large numbers of employees have been staying late at Zynga.

In terms of visual production values, CityVille again sets a higher bar than most games. This can mean a great deal in getting a player hooked in and sending out invites to friends, as we covered in more depth in a recent guest post.

Working the system

The hardest quantity to measure is how much Zynga has pushed Facebook’s viral channels. Some examples of this are in evidence very early in the game. Consider the chocolate quest that comes up in the mid tutorial. Facebook policies clearly prohibit developers from incentivizing use of communication channels, but CityVille makes no effort to hide what it’s doing. This quest has stayed in my queue since launch:

Zynga is hardly alone in continuing to push to use viral channels despite Facebook’s efforts at control. The question is how many viral points Zynga is reaching out through — with the game being regularly modified post-launch, it’s difficult to establish a reliable count.

It’s also somewhat unclear how much such efforts can contribute to growth, since for most people these posts will appear through sidebar notifications rather in their feed. Many developers now say gifting and direct invites are major sources of growth, but not necessarily posts like the chocolate quest.

What we do know is that Zynga is a master of viral growth, having honed its technique through a succession of Facebook’s biggest games.

Later we’ll see if someone of Zynga’s other efforts are working, like the daily email blast it sends out asking players to come back for their bonus. At CityVille’s scale, email campaigns are expensive, so if Zynga keeps up the effort we’ll probably know that it’s having success. This, too, can be additive to growth, but not as clearly as the above reasons.

The last point to note here is that CityVille’s current growth puts it on a trajectory to exceed 30 million MAU this week, something that no game has done since Cafe World last December. After that, the next ceiling to break through is FarmVille’s current 54 million MAU — but whether that is possible, we’ll leave it to the coming weeks to show.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Facebook— tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, December 6th, 2010

• BandPage Cruises Up This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Games by MAU
• Facebook Profile Redesign Will Coax More Data From Users: An In-Depth Review
• New Reports, More Data at Inside Facebook Gold
• Developer Roadmap Update: November Rollup Migration Coming December 12
• ThinkEquity Says It Advised Peanut Labs Deal
• Loopt Tries to Adapt Around Facebook’s Places With a Richer Interface

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

• Webtrends Brings Drag-and-Drop Interface and Ads API Integration to its App Creation Services
• Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Harry Potter, TV, Zynga and Rihanna – and Wikileaks
• How the New Profile Redesign Will Affect Facebook Monetization
• The Current Disadvantages of Merging a Place With a Page on Facebook
• How the Redesigned Profile’s Recently Tagged Photos Panel Can Be Abused

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

• Involver Releases Social Markup Language for Efficient Facebook App Creation
• Photo Tagging Helps Apps Ascend This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Apps by DAU
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Playdom, Kabam, Playfish, & More
• Facebook Launches a Mobile Applications Privacy Dashboard for m.facebook.com
• Facebook Tests Full Text Comment Stories in the Recent Activity Feed
• Facebook CTO Bret Taylor to Discuss Facebook’s 2011 Platform Priorities at Inside Social Apps

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

• As Facebook Expands Offices, A Look at Its Latest Job Listings
• Facebook Platform Dialogs Now Auto-Optimize For a User’s Device
• Facebook Shows Application Requests in the Notification Channel in Potentially Significant Test
• Facebook Announces Hacker Cup Engineering Competition

Friday, December 10th, 2010

• Likes, Bonuses and Page Managers Are On This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
• Comparison: Cardpool and Plastic Jungle Exchange Facebook Credits for Gift Cards
• Platform Update: OAuth 2.0 Migration, Open Graph Tags for Video and Audio
• Latest Update to Facebook’s Official Stats Shows Surge in Off-Site Traffic
• Facebook Roundup: Privacy, Community Council, DST, South Korea, Email Importing, and Disney
• Google’s Eric Chu to Discuss Android’s 2011 Social Platform Plans at Inside Social Apps

The Inside Network Job Board is 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 Playdom, Kabam, Playfish, Storm8, and Ubisoft.

• Social Game Design Lead (San Francisco, CA)
• Art Director (Mountain View, CA)
  
• Senior Game Designer (Mountain View, CA)

• Senior Product Manager, Payments & Monetization (Redwood City, CA)
• Business Intelligence Quantitative Analyst (Redwood City, CA)

• Head of Acquisition Marketing (Redwood City, CA)

• Users Relations Associate (Redwood City, CA)

• Lead Artist (San Francisco, CA)
• Producer (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.

January 25th | San Francisco

As we announced recently, Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco.

Today we are excited to announce that Google’s Eric Chu, Group Manager of Android, will be joining us for a fireside chat on Android’s 2011 social roadmap at Inside Social Apps. Social mobile applications, especially games monetizing through virtual goods, have seen rapid growth over the last year. Now that there are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day, developers are increasingly investing in building applications for the Android ecosystem.

With the rise of Facebook and third party mobile social platforms, what will Android’s approach to supporting social application developers in 2011? How should developers think about what to expect from Google in the year ahead? We’ll discuss Android’s 2011 social platform plans in-depth at Inside Social Apps .

Who’s Speaking?

At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, executives and experts from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social games and apps.

We’re honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
	Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal		Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)
	Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity		Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network

Key topics for the day will include:

• Growth and User Aquisition on the Facebook Platform
• New and Alternative Social Platforms: Where Do Opportunities Lie?
• Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms
• M&A Landscape for Small & Midsize Developers
• Monetization on Facebook in a Credits World

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Register Now

A limited set of “Early Admission” tickets is available through Friday, December 17 at a special price of $299. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register now.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco at Inside Social Apps!