As far as tower defense games go, Tweet Defense is still fairly standard. Players choose from 10 different maps and construct various towers to try to take down enemies before they get from Point A to Point B. As expected, towers vary in strength, abilities, and cost: Some are cheap with high rates of fire, some do area of effect, some are short range, but powerful, and others boost whatever defenses you have currently up. However, each tower has a unique, garage-built look that adds a bit of flare to this basic gameplay.

Conversely, the enemies, in this case, zombies, come in their own odd shapes and forms. This includes the basic Sneakie zombie that attacks in hordes, the hard to kill, and overweight Blubberbie zombie, and borderline uncouth Mombie that spits out two baby zombies (called Zuppies) when she dies. Unfortunately, there are only five types of zombies, but with a zany, cartoon style, they are all amusing to watch.

Beyond visual style, Tweet Defense also increases the difficulty of the game through the maps themselves. Most of the time, these types of games have a set path that the player can easily see, with towers placed around it. In this app, harder maps have no such luxury, and towers can be placed anywhere. Normally, this might not mean anything, but in Tweet Defense, should a tower be in a zombies way, they’ll just plow right through, destroying it in the process.

Quickly, the app becomes a game of strategic placement and money management. In regards to the latter, it works like virtually any other tower defense title. Towers can be upgraded or scrapped, and money is earned for each enemy slain. And don’t think upgrades are optional, as even though the game starts off easy, things can quickly get out of hand and the player even more quickly overrun.

With all this talk of the game design itself, it is easy to forget the main gimmick of Tweet Defense. Per its title, the game is actually connected directly to Twitter. No, this isn’t about tweeting achievements, but rather, a user’s social activity on the network itself, influencing gameplay. Once a user logs into their Twitter account, Tweet Defense actually picks up on your friends, followers, and the number of tweets you have made in order to grant users significant bonuses in the game.

To break it down, the more friends you have, the faster rate of fire your towers get. More followers will give you greater range. And the total number of tweets increases damage. In addition to this, there is a daily Booster that will grant random bonuses such as cheaper towers.

As unique as this use of Twitter is, Tweet Defense also incorporates the social platform OpenFeint to improve longevity with standard leaderboard rankings, and a fairly sizable list of achievements for players to earn and boast about.

Without a doubt, this iPhone app has one of the most curious and unique social integrations we have seen to date. Moreover, the game is actually fun and more than just a gimmick. Could Tweet Defense do more as a tower defense title as a whole? Absolutely. Even a little more variety in the zombies would by prudent in improving overall quality; especially considering the game’s visual style. Nonetheless, this is an app that show that, in game design, just looking at something in a different way can lead to more creativity.

The game is actually a compilation of four other smaller titles that are essentially digital remakes of games many girls probably played during their childhood: MASH, Lemon, Cootie Catcher, and Love.

Each game, more or less, plays the same way. Seeing as how it’s the first game on the list, MASH is probably the best place to start. All the game really does is take input information and composes it together into an amusing story. Users submit up to five picks for your crushes, cars, cities, jobs, wedding dress colors, and numbers. They can either type it in themselves, choose from a list, or simply touch “Emily’s Picks” for random choices in all. Then, you pick the “magic number” to start making the story, and after a few moments, an amusing tale of your future is displayed regarding who you’ll marry, where you’re honeymoon will be, and what you’ll drive.

As if that wasn’t amusing enough, the story can then be shared via email, Facebook, or Twitter. In fact, it also gets saved to an in-game journal and can be pulled up again at anytime, which means it can be shared again at anytime too.

As for the other games, Lemon focuses on names, body parts, cities, and things you can do with a lemon to make funny statements such as “Vanessa will heat Luis’s ankle in Budapest.” Cootie Catcher is a virtual version of those paper fortune telling toys that will answer a yes or no question based on what numbers and colors (typically written on the toy itself) are picked. And Love is a simple mini-game that asks for your name and your crush’s name and “calculates” your percent chance for love.

Visually, the game fits very well with its target demographic of young girls. It’s full of overly cute drawings saturated in an almost storybook color scheme (not to mention the palette is mostly pinks, violets, and soft yellows). To further the appeal to this audience, Emily’s Girl Talk even allows users to earn stickers (sort of like trophies) just by playing the game.

Frankly, for what it is, and for those it is made for, Emily’s Girl Talk is a great app to have at only $0.99. A lot more has been spent on a lot less. That said, however, it doesn’t come very recommended for girls that have nosy little brothers, as unlike a diary, this app doesn’t have a lock.

The game uses ngmoco’s Plus+ platform, but while that feature plays a strong role in the game’s social prowess, it is hardly the focal point. Best described as an online, multiplayer marriage of charades and pictionary, Charadium is a social app all on its own.

Using either WiFi or 3G, players connect with other app users (this can also be limited to just friends) and play against one another in full games of 15 rounds (don’t worry, there is an option for quick games too). One person will draw, and the others guess. If you’re on the guessing end, the makeshift artist will begin to draw something, pictionary-style, based on a mystery word that only they know. Given the standard iPhone keyboard, players will type their guesses until someone gets it right, earning them points.

Obviously, ease of guessing the right word often depends on the artistic prowess of the person drawing, so the game does try to help out as needed, eventually displaying how many letters are in the word, filling in letters, and auto-correcting misspelled words.

At the end of a round, a new artist is selected. In this case, the mystery word is presented to them and could be something as simple as “tea,” or more ambiguous like “emptiness.” From here, the player uses the touch screen to draw and a basic palette to change their pen color. Granted, it’s not Photoshop, but it’s enough to get the job done. Moreover, points are awarded to the person drawing based on how quickly their work is deciphered.

The Plus+ integration include in-game achievements to add further longevity (though since its multiplayer, it already has a hefty lifespan), as well as leaderboards. The game’s results can be shared with others via email, Twitter, and Facebook. You can also view game log results and your drawings at Charadium.com using a “room code” granted at the end of each game.

Frankly, the game is a ton of fun and a great adaptation on classic analog games. In fact, the only complaint to be had doesn’t even come from the design side at all. As with most online games that give any sort of user control (even something as simple as chat), there are the random, immature morons that have to come in and draw offensive and obscene content. Thankfully, you can boot them out of games, but it is still very obnoxious.

Iif you’re looking for a simple, yet extremely fun and addictive game, Charadium comes highly recommended at $0.99.

Gowalla and Loopt Use Check-Ins to Help Haiti –

In line with Loopt’s charitably, another location-based app, Gowalla has also launched a check-in charity campaign dubbed “Hearts for Haiti.” The event will take place on Monday, February 8th in the San Francisco Bay Area, and whenever someone checks-in at one of three specific locations (noted below), at specific times, Gowalla will donate $50 to the American Red Cross in that person’s name. The goal is to raise $20,000.

• 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Emeryville at 5959 Shellmound Street, Suite 85
• 2:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Mill Valley at 88 Throckmorton Avenue
• 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Barenaked Ladies concert at Infusion Lounge

AppFund To Seed iPad Apps – CNET and E! Online co-founder, Kevin Wendle has partnered with MusicNation to form the AppFund, with the sole goal to help fund entrepreneurs and startups that wish to launch applications on the new Apple iPad (or any other tablet, for that matter). The investment amount will range anywhere from $5000 to $500,000 depending on the complexity of the app. However, proposals for funding are encouraged to be made immediately in order to be part of the first wave of iPad applications this summer.

[via TechCrunch]

Celebrate Valentine’s with Wizard101 – The free-to-play MMO, Wizard101 will be bringing some special Valentine’s virtual goods to the wizarding world this month. The goods will be purchased via the game’s virtual currency from a non-player character, Valentina Heartsong, but as a special promotion, the developers will be hosting a special contest that will give away some of said items for free.

All players have to do is follow @Wizard101 on Twitter, and each weekday, until the 12th, a random follower will be contacted through the social network to claim their free virtual gift.

Civilization on Facebook – Though it was announced in October, Sid Meier’s Civilization isn’t quite ready for Facebook yet. Publisher, Take Two, told Variety that it’s going to still be a little while until the popular franchise makes its way onto the social network. But fear not, as they also said that the game’s open beta ought to be “sometime in June.”

Star Trek Online Virtual Goods – The highly anticipated MMO, Star Trek Online launched with an interesting surprise: Apparently, developer Cryptic Studios and publisher Atari are bringing some very hefty virtual goods to the table. Currently, players can purchase two special races from the game’s in-game “C-Store” using the virtual currency, Cryptic Points. For 240 Cryptic Points – $3.00 – players can purchase the Federation Klingons race, and for 80 Cryptic Points – $1.00 – the Federation Ferengi race. Currently, however, the virtual currency can only be purchased in increments of 500, or $6.25.

TrialPay Gets in on Valentine’s Day – Offers company TrialPay is running a little something special for Valentine’s Day as well. Currently, the company is offering new and existing partners a $250 Amazon.com gift card. In order to qualify, new partners must complete 30 transactions via TrialPayduring the month of February, while existing partners must launch a new Valentine’s Day Campaign and complete 50 transactions.

Assassin’s Creed II Multiplayer Coming to the iPhone – While an iPhone rendition of Assassin’s Creed II has been noted to come out in early February, word is that Ubisoft is to release another, online version, Assassin’s Creed II: Multiplayer. Soon, players will be able to use Wi-Fi to compete with up to three other players in a deadly game of hide-and-go-seek as each assassin tries to kill the others before being killed themselves. What is most interesting, however, is that the game will feature not only a built-in friend’s list but Facebook integration as well that will allow the posting of up to 24 achievements to their social networking feed.

[via Kotaku]

This well-designed, Flash-based game is especially notable for pushing boundaries between social and traditional online gaming. It not only tasks players with the MMO-style goal of bringing order to a chaotic vampire-run city, it also has players doing less intense activities, like building and caring for their avatars, and decorating a living space.

To begin, just go to the game site and click play. You’ll be asked to log in using Facebook Connect. This means you don’t need to go through a separate, cumbersome sign-up process. This is the first of many ways that the game uses Connect.

Each player starts out as a new vampire in a city called New Valencia. You and a friend have just been attacked and killed  by a group of vampires while walking through “Central Park.” You’re immediately asked a multiple choice question that will determine which of five themed vampires houses you will become a part of. Like many other role-playing games, each theme provides you a different set of options throughout the game.

Once past this introduction, you begin the game: you crawl out of your freshly made grave and are promptly greeted by a vampire quest giver that teaches you the basics of combat and gives you the task of slaying a zombie.

Combat is simple enough with a mere point and click interface. The avatar transforms into a fiercer-looking creature and a combat menu with various abilities appears. As players fight, they use basic attacks until bigger and better ones become available (i.e. after the player does three bites they might be able to drain blood), and as they level up, they unlock more advanced techniques for later encounters.

As far as progression goes, it follows the standard World of Warcraft format of choose quest, do quest, deliver quest to garner experience; also like Warcraft and other MMORPGs, players can eventually level up various professions such as anatomy, gathering, and so on to make items for use.

Early on, most of the quests are tasks that merely have you talking to objects and people to learn the premise of the story and how to use various basic features. This is wonderful on many levels, because it not only lets the user ease into the game world, but there is a lot of lore going on in New Valencia. If you’re interested in knowing more, you can always look at Ohai’s lore and backstory pages, but in a nutshell, over the ages in which New Valencia has existed, various bloodlines have formed, eventually turning into the modern day houses that the player joins. The issue, however, is that for the longest time, the vampires lived off of “hema,” or artificial human blood, and now, this tradition of not feeding off of humans is fading (hence the introduction), and the city faces civil war.

Like virtually all MMOGs, this game has equipment that can be used to better your character’s performance in battle. However, you can also purchase clothing simple for aesthetic expression, and as an added bonus, your friends will see what you buy as well.

Beyond clothing, City of Eternals even gives you the option to fully redecorate the house you are given at the start of the game. This isnt’ to be confused with the “Vampire House” (your chosen faction), but is actually a virtual space that you can not only customize, but your friends can visit as well. In fact, this is yet another pleasant addition since our first play. Perhaps it hadn’t been added yet, or it had a level requirement, but early renditions did not seem to allow redecoration (or at least not in a manor we could decipher).

Items are purchased in one of two ways, either using an in-game currency called Rubies or a purchased virtual currency called Ohais.

The city is pretty sizable, so it does take some time to find the vendors you’re looking for. Note that there’s an instant teleport to the housing vendor, part of the new update to the game that the company rolled out recently. Most items costing Rubies require an abundance of them, while those costing Ohais are relatively cheap. Useful items such as health potions and bags for inventory space also follow this rule, coaxing players to advance themselves faster at the cost of real money.

The last major feature worth mention is yet another social one: Minions. Yes, you can employ your Facebook friends as your personal minions. What sort of jobs can they do? Oh this is good: Why, they can be your accountant, a bodyguard, or oh yes, a concubine or boy-toy. Once hired, your minions can then go out and do little missions for you at the cost of Rubies. Each mission will take X amount of hours to complete but will earn you special items and double the money back or more. As you play and level up, more minion slots open up for further jobs, which is good, because they are then placed in what’s called the “Tower of Tribute.” In short, as they play, they earn you points that are put towards special rewards that you can use yourself.

This Minion feature, too, is new and improved. In our previous look, it was significantly simplified to just drop lists and basic menus (sort of like a basic Mafia Wars-type of game). Furthermore, the Tower of Tribute did not exist (which really is a great addition). Unfortunately, it did look like the best minion job had been removed: We could no longer make our Facebook friends succubi. Luckily, our disappointment was short lived when we were informed that it was merely just moved to a level four minion job.

With no downloads, no accounts, and personalized Facebook integration, there really is nothing to complain about with City of Eternals on the game play end. For a free MMOG, it is actually a lot of fun and got in the way of finishing this review. Honestly, the only gripe that can be had is that the visuals are a little simplistic. The animations are a little stiff and awkward looking, and more visual variety within the city would be more than warranted.

In the end, City of Eternals is a lot of fun and very deep for a free – not to mention social – MMO. Whether you play through networking, combat, or through crafts, this is something to feed everyone’s social dark side.

April 20 | San Francisco

2007 was the year social applications were born. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, and soon after similar platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible. Three years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry.

Now, in 2010, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Who Is Speaking?

We’re excited and honored to announce the following initial set of 20 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon

More speakers and a full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information.

Register Now

A limited set of 20 “early announcement” tickets is now available at a special announcement price of $149. This price will change when these first 20 tickets are sold out. Space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

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

Square Enix May Go Social:

Zynga Players Help Haiti: Though it is not possible for everyone to head to Haiti and help out, Zynga game players are doing their part, having raised $1.5 million in five days. More than 300,000 individuals contributed to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) by purchasing limited edition virtual goods within FarmVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker. 100% of all proceeds went directly to WFP, with $1 million coming from FarmVille alone.

TAITO Chooses OpenFeint for Social iPhone Apps: TAITO Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Square Enix and major Japanese mobile game developer, has chosen Aurora Feint’s OpenFeint platform to empower its mobile titles with social capabilities. TAITO is also a major partner to one of Japan’s mobile social network operators, DeNA- creator of Mobage-Town – with whom Aurora Feint also partnered with last October.

$1.38 Billion Invested into Online Game and Virtual Goods Firms: The downtrodden economy didn’t hurt everyone as a recent report, the 2009 Virtual Goods Investment Report by Engage Digital Media, is stating that the past year tallied somewhere around and over, $1.38 billion in investments for online games and virtual goods-based businesses. The number of companies said to have received investment is at 87, but of that total, 29 did not disclose the amount of money involved. These values were not actually included in the $1.38 billion estimate.

gWallet Launches Early-Stage Venture Fund: Another announcement this past week came from virtual currency monetization company, gWallet. The company will be launching a new, early-stage venture fund called gWallet Ventures to invest in social gaming companies as well as attempt to drive new innovations within the social gaming realm. Currently, investments are said to range from $100,000 to $1 million per company and will also be tied with the monetization options gWallet already provides.

ISN Virtual Worlds Announces Oasis Foundation Virtual World Project: Thursday, ISN Virtual Worlds announced the first steps in rolling out the Oasis Foundation Virtual World Project (the Oasis Foundation is an Italian nonprofit organization focused on the medial care of the elderly and disabled). The virtual world will be built on top of the Second Life Grid and will be intended to provide the elderly with a form of community interaction.

According to ISN CEO, Mattia Crespi, the project already has $3.5 million in funding, which will not only pay for the development, but management as well that will consist of staff from ISN, Oasis, and even the community. Furthermore, the world will contain learning sessions for the “Oasis Virtual University” and will hold content such as producing virtual goods, culture and releigion, machinima, and even family assistance and help from psychologists.

AppStoreHQ Uses Twitter for App Discovery: With over 100,000 applications, AppStoreHQ is looking to help people discovery new and interesting iPhone applications. via Twitter. By looking at Twitter’s public stream, it will actually make recommendations based on who is tweeting about what in regards to iPhone applications. In a nutshell, every time anyone links (in a positive light) to an app it is treated like a vote, thus the more apps are tweeted about, the more recommended they become. Unfortunately, for the system to work properly, keywords such as “iPhone” or “AppStoreHQ” must be within the actual tweet to find it.

To further prune down recommendations, the system also looks to see what games you might be tweeting about. Based on how many apps you tweet about, the recommendations become more specific to what it determines as something you might like. Moreover, clicking app links as well as favoriting them on AppStoreHQ will also affect  how recommendations are made.

CrowdFlower Raises $5 Million: CrowdFlower, a provider of “labor-on-demand,” announced that it has closed a $5 million Series A round led by Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company makes use of what it calls “machine learning algorithms” to provide quality control to crowdsourcing, making it easier and less expensive for companies to find online labor. With the new funding, the company is looking to expand its repertoire of client solutions as well as provide its services worldwide.

GunMan is a game that makes direct use of the iPhone’s built in camera, superimposing a gun scope and minimalistic interface, and combines these with color recognition technology to take the concept of shooter games out of the virtual world and into the real one. Players can choose from three different game modes: One vs. One, Multiplayer (four players via WiFi), or Pro. When playing either of the first two, participants select a time duration of either two minutes, five minutes, or unlimited and the shirt color of your enemy. This is where the magic really begins as the game can actually recognize the colors of red, green, blue, gray, and white.

This is easily the coolest part of the game. If you claim that your enemy is wearing red, for example, if you pull the proverbial trigger with them in sight, you get a hit. Moreover, and despite our initial skepticism, this feature actually works phenomenally well with good lighting. What makes it even more fun is that every time someone gets hit, their iPhone vibrates and at the end of each game, players are able to not only see their accuracy and final scores, but it saves all of your shots and lets you Tweet your favorites.

The game also makes use of other iPhone technologies as well including shaking the device to reload and using pinch zooming to snipe distant opponents (though the game doesn’t actually inform you that this is possible). GunMan comes with a “Pro” mode that lets players run around and shoot 30 random shots at anyone around. Of course, this really only pans down to shooting random pictures, so it does get a bit old.

If there are any complaints to the game, it is that the color recognition is a bit sketchy in without really good lighting when indoors. It does still work most of the time, but not nearly as well as outside. Furthermore, if you don’t have the iPhone 3GS, the frame rate of the camera is a bit choppy and the image can become rather blurry when you’re whipping about trying to make a shot.

Nonetheless, the game is still a ton of fun if you have friends that own an iPhone, and seeing as how it is currently a free download, it is quite the bargain as well. Furthermore, according to the Shadowforce website, even cooler features are coming soon including location based features (like Foursquare), badges and achievements, leaderboards, and semi-automatic weapons and grenades. Whether or not such new features will be free is, of course, yet to be determined, but it certainly sounds fun, all the same.

Zynga Expands on its Sweet Seeds Program –

Habbo Adds Facebook Connect – The teen virtual world known as Habbo has long been popular among its target demographic. Now, users that also have a Facebook account will gain access to the social network through the virtual world. Players will be able to broadcast their Habbo activities and accomplishments through their Facebook feed, regardless of which of the 31 Habbo communities they are part of.

Sony’s Winter Charity Drive – Also in the giving spirit is Sony Online Entertainment. Until January 17th, players of the MMOs Free Realms, EverQuest, and EverQuest II may purchase a Triceratops pet, an Anklebiter doll, and a Bouncing Baby Panda Cub in each game respectively. Each item costs 500 Station Cash, and for each transaction $10 will be donated to the pediatric charity, Child’s Play.

[via Massively]

How Social Games are doing in Latin America – While the past few months have shown notable influxes from the Asian demographic in social gaming, we have also been seeing, on Inside Facebook, growth from Latin America. Though it is unfinished, a study from a Brazilian university is showing that in its first survey, of 250 Brazilian users (ages 18 – 35), has shown that 26% of those that joined Facebook did so because of its social games. Moreover, another 30% joined due to friends being on the social network. Of everyone, however, 86% stated that the games were what they enjoyed the most, and of said games FarmVille made up 35% of all Brazilians playing Facebook titles while Mafia Wars made up 26%.

[via DMLcentral]

Civilization On Facebook – Sid Meier’s masterpiece, Civilization has been expected on Facebook for some time now. Leading up to its release, we’ve been kept up to date on its progress by the developer himself, and the game’s Facebook page (Sid Meier’s Civilization Network). Thus far, the page has garnered over 50,000 fans, and to their elation, the wait may be coming to a close. Just this Tuesday, the fan page stated that an open beta may be expected sometime early in the new year.

Zynga Tests Mobile Notifications – According to TechCrunch, it looks like Zynga is going to expand the usability of its games collection by allowing mobile notifications via SMS. Players will be able to track what is happening in any Zynga game without having to log onto a social network like Facebook. It is currently only available for about 10% of the Zynga player population.

Become a Facebook Fan and Win Fabulous Prizes – Looks like mainstream MMO titles are making even greater use of the social graph these days as developer Funcom is looking to give away prizes to people that become friends, fans, or followers of their Facebook and Twitter accounts. The company will have two accounts for each of its major titles including Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, The Secret World, and Funcom itself. For each one that a user signs up for, they will be entered into a drawing to win prizes such as free game time, beta access to new expansions, and other, unannounced items.

gWallet Launches gLTV Platform – Going live this week was ad offer platform gWallet’s brand new gLTV. The new product is intended to add greater insight and accuracy in the measurement of social media analytics by allowing publishers to “measure and increase their lifetime value of users on their applications.” According to statements from the company, the gWallet platform can generate a gLTV metric on individual users. From here it is able to demonstrate exactly how to increase a “lifetime value of a user based on prior usage and transaction history.”

Answer Our Inside Social Games Weekly Trivia Question, Win a Free USB Drive from Surfpin – Tell us the correct answer to the following question before anyone else, and mobile payment company Surfpin will award you an 8GB Surfpin-branded USB drive in the shape of a credit card. The question, drawn from an article we published this week, is as follows: What is one possible reason that gaming applications have seen slower growth in the past couple of weeks? Send the answer to eric (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

Xbox Suits Up for the Holidays –

MOL Global Buys Friendster – While rumors about some sort of sale have been out there for awhile, Friendster has now officially been acquired by MOL Global, a division of online payments company MOL AccessPortal Berhad. The purchase price has not yet been disclosed but MOL is looking to combine its services with the existing Friendster platform to create a content distribution and e-commerce platform for the Asian market. Currently, MOL holds a network of 500,000 payment channels across 75 Asian countries, while Friendster has over 75 million users of the same demographic.

Gowalla Raises $8.4 Million – Location based mobile game/app, Gowalla looks to be doing well as it has just raised $8.4 million in a Series B round led by Greylock Partners. Other investors include Shasta Ventures, Maples Investments, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Gary Veynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, Jason Calacanis, and Chris Sacca. This brings the investment total for Austin-based company, Alamofire, to $10 million.

PlaySpan Releases VGMarket Digital Goods Study – PlaySpan and VGMarket recently completed its virtual goods study on user buying habits. The study surveyed 2,425 random individuals that made use of either the PlaySpan Marketplace, Spare Change, and/or the Ultimate Game Card. In a nutshell, the study noted that 80% of users make virtual goods purchases for themselves to use in game, with the other 20% gifting them. Furthermore, roughly 66% bought virtual goods once per month while 25% did so once a week. Of everyone, however, 7% made daily purchases and 12%, yearly.

Another curiosity was that most users will not purchases virtual goods from third parties. 42% refused to do so out of fear of getting their account closed while another 42% were afraid of scams. 9% just didn’t know they could.

The full report can be found here.

Sony Offers Players Virtual Goods Rewards – Sony Online Entertainment has launched Facebook pages Twitter accounts for its three big MMORPGs, Everquest (FB, Twitter), Everquest II (FB, Twitter), and Free Realms (FB, Twitter). In order to get players involved in these new pages, they have created the program, ConecDING, that will reward users with virtual goods when the social media pages reach a certain number of fans or followers.

There will be three milestones of 5000, 10,000, and 25,000. At each one, players of each game will be eligible to receive 250 in Sony’s virtual currency, Station Cash (SC), 250 SC and a virtual good worth10,000 SC, and 500 SC and an item worth 25,000 SC respectively. For Free Realms, the goods will be a House Frog and Small Dance Floor; for Everquest they will be The Tome of Friends and The Magic Lute; and for Everquest II it will be The Cloak of Pie and an unannounced item.

Virtual Currency Used to Fight Health Care Reform? – This past week a health insurance group called Get Health Reform Right was apparently sponsoring ad offers that were actually paying social games players in virtual currency to send letters to Congress that opposed the health care reform.

The Business Insider describes the act as “virtual astroturfing,” with astroturfing being the act of orchestrating a campaign yet disguising it as spontaneous public opinion.

YouWeb Invests into Social Gaming – YouWeb, founded by Oracle Internet executive Peter Relan, announced Friday that it is going to begin heavy investment into social gaming in 2010. The focus will be to jump start an entire “ecosystem” centered around its social gaming companies of CrowdStar, Aurora Feint/OpenFeint, and Sibblingz. All ready the “ecosystem” has many entreprenurial startups involved, but by the looks of things, they intend to concentrate the “efforts of entrepreneurs around the real opportunities using its perspective gained” from the aforementioned big three.

YouWeb also plans to host a Social Gaming Eco-System Summit at some point in the near future. It is here that it will clarify and outline these “plans” and “opportunities” for its companies.

Tonchidot Gets $4 Million for Augmented Reality Virtual Goods – Augmented reality, the combination of real world objects with virtual ones, is a growing space in the mobile field, but a Japanese startup by the name of Tonchidot is taking a new perspective on the matter. The company just landed $4 million in funding from DMC and ITOCHU Technology Ventures for a very diferent monetization concept. Based on early demonstrations, the technology could allow brick and mortar locations to sell virtual goods using the “Sekai Camera System.”

Mochi Media Surveys Flash Game Developers About Monetization – Among other results, 20% of developers said they make more than $1,000 a month on games. More here.

Answer Our Inside Social Games Weekly Trivia Question, Win a Free USB Drive from Surfpin – Tell us the correct answer to the following question before anyone else, and mobile payment company Surfpin will award you an 8GB Surfpin-branded USB drive in the shape of a credit card. The question, drawn from an article we published this week, is as follows: What type of game mechanic is being favored by a large game developer these days, to the exclusion of still-popular titles? Send the answer to eric (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.