Inside Social Games

There’s a new gang in town, but instead of tearing the place down, they seem to want to build it up. This week’s AppData list of most rapidly growing games still under a million players is ruled over by a set of town-building games, although a few other interesting entrants also made it on.

Besides the new faces, there are a few notable absences. Where is Gangster City, and what happened to Little Warrior and Band of Heroes? You won’t see them here; Playfish’s Gangster City is the standout, with over 100 percent growth during the week to 1.1 million players, but the others have also passed the fateful mark.

Here’s the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	My City Life	698,494	+535,098	+76.61
2.	Truth about friends	523,925	+523,784	+99.97
3.	Go to Hell	273,931	+257,768	+94.10
4.	MiniPlanet	558,648	+221,714	+39.69
5.	Sanalika	501,359	+147,149	+29.35
6.	Kingdoms of Camelot	670,480	+133,490	+19.91
7.	Jumping Dog	108,671	+108,655	+99.99
8.	Funflow	101,589	+101,414	+99.83
9.	Flowers for Friends	503,076	+100,625	+20.00
10.	SPP Ranch!	186,246	+89,777	+48.20
11.	Cité des nuages	618,950	+84,752	+13.69
12.	Spot The Difference	568,182	+81,769	+14.39
13.	COLLAPSE!	955,478	+77,955	+8.16
14.	Ninja Warz	874,625	+72,530	+8.29
15.	Street Rides	149,536	+65,715	+43.95
16.	SuperPocus	202,272	+65,242	+32.25
17.	Zapapa	185,326	+60,583	+32.69
18.	Social Pang	174,760	+55,756	+31.90
19.	Roulette Madness	132,832	+49,514	+37.28
20.	Happy Slots!	192,538	+47,450	+24.64

My City Life almost sounds more like an app for scheduling bouts of heavy drinking than a game. Its developer is an unknown, but the game appears fairly well built, if along standard lines; you start off with a handful of houses and an abbreviated strip of road and build from there, with the usual entreaties to invite friends.

It’s in good company with two games following close behind: MiniPlanet and Kingdoms of Camelot. There’s a bit of a “Sims” vibe going in the former, while the latter lets you enjoy the pseudo-slavery of medieval serfdom, with quests and fighting thrown in.

Number three is Go to Hell, a promotion for the new console game Dante’s Inferno. The gameplay on Inferno, by the way, is pretty great; but the Facebook game is a bit of a single-joke throwaway on the theme of sending friends and various Facebook Pages “to hell”. Players, not to be fooled, seem to mostly be sampling and moving on.

There’s one more worth mentioning: Funflow, at number eight. This isn’t a game, exactly; it’s instead a social gaming app built for game discovery and score keeping. It’s built by King.com, one of the internet’s larger gaming portals, which is apparently trying to find its way onto Facebook.

Zynga is partnering with Microsoft’s MSN Games site today and providing its hit game FarmVille using Facebook Connect. This is the first time a Zynga game has gone live on a destination gaming site, and the partnership will include more titles and game availability on Windows Live Messenger in the coming months. This is the first of what we expect will be several examples of social gaming driving the adoption of Facebook Connect across the web.

FarmVille, with around 75 million monthly active users, has been the breakaway social gaming hit on Facebook. While Zynga offers its games on many other social networks, it has only previously branched out to its own destination sites, like FarmVille.com. Like the game will on MSN Games, FarmVille.com uses Facebook Connect as its sole user identity service.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook

Allopass is the latest payment provider to go after the social networking and gaming markets, today announcing of a San Francisco office and a list of industry partners. But this is not another payments startup throwing their hat into the ring. The company is a subsidiary of Paris-based online conglomerate Hi-media Groupe, the owner of many web sites, an online advertising network, and the already-established Allopass service.

The publicly listed company operates in 9 European markets as well as Brazil and the US (and serves more than 60 in total), has more than 500 employees and brought in sales of €172.1million in 2009, or around $238 million in dollars. It intends to exert its weight against other payment companies, in a few different ways.

The first is application programming interface (API) aggregation for 9 different payment methods, like mobile, home-phone billing as well as pre-paid cards from other companies. The API can be used directly by companies, or by service providers like offer companies. Too many payment methods in one screen can cause paralysis, as Hi-media US’s chief executive Pooj Preena tells us, so the API lets developers choose the 4 to 6 that best fit the markets they are in. The company has also established relationships with many carriers, allowing it to compete against payment providers that have already gotten big in social gaming, like Boku and Zong.

The second way it competes is by using Hi-media’s balance sheet, as Preena explains: Because it has cash flow already it can do payouts quickly, in 7 to 10 days. Rivals are improving their payouts as well, but Allopass sees this short time frame as being especially attractive to the large number of small and mid-sized developers on Facebook and other platforms.

Finally, on a related note, developers can use Hi-media’s ad network to further promote their games.

Existing game clients include Bigpoint Games, Dofus, and Urban Rivals. The ones being announced today are a mix of games, social networks and offer providers

• Artix Entertainment
• Boomerang Networks
• Gambit
• gWallet
• Merscom Games
• OLX
• Peanut Labs
• Quepasa
• Sometrics
• Sonico
• TheBroth
• Viwawa
• Viximo
• Wadja

We’ll be tracking the company as it moves into the social gaming market. It’s definitely going to be an interesting year for payments in social games.

Not every game you play on Facebook needs to be about mafias, pet caring, farming or epic fantasy adventures. On the contrary, sometimes the simplest games can prove to be the most enjoyable. Sure, they may not be something you come back to often, or even at all, but for what they are, some of these simple apps are just the pick-me-up one needs to end a long day.

The first app is a little title called Foxie Jump from Fusion Creative Studios. In this arctic game, players control a 3D fox avatar with the sole objective already spelled out in the title. The fox, Foxie, is apparently in a dream where she jumps her way to the moon. Here is the trick: Players only get five jumps to do so.

The path upwards is littered with gems, eagles, and bats. Touching these will not only increase your score by a set amount, but provide you a much-needed vertical boost. Essentially, the game comes down to moving Foxie back and forth, with the mouse, to reach the next highest gem or critter before gravity takes over. If you miss, you can recoup with one of the five jumps, but once you run out and miss, the game’s over and you fall to the ground. Then you can see how you compare on the leaderboards.

It’s a simple game of who can get the highest score, but for whatever reason, it is extremely fun and addictive for a short while.

The second application isn’t, technically, a game in the truest sense, but it certainly provides as much amusement. This is actually a Polish title from the company, Mint Media. This European company specializes in advertising on social networks – namely, Facebook – using technology from German partner Ad-Tech to provide video, banner, mobile campaigns, and more. But perhaps this is why the company’s Facebook app, is along the lines of advertising people.

The application is called Ploteczki, and it’s a shame it’s only in Polish because it is quite funny. What it does is pull up random friends from your Facebook account and allows you to publish preset tabloid-like commentary to your feed. An example is “Pobdono wyjada wino Rona w supermarketach!” Translated, this comes out to be “ reportedly eats grapes in supermarkets.” To put an exclamation point on everything, the item comes with a very noticeable banner or random photograph reminiscent of said tabloids. Other publications can include banter such as so-and-so doesn’t wash their hands after using the toilet, so-and-so has a secret lover, and so on.

It goes to show that quality can come in all shapes and sizes. Just because something is simple or has a basic visual style, it doesn’t mean it’s not fun. It’s easy to make a game or an app look good. It’s not even that hard to make it complex. But to make it fun… now that takes a certain level of art.

Currently, Ploteczki is earning around 200,000 monthly active users (not surprising given its viral nature) while Foxie Jump has only a few hundred. Nonetheless, if you’re having a rough day, and you want a little smile, these are two apps definitely worth a play through or two… though you might want Google Translate open for the Polish one. Just a thought.

The first version of Sim City came out in 1989, but the concept continues to thrive these decades later. The most recent example is a quaint little Facebook application called Tiny Town from the developer Domisuto.

The premise of the game is that you are a giant construction worker, helping the mayor of Tiny Town to build up the city. When starting out, all that is available is the City Hall and a strip of road. Using a decent amount of starting money, players begin paving roads and placing buildings.

Each building must be constructed next to a road, so the user is tasked with moving about and laying out the city streets. It’s nothing too difficult and fairly intuitive, so it requires no real instruction. From here, it’s time to start plopping down some buildings and meeting the requirements demanded of your city.

These requirements are what actually determine a player’s level, and as they level up (done by meeting said requirements) new tasks, for the new level, are made available. When first starting out, the only real goal is to reach a certain population and open up X amount of jobs, with the amount needed viewable by mousing over a tool bar at the top of the screen.

Each house will allow for a stated amount of citizens to live there (i.e. the most basic, mobile home allows for eight individuals) with the more expensive and elaborate structures granting more. Buildings like gas stations or general stores will open up a set amount of jobs. Interestingly enough, the game doesn’t stop at just this.

The construction itself also turns into a time-versus-funding form of micromanagement as players have to choose how many workers to assign, which determines the cost of placing the structure and how fast it completes. Regardless, as housing and businesses are established, your city will grow and flourish.

As the user levels up further, more expensive demands fall upon their gargantuan shoulders. At level five, electricity and water become an issue, and at level 20, waste, education, and health enters the picture; all of which play a part in reaching the ultimate goal of making a city that supports 1 million citizens.

As one might expect, however, creating such a metropolis can become a bit pricey, so primary funding comes in automatically in the form of taxes (small amounts of funding also come from clicking on a new building after it has been completed). Periodically, the user needs to log in and cash a vault of taxes that will go into their spending fund before it is maxed out and cannot collect more. This is an interesting means of coaxing frequent returns for players and similar to how income works in Booyah’s MyTown 2.0.

It is also prudent to note that this isn’t the fastest means of income, so for those that do get into the game, there is always the option to purchase – via PayPal – the in-game currency (Coins), and, in the future, a virtual currency called “Domi Cash.”

Unfortunately, the virtual currency in this game is a bit obnoxious because of the whole “in the future” aspect to it. There are buildings that only cost Domi Cash, yet there is no way to obtain it at the moment, just the text “Coming Soon” when you mouse over the icon. This begs the question, why include it at all right now?

As a matter of fact, that question applies to a few other elements to Tiny Town as well. The biggest one, no pun intended, would have to be the oversized avatar representing the player. Why? Frankly, it seems to serve no purpose, and really just doesn’t fit in with the game. Actually, it is a bit annoying as it often gets stuck or hung up on decorations (like trees) and even buildings. As you can imagine, as the city gets bigger and bigger, this annoyance only gets worse. The game is dubbed beta, so hopefully, such bugs will go away soon.

Luckily for Tiny Town, its social elements do make up for this a bit. Like with many virtual space games (be they farming, restaurants, or otherwise), players can add and visit friends’ cities. Not only does this feature allow for a little bit of virtual show and tell, but allows players to help one another out by picking up trash around each other’s town and earning a little extra coin in the process.

Overall, Tiny Town is a pretty fun game if you like these city-building applications. Granted, it is a lot like SimCity, and it does fall short of the depth that the classic PC title and its sequels have to offer, but for what it is, this Facebook game is still pretty enjoyable.

We’re currently tracking around 1,400 monthly active users for the relatively new app.

Kwedit is a new company trying to address the group of people who have money they want to spend on virtual goods, but lack the method to make the purchase. Typically teenagers with cash but no credit card, this group currently buys pre-paid cards for game currencies in convenience stores, pays by their mobile account (if they have access to one), or “borrows” their parents credit cards. Or they don’t spend at all.

This problem is what Kwedit and a range of rivals are trying to address.

A variation on the concept of buying a pre-paid card, Kwedit’s service provides the user with virtual currency by direct payment or by incurring a virtual debt. The service is going live tonight in more than 100 games including FooPets and Puzzle Pirates, typically as a new feature in some game offer walls, as well as 5,800 US stores for convenience chain 7-11.

The set of direct payment methods are called Kwedit Direct and includes the usual range of credit card and other direct payments via an integration of SocialGold’s service. But has 3 more direct ways of paying that result in additional money to developers. One is “Kwedit Slip,” a barcode that users can print then have scanned and paid for at 7-11; the interface includes a store locator so users can easily find the nearest location. The concept is similar to how other types web-based purchasing and coupons work. The next method is “Kwedit Mailer,” simply a piece of paper that users print out, wrap around cash, and mail in. The third is especially interesting. Called “Pass the Duck,” it lets a user ask somebody else to pay (like their parents). The interface lets users send a message about the request, and the recipient then has the choice of how to pay: credit or debit card or any of Kwedit’s methods.

Then there’s Kwedit Promises, or virtual currency debt. The company extends a certain amount of virtual currency to the user at a dollar value, and tells the user to pay it back by a certain date, using any of the above ways to do so. It’s geared as a sort of virtual FICO-style credit system, where users get worse scores and less credit if they don’t repay on time or more if they do. To be clear, there’s no connection to users real credit scores. In fact, Kwedit explains this virtual debt as also being an educational tool so people can learn about the consequences of regular payments. The idea for Kwedit’s business, of course, is that enough people will pay that the company will make money despite some users skipping on payments.

Direct and Promises are viewable within a single dashboard of payment stats: how much money they have in a game, how much they owe, how much they’re promised, etc. It is accessible within offer walls in games, as another option next to the usual list of mobile payments and other direct payment options.

While Kwedit’s service is competing, in some sense, with pre-paid cards and other forms of payment, its new features could bring it new users. And, when you factor in people besides teenagers who might want the service, the market looks especially promising. Some older people don’t have credit or mobile access and Kwedit is not yet going after the international market.

Company founder Danny Shader has a long history in the payment industry, having worked on Amazon’s early payment services. The company raised a round of $3 million from True Ventures, Mitch Kapor’s Kapor Capital, Endeavor Partners, Maples Investments, Fenwick and West, and angels last May. We’ll be tracking the company as it signs up partners, and as the payments space continues to get more competitive.

For a year now, game developer Ohai has been working on a Flash-based massively multiplayer online game called City of Eternals. After having gone into testing last fall, it has just gotten an upgrade and gone into public beta. Here’s a closer look.

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.

11 million, 12 million, 13 million, and so on. What do all these numbers have in common? They are each milestones that Blizzard Entertainment has announced at one point or another signifying the number of global subscribers to its massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft. Already the game sucks in an exorbitant amount of players and time, but now its going to expand just a little bit more with a WoW Armory application on Facebook.

For those that don’t play World of Warcraft (WoW), The Armory is a section of the WoW website that allows users to search for other players, view their equipment, achievements, talent points (how they customize their character’s skills), guilds, and a myriad of other things. Now, players will be able to see a good deal of this on Facebook.

Making use of the social graph, the app will allow players to select up to five WoW characters to follow. From here, they have the option to set what appears in their feed. This includes boss kills, achievements, obtaining new gear, and so on. Of course, if you are highly active in WoW, it would be courteous to pick and choose what you share wisely, lest you barrage your friends with spam.

As an added bonus, users are also capable of viewing other friends’ Armory feeds from the app itself (assuming they’ve installed it). Furthermore, you get to view their actual in-game characters – as well as your own – fully rendered out. You can even rotate and animate them.

On another, and quasi-social note, Blizzard has also created an Armory app, called the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory for the iPhone and iPod Touch as well. Granted, this doesn’t incorporate the whole social graph element, but it does allow you to show off your characters to your friends more directly (i.e. “Hey, check this out.”)

Within the app, players can view their characters, search through a database of items, see what equipment they have, and more. Some of the more useful features: incorporate the ability to check Blizzard news, view your guild calendar (to see when it is doing special events), see your guild ranking based on achievements, and even create new talent distributions for your character.

Frankly, this is a great addition to a great game. Be ready for breaking Facebook feed news when the Lich King goes down later this week!

Smaller games are prominent on this week’s list of Facebook games gaining the most daily active users (DAU), from AppData. Starting with number three, 開心寶貝, fully 13 of the entries have under half a million total DAU.

Among those same games, there are also several repeat visitors to the list, suggesting that they won’t remain small for long. Here are all 20:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Bejeweled Blitz	3,038,124	+231,139	+7.61
2.	Zoo World	2,167,734	+159,973	+7.38
3.	開心寶貝	476,028	+150,155	+31.54
4.	My Town	486,796	+100,763	+20.70
5.	Happy Island	2,919,892	+96,184	+3.29
6.	Mafia Wars	6,712,908	+81,514	+1.21
7.	Wild Ones	326,413	+77,235	+23.66
8.	(Lil) Farm Life	998,748	+72,478	+7.26
9.	Jewel Puzzle II	67,640	+67,621	+99.97
10.	Gangster City	220,909	+62,673	+28.37
11.	MindJolt Games	2,513,204	+55,954	+2.23
12.	Go to Hell	55,153	+54,564	+98.93
13.	Little Warrior	238,319	+47,320	+19.86
14.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	68,271	+41,914	+61.39
15.	Texas HoldEm Poker	5,665,925	+31,742	+0.56
16.	Little Rock Pool	93,399	+27,278	+29.21
17.	Medical Mayhem	216,179	+22,932	+10.61
18.	SuperPocus	37,100	+19,610	+52.86
19.	Kingdoms of Camelot	142,402	+19,532	+13.72
20.	Fashion City	19,308	+18,313	+94.85

The board’s leader, Bejeweled Blitz by Popcap, has actually lost over half a million monthly users in the past month. But the game’s stickiness has risen slightly; about four percent more of the game’s users visit on a daily basis now. Number two, RockYou’s Zoo World, has been on a sharp upward trajectory for the month, though not as much as its sister app Birthday Cards, which it is partially integrated into.

The Chinese-language game 開心寶貝 (Happy Baby) is notable for more than its steady week-over-week growth. Quite a few of the game’s monthly users are also daily users (see below) — more so than most English-language games, whose DAU tends to hover at or below 30 percent of MAU.

My Town continues to do quite well, also. In its early days, this game appeared on our top 20 lists with Ninja Warz, the other significantly-sized game from developer Broken Bulb Studios. But Ninja Warz has fallen away, while My Town, a sim-town game, appears to have gotten a firm foothold among players.

Continuing down, there’s Mafia Wars and a bit further, Texas HoldEm Poker; these two huge Zynga games never seem to gain much at once, but both have gained pretty steadily since the holidays. And below Mafia Wars, you’ll notice Gangster City, a similar challenger from Playfish with strong prospects. But it looks like the game may be having trouble hanging onto players; we’ll have a better idea of that next week.

[Editor's note: This article was co-authored by Eric Eldon.]

When Facebook began enforcing new policy changes in mid December, it was called a “philosophical approach to platform governance.” As we covered on Inside Facebook, “instead of trying to spell out all the rules in detail, it is laying out more general principles and reserving the right to make policy enforcements when its policy team deems doing so to be necessary.”

Looking at what has and hasn’t been enforced since the changes were implemented helps provide some insight into the policy team’s thinking thus far.

When is Gifting Okay?

The policy: “You must not prompt users to send invitations, requests, generate notifications, or use other Facebook communication channels immediately after a user allows access or returns to your application.”

Just about every game launched prior to the changes in December had gifts — where users send gifts to friends, in most cases to users not already playing the game — first and foremost in their viral marketing strategy. This is still still evident by the number of games where the first menu tab is “Free Gifts” or “Send Gifts.” In reviewing 98 game applications with over 100,000 daily active users (DAU), only about 20% of them did NOT have a gifts component at the start of the game (the largest was Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz with 2.8 million DAU).

We’ve been tracking this story over the past week. When we first looked, only four games with more than 100,000 DAU four appeared to be directing users to gift prior to playing the game: Happy Farm (940,000 DAU), Farkle, (840,000 DAU), Garden World (260,000 DAU) and Las Vegas Slots (210,000 DAU).

Facebook tells us that the policy “is not at all meant to stop gifting or virality — it’s meant to prevent users from being prompted to use Facebook communication channels before engaging with the application.” The company wants “users to initiate communications and not be asked to send them right after authorization or every time the user returns to the application.”

“Our expectation is that developers are required to comply with our Principles and Policies,” it says, “and if we come across violations, developers are going to be held accountable.” As many developers have been discovering lately, Facebook won’t punish apps by blocking them completely but rather shutting down some communication channels into fixes are implemented.

Out of the four games mentioned above, three have updated their interfaces to not require gifting, and are in compliance. Garden World still directs users to gift first, but we’re not sure for how long.

Let’s look at some more examples. Titles from Playdom, like Sorority Life and Mobsters 2, are taking users to a gifts screen when you click the Jobs and Missions tabs respectively. So while not the first thing users see when they come to the application, users still must skip the gifts screen (or send items to their friends) before they can actually engage in the game. This interface is okay, Facebook says, because the gift page isn’t what users see first when they add or return to the apps.

While gifts have often been considered social spam (with some developers specifically not including gifts because they feel they are too spammy), the feature has become a very powerful way to get users to interact around a game. Still, one can imagine a gifting mechanism that is a more natural extension of the game’s social aspects.

Café World by Zynga has a Free Gifts tab positioned first among menu items and was one of the first to add a “present” icon as an overlay to the playing screen; the app recently added a “Gift of the Day” section to your friends leaderboard across the bottom — you can send gifts to earn points. This interface is not just okay but a best practice, Facebook says.

It still by default prompts you to send this gift to all of your friends (versus just your Café World friends), but by positioning your promo near the friends leader board, it underscores the behavior that users are more likely to send gifts to their friends actually playing the game.

Pet Society by Playfish has taken the other extreme, only providing gifting of items from a user’s inventory to one of their friends actually playing the game. While this most accurately reflects the typical user’s desire to send something to a friend, it wouldn’t appear to be a top-of-mind functionality that would drive retention or viral growth as it is buried within the inventory “Chest” section of the game.

Eventually, we think most developers will create a gifts functionality that lies somewhere in between the “spam everybody” and “gift to a single friend” philosophies. One way for games like Café World to begin this transition would to change the default from sending to all your friends to just the users playing the game. Then take it one step further, allowing users to filter it to go to only their “active” Café World friends (say those that have played in the last week and thus are more likely to find value in the gift messaging).

Ideally, gifting can be a jumping point for users to have more conversations in and around the game, moving it from a viral marketing tactic to a game experience enhancing transaction that boosts customer retention.

Applications Continue to Gate Content Based on Number of Users

While gifting spam has been reined in a bit thanks to policy changes implemented by Facebook back in December, the company does not yet appear to be enforcing one of the other recent policy changes.

The policy: “You must not provide users with rewards or gate content from users based on their number of friends who use your application.”

Two of the biggest games on Facebooks, Zynga’s FarmVille and Café World, continue to use the practice, leaving developers trying to figure out how to interpret this specific policy. Below, you can see the Café World restaurant expansion requires 12 neighbors and just under 1 million coins (or a user can spend 35 Café World cash – the equivalent of $7 – to unlock the feature).

FarmVille recently introduced its long-awaited 24×24 expansion, and it requires a hefty 30 neighbors (or 60 FarmVille cash – about $12) to unlock. The desirability for this expansion by some players has resulted in long pleas to friends or strangers to “add them” so they can unlock it:

Besides the written responses, we’ve anecdotally heard of friends who have had long-ago forgotten colleagues contact them by phone to request them to friend them on a game to unlock something. That’s powerful stuff.

There is a long history of game design where users can either grind through to earn rewards or pay cash to unlock the items faster – a classic tradeoff between time and money that has helped fund a great number of games.

With Facebook, the ability to virally spread is equally valuable, as a portion of new users will end up spending real cash or bringing in other users. Thus developers like Zynga prize a user who can bring 30 friends to the game initially, then continue to influence (and retain) them through posts about the game. If, as a developer, you can’t remind users with notifications – those are being phased out in a month, you might want an army of users who will post on their walls handle viral communication for you.

While there is definite economic value being exchanged here by both to a developer and the user, it creates some presumably unwanted behaviors:

It induces users to go beyond their social graph of “known” friends. If a user “adds” a stranger, it potentially exposes more personal information than a user realizes they are sharing – basically, their whole profile unless the user actively goes through multiple steps to limit access.

Users are also creating secondary accounts just to play games, distorting DAU and MAU data as well as creating potential cheating issues. Comments on developer fan page posts end up being a litany of “add me” notes, drowning out any true conversation around the content being posted

While the Facebook policy as stated would appear to be squarely focused at eliminating these undesirable behaviors, the lack of enforcement begins to make one wonder if this is as important an issue to Facebook policy team now compared to when the roadmap of changes were initially announced. Clearly some of the latest changes to user information sharing – like privacy settings — were designed to get users to open up more and expand beyond the “known” friends to “Everyone”, so maybe Facebook’s platform team is less worried about users inviting people they don’t know into their personal network.

While the gifting policy has largely been enforced, Facebook says to expect more news on gating:”Our intent is to protect the integrity of the social graph and the authenticity of relationships on the site,” the company tells us, “but we recognize that this is a complex and important topic. We plan to provide more context on this policy soon.”

In the meantime, check out Facebook’s platform policy examples and explanations page for more detail.