While Google has been strategizing ways to fend off the Facebook threat for the past couple years, the company has been accelerating efforts in recent weeks. The company began recruiting a number of social web advocates including Chris Messina, Will Norris, and most recently Joseph Smarr who previously worked for Plaxo to create a new “Social Web Team” . Tomorrow, it is expected that Google will take things one step further by launching a social stream within Gmail according to the Wall Street Journal.
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Coinciding with recent announcements by Playfish that they were going to bring an EA brand to Facebook, Peter Moore just announced that “Madden NFL” will be released for Facebook.  The details are sparse, but Moore stated on Bloomberg Television that “we have to make Madden’ more accessible,” and “you’ll see us on Facebook going forward.”
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A new application for the iPhone and iPod touch from WeeWorld will allow customizable avatar creation and integration for fans of the popular teen-based virtual world. The application, called WeeMee Avatar Creator, can be downloaded onto the user’s iPhone or iPod touch and the distinctive cartoon WeeMees can then be created, edited, and shared.
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If you’ve ever spent a night at a local pub, you’ve probably heard of Golden Tee Golf, the arcade cabinet first released in 1989 and one of the first golf arcade games in existence.  Following up on their 2000 launch of Golden Tee Fore, where players could participate in tournaments from around the United States, developer Incredible Technologies released Golden Tee Live, which took the tournaments to a whole new level, with coordinated leaderboards and available prizes.  Recently, the games have introduced two social elements, Facebook Connect and Youtube Uploads.
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Zynga – the leading developer of Facebook Applications and the company with 230 million Monthly Active Users  - announced a partnership with MSN Games that allows users to play Farmville on the site using Facebook Connect.  Farmville, Zynga’s largest game with 75 million Montly Active Users, will be playable through the MSN Games area of the MSN network, and its use of Facebook Connect means that gamers will be able to interact with all 75 million other players no matter which site they log into.  This is the first time that Farmville will be available anywhere other than Facebook and the FarmVille site itself.
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Kwedit, a Mountain View – California based startup, wants to simplify the purchase of virtual goods for teens. The company plans to allow teens to buy virtual goods on Facebook games such as “FarmVille” and “Café World”, if they commit to pay later at 7-Eleven stores or send in money via mail.
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One of the more popular ways for Facebook application developers to drive traffic to their applications is through the use of Facebook advertisements. With relatively low CPMs, it’s often more cost effective than traditional cost per install campaigns as the users are also targeted based on profile data. Today TBG, the company behind the ONE Media Manager, is announcing two new clients: Playdom and Napster.
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The way it’s overtaken the TV newsrooms and celebrity gossip pages, you’d think that Twitter was the be-all-and-end-all of social media.  But a new report from the Pew Research Center cited in this Washington Post article says otherwise: teens are pretty ambivalent about using Twitter, with only 8 percent of those online reporting regular use of the social networking tool.
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2009 saw a tremendous increase in usage of Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and could easily be termed as the Year of Social Media. This growth in the usage of social and collaboration platforms has led the enterprises to seriously consider using social platforms for business collaborations, according to Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner Research.
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As the Facebook gaming wars continue to heat up, analysts seek as many ways as possible to measure each companies’ gaming success.  Monthly Active Users (MAUs), Daily Active Users (DAUs), Page Views, Monetization… the list goes on.  There are as many ways to measure an application’s success as there are applications in the Facebook directory.  That said, the dimension of user loyalty has always been interesting to me, and the concept of the users-to-fans ratio for a given application does a good job of indicating what percentage of users play the game and publicly demonstrate their affinity by signing up as a fan.
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