While Twitter promotes their open developer platform, Social Times has confirmed a number of new deals which involve 6 figure monthly fees for access to the Twitter stream. Both Google and Bing recently announced deals which involve the exchange of access to the public stream for significant sums of money, yet it wasn’t clear that this practice continued on down the line (of smaller developers). While the stream may appear free, if you consume too much information from Twitter, you will be billed.
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Days into SXSW it’s clear that location based services are fighting to take the lead spot as the thousands of Interactive festival attendees are all using the location products. Foursquare and Gowalla are competing for the top spot, but by now it’s clear that Foursquare has become the defacto service despite Gowalla’s strikingly good looks. Whrrl, a service that you probably can’t remember how to spell the first time around, has street teams trying to get users to install their app.
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This week’s social gaming news included Namco and Konami entering social gaming with Pacman and Frogger, Raj covering a special report on emotions in social games at GDC 2010, OfferPal releasing a report indicating that 30% of gamers can’t afford virtual currency, MySpace and hi5 announcing a big shift to games, and Digital Chocolate releasing NanoTowns and Sony releasing their classic PoxNora on Facebook.  Read on for more!
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This morning, Big Fish Games announced they will be releasing their second Facebook game, entitled My Tribe. The game involves evolving a tribe of people on a remote island. Big Fish is known for its high production value games, and this game is no different: the graphical and general aesthetic quality of the game is very high.
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At GDC this year, Gareth Davis, program manager for games at Facebook, went on record as saying that “pretty soon all games will be social”, and explained that Facebook, with 100 million players per month, is “the biggest game platform in the world”.  Well if all games are trending towards becoming social, I thought it’d be interesting to analyze just how social console games already are.
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When it comes to a giant conference like GDC 2010, there are always great talks to be heard, but a few like XEO Design President Nicole Lazzaro’s discussion, “4 Most Important Emotions for Social Games,” really stand out. This is the kind of talk every social game developer should hear, as should every game player who wants to know why they’re spending so much time adopting stray pink cows, or what have you.
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Namco and Konami are entering the social game sphere by introducing social elements into some of their biggest titles; Pacman and Frogger, respectively. Konami is using Facebook Connect to enable Frogger players to challenge their Facebook friends and Namco is introducing their UniteSDK engine which empowers players to play across devices. Namco plans to release Pacman later this month.
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Yesterday, ngmoco announced two “social strategy” games for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad: We Rule and Godfinger.  The games utilize mechanics found in games like Farmville and other social networking games, and are likely aiming to bring that type of gameplay and monetization potential to the iPad and iPhone.
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D.C.-based LivingSocial has raided $25 million in a series B round, with an emphasis on their LivingSocial Deals product as a continued source of revenue growth. The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners, with Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC participating as well. The company is also announcing the expansion of LivingSocial Deals into four more cities: Chicago, Denver, Raleigh Durham, and San Diego.
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Today, Offerpal released the results of a survey that targeted social gamers’ monetization activities.  Specifically, the report found that 29.7% of social gamers do not have the ability or means to pay for virtual currencies with cash, and 53.3% of consumers are willing to engage in alternative payments, like offers, to earn virtual currency. The report also found some other interesting statistics related to monetization behavior.
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