Just as farming games like (Lil) Green Patch, Farm Town and Farmville once surged in popularity, the city-building genre is rapidly gaining players.  Playdom’s new Social City has gained 5,600,000 users in 2 weeks and is an excellent example of a city building game; it has great graphics, a pleasant interface and some great social features.  On the other hand, the game seems to be more about the “City” and less about the “Social”.  We review the game below.
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Do you remember ICQ (”I Seek You”)? It was one of the first desktop download chat applications and was sold to AOL for $400 million in 1998. Strangely, it fell off the map after the acquisition, but has since resurfaced as a type of community-based social network that leverages Facebook and Twitter. We take a look below.
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Recently, we noticed that RockYou had been promoting it’s ZooWorld application by using graphic ads on the Meebo chat service. This is certainly another sign of the growth of Facebook games, not only in reach, but in value to advertisers, as they pay to make placements on disparate networks or in this case, chat aggregators. We investigate how other game companies are attracting users to their Facebook games from outside of Facebook.
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HitOrNot, a new Facebook game, is where the users play the role of an up and coming music mogul. Their goals are to pick hot songs and earn money based on their taste, use that money to highlight songs of their own choice, and then earn money based on people enjoying your music. One of the best elements of the game is the use of 30 second clips of real music, most definitely adding to the app’s appeal.
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With the rapid growth in the use of Twitter, there’s bound to be a growing interest in tools to analyze Twitter statistics and social graphs, even while on the go. Tweeb is the latest application to do just that, and it’s for the iPhone. Tweeb is developed by D.C.-based Ken Yarmosh and Mobomo.
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Is anonymous search and surfing the opposite of social media?

Our social media experiences require us to participate as a known members of online communities. Facebook, MySpace et al collect personal data while you communicate with friends, share photos and personalize your profile. Sure, most people are happy with the tradeoff of exchanging their privacy for the joy of social media.
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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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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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I’ve been following Animoto – an automated music video creation company  – ever since they first launched on Facebook in March 2008, and although they are tight-lipped about their success, I feel they have a smart, expandable business model for online video.  The company reached out recently to let us know about their upcoming 2nd Annual Valentine’s Day Video, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to look at their existing services, business models and share a bit of opinion about their current offerings.
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As an avid social gamer, I find myself constantly seeking out different ways of finding new games on my iPhone and on Facebook. If I stick to making choices based on recommendations from the same people, I’ll end up only playing games of a certain type, and may miss out on the wide variety presented by these platforms. That said, I often find myself wondering how the current Facebook and iPhone application directories contrast in their job of presenting a user with interesting new game content. I analyze that here, looking at the areas of first discovery, navigation, sorting and suggestions.
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