Toy Soldiers, a real-time 3D simulation game set in World War I, was released onto XBox Live today. What makes it special is that the game has a unique feature: players are able to run their campaigns on XBox with the help of players that play the Match Defense: Toy Soldiers game on Facebook. In a first for the connected game world, Microsoft Game Studios has created a game universe where Facebook players can play a Bejeweled-ish casual game to contribute statistics and points towards a given campaign, and this in effect helps out players who are playing the campaign on XBox Live.
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Another big week for Social Games, with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Zynga and Offerpal making big announcements.  Microsoft is considering purchase of Crowdstar, makers of Happy Acquarium, Electronic Arts has announced a Madden NFL Game and more for Facebook, Zynga acquires the makers of Friends for Sale and Offerpal releases tasks, an easy new way to buy virtual currency.  Read on for more!
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Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft Corporation is in talks to acquire Crowdstar, the third largest Facebook Application Developer, for $200 million.  This follows the recent acquisition of competing social game developer Playfish by Electronic Arts for up to $400 million. The Social Gaming space has been heating up most recently with Zynga expanding their application distribution through a partnership with Microsoft-owned MSN .
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If we are to go by the latest patent filed by Microsoft, the company could be soon rolling out their own social advertising product. The patent by Microsoft’s inventors for user generated advertising model describes the problems faced in traditional social network advertising and how their model improves on that.
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Bing, the new search engine project from Microsoft, has gotten a whirlwind of attention, in part because of its large marketing push which made the world aware of Bing across every major media channel. And while the debate still continues in regards to which search engine is better for what purposes between Bing and Google, Microsoft is continuing its efforts to make its new search engine productive.

Part of this continued effort appears to be BingTweets, a recently launched collaborative project teaming Microsoft with Federated Media and Twitter in order to combine real time Twitter search content with Bing search results. It’s not a far stretch from what Bing was already offering. With a montage of media and text search results, Bing was already fairly diverse in its search results formatting. And Twitter, being the popular microblogging tool that it is, has found itself at the center of the real time trend.
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Is Microsoft’s latest product, Vine, the answer to solving the issue of practical status update applications? The new social web application from Microsoft was revealed today during a beta test in Seattle, offering hyperlocal and personalized information for users and groups.

On your computer screen Vine acts as a dashboard that you can use to keep up with other members in your community, whether they’re family members, office or team members, or your best buds. The application itself comes in the form of a map, where your contacts will appear via their location, along with their updated status. You can send alerts or reports, which can be sent and received either through the Vine web application or through SMS on your mobile phone.
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Lots of Microsoft support coming from MySpace today. Announced at the CTIA Wireless 2009 conference as well as the Web 2.0 Expo that will be going on in Las Vegas and San Fransisco respectively, Microsoft Windows Mobile as well as Microsoft Silverlight are both supported by MySpace. The added support extends MySpace’s mobile accessibility as well as the potential for more MySpace OpenSocial applications from developers and third parties.

MySpace has actually partnered with Microsoft to set up the new offerings. While the Windows Mobile 6.1 support won’t be available until later on this summer, the application will be better optimized for a friendlier user interface with improved options for direct delivery of MySpace-related content. Several of MySpace’s main social features are to be tied in with the Windows operating system itself, for better accessibility and media-sharing options for users on the go.
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This morning the big news is that Live.com, Microsoft’s primary portal which was originally just a search engine has gone social, providing users with profiles and activity feeds of their friends’ latest activities. As Mike Arrington writes, “Users are automatically connected with any friends they have on Windows Live Messenger, which is by far the most popular instant messaging service worldwide.”

With 268 million users using Windows Live Messenger, the company has access to around 16.7 percent of the world’s internet population. That’s more than double Facebook’s user base. It’s clear that social technology is becoming ubiquitous and this is one more step that emphasizes the trend. The largest news about the new site is news feed which imports user activities from around the web.

The new service also includes a number of features that mimic Facebook. For instance you can tag all of your friends in photos in Windows Live. There is a limitless number of tools, far beyond those that other social networks currently offer. For example there are online productivity applications that are integrated directly into the Windows Live experience.

There is also a robust mobile experience which includes access to your feeds, your friends, Microsoft Hotmail, and a number of other services. The bottom line is this goes far beyond what existing social networks provide, it is a web-based suite for your life. One thing that’s interesting is how Microsoft clearly sees Facebook as a competitor to their social networking service.

The two features that Facebook appears to be lacking in the matrix below is customization and blogging. While there has been chatter of a potential blogging platform launching on the site, Facebook is far from enabling users to customize their own profiles. This new Live.com service is huge and it emphasizes how social features are simply one component of our complete online experience.

To learn more check out last night’s Techcrunch post.

Chart from Windows Live Reviewer Guide

According to a Microsoft blog post today, Microsoft is expanding upon their Windows Live platform by releasing their Windows Live Contacts API. This new service is similar to that of the Google Contact API paving a path for increased data portability.

The biggest part of the announcement is a partnership with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn to “exchange functionally-similar Contacts APIs” which will open a “two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services.” This is a significant step especially for Facebook who has so far been one of the most closed-off social networks. 2008 is truly becoming the year of contact data portability and while the average Joe may not yet understand what’s going on, they soon will.

It appears that the larger players are now realizing that data portability is a must and is no longer an option. We are witnessing a transformation of the web landscape toward cloud computing and data portability having a significant impact for many of the businesses that have been closed off until now. Do you think today’s news about Microsoft is significant? Why don’t the other social networks create two-way portability for anybody?