SXSWI REWIND: FACEBOOK INVADES IPHONE GAMES
With SXSW Interactive now winding to a close, a quick recap: though now diminished somewhat by Apple’s just-announced iPhone 3.0 updates — bringing push notifications, in-game content purchases and voice chat, local bluetooth multiplayer and the opening of the device’s SDK to 3rd party hardware peripherals — the biggest news out of the conference for the iPhone was its newly established connectivity to the Facebook platform.
With the untimely demise of Trism dev Demiforce’s Xbox-Live-like Onyx Online, this might do quite nicely for socializing the device, and threatens to immediately overshadow the work that the Aurora Feint devs have underway — a plan that allowed for avatars, friends, wall chat, and news, all features currently in place at Facebook, and now more publicly accessible, should users choose.
Currently, the features are limited to a handful of games: Who has the Biggest Brain, iBowl, Agency Wars, Tap Tap Revenge 2, Live Poker and Binary Game, and, having now investigated the seamless integration of even just the rudimentary personalized leaderboard in Playfish’s excellent logic/minigame collection Biggest Brain [iTunes link], it’s clear that there’s big potential to tap into the even bigger audience with something more tightly woven around the mobile/social experience.
Facebook Connect for iPhone [Facebook]
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