OpenFeint Takes the First Step Toward Facebook-Style Virality in Mobile

Today OpenFeint, the social platform for mobile games, announced its latest version and an interesting new feature: cross-platform invites between users with iPhone and Android phones. OpenFeint hasn't launched for Android yet, so this feature won't be available for a few months. However, it's clear that the company is putting effort into mobile invites. One big problem starting out will be that only a few hundred of OpenFeint's thousands of games will have both Android and iPhone versions. So if an iPhone user invites an Android-using friend directly through OpenFeint's in-game network, for example, the invitation simply won't be sent if there's no Android version. If the invitation is sent by SMS (another choice available to users), the link reaching the Android user will send the developer a request to port over the game. For games that are cross-platform, the invitation feature offers the first possibility of growth through virality. Like Facebook developers, the game creator will have the option of popping up an in-game box asking users to invite their friends through OpenFeint. At the same time, Aurora Feint's CEO, Jason Citron, thinks that mobile invitations will be able to avoid Facebook's spam problems. "The way that we provide the box, the user actually has to go through and decide who to [invite], picking phone numbers. I think it makes people think about what they're doing more ... than on Facebook. You know if you send someone 400 text messages, that sucks." Of course, there's one major viral feature missing from the picture: the ability to broadcast the fact that you're playing a game to all your friends, as Facebook allows with wall posts. Citron says his company is working on something, but won't offer up any more details. Also, most mobile games still lack overt social features, beyond leaderboards, challenges and a few other features that services like OpenFeint add. There's another similarity to draw between mobile games and Facebook, though: scale. By back-of-the-envelope calculation, Citron estimates 200 million users between iDevices and Android by the time his company is on both platforms -- about where Facebook was when social games started to take off.

Social Pro Daily

OpenFeint Takes the First Step Toward Facebook-Style Virality in Mobile

Chris Morrison

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Chris Morrison