Recently, I spoke with Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners about the future of gaming on social networks. Jeremy has been writing frequently about social games on his blog and recently moderated a panel on the topic at Web 2.0 Expo.

During our conversation, Jeremy brought up some important points regarding the way the core mechanics of social games are designed, specifically regarding the different ways that some game developers are integrating “viral channels” on social networks into their games:

It’s not an accident that the biggest games on Facebook are not owned by SGN or Zynga: Scrabulous and Friends For Sale have been growing independently.  They’ve been baking virality directly into the game mechanic, not layering it on top. They’re developing game mechanics that are native to social networking environment – not just using social networks as a distribution channel. This has only been going on for a few months, and so it’s clear to me that there’s still a lot more opportunity to optimize that.

Read the full interview at Inside Social Games