As the “social gaming” space matures, so will the platforms and business models. Check out the latest innovations in the space, as well as a smattering of social game reviews, in this week’s edition of highlights from Inside Social Games:

• Sharendipity is a New Platform for Building Social Games
• Virtual Goods are a Major Source of Revenue for Social Game Developers
• 15.30 – Das Bundesliga Tippspiel is Fantasy Football for Germany
• Tetris Gets Friendly with Tetris Friends on Facebook
• Cute Catz Lets Your Nurture Your Virtual Feline Friend on Facebook
• Play Sudoku on Facebook with Challenge Sudoku
• Busy Bees Doesn’t Do Bee Movie Justice
• Divine Division is Actually Pretty Hellish

The web is becoming increasingly social, and new platforms are spurring that progression. We spoke with Shaun Connolly of Ringside Networks about their Social Application Server and their efforts to make the web – outside of major social networks like Facebook – more social.

Tell me a bit about Ringside. How did you get started?

The idea for the company germinated a little over a year ago from the premise that while currently there are a few major social networking hubs out there, many websites are going to want to tap into the social web for their business needs. One of our founders has a running shoe store and was looking for a way to engage the runners and create a vibrant community. By integrating a social application directly into his site, for example, he could make a much deeper connection than creating a group or application that runs on Facebook and add value to his existing customers.

For site owners, how is integrating with Facebook Connect different than integrating with Ringside?

We feel that what Facebook and Google are doing with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect is really important. Basically what they’re doing makes our job kind of easier. These services make it easier for people to reach out and leverage their identities. Our focus however is a bit different, as we are intent on the creation of temporal, ad-hoc networks.

What are some key highlights of the Ringside Network?

Our initial focus as a company was around creating a social application platform that was compatible with the Facebook APIS. We aren’t focused on creating a service that is a simple install it and then you have a white label social network, so we don’t consider Ning or any of the other stand alone competitors white label creators to be competitors. Our social application service is a base infrastructure that is designed to federate your social footprint and apply that within the context of a particular website.

How difficult is it for an existing Facebook app to run on Ringside?

In some instances the integration is as easy as embedding in a widget. We’ve have other examples of full blown applications that have been built to run on other sites. We implemented a good chunk of the Facebook APIs, so you can have an application render itself normally on Facebook and still render on another web site.

What do you see as the core market need here?

Since we’ve been in business by necessity we’ve built up this open source platform. With the underlying platform in place, we build applications and widgets that leverage common social activities and interactions. Our implementation leverages the fact that users have built up their Facebook identities but the social graph manifests itself in these micro-networks. For the regular user the micro network arises, you do the social activity within the context of the site, and maybe a few months down the line that micro network disappears.

What is the status of the most recent beta release?

The platform has been built up over a variety of betas. We are focused on getting these cloud based services done. Sometime in September you will begin to see the manifestation of the platform technology. We will use that process to help us determine to go live date on the core platform. Our goal is for integration with the application server to be something as easy as dropping paypal into your site.

Are partners lined up already?

We have had a few sites deployed and active on earlier betas of the platform. We are in the process of reaching out to system integrators who are working with their customers on a variety of use cases in an  e-commerce context. They are looking to our platform as a means to build up this social graph across their own site.

For more information visit www.ringsidenetworks.com.

More social marketers seeking to engage their audiences on Facebook are turning to firms like Buddy Media and Context Optional to develop and promote applications that allow for rich interactions between Facebook users and their brands.

This week, the companies released several new applications that agencies should check out:

1. Buddy Media and Fox News

Buddy Media‘s Fox News app allows users to visit the Fox News Page, customize the Fox News video player, and integrate it on their profile. “Supporters of Fox News will be able to carry their brand affinity off the Fan Page and onto their personal profile – increasing brand exposure and application engagement beyond the point of first contact,” says Buddy Media’s Greg Roth.

2. Context Optional, Ogilvy, and Kraft

Context Optional‘s One Minute Mogul app is a social game that encourages users to try a new line of Oscar Meyer sandwiches through coupons. “It’s a very innovative approach tying online viral marketing to offline store purchases, and we’re excited to see how it goes,” says Context’s Kevin Barenblat.

3. Context Optional, Rapp Collins, and Travel Channel

Context Optional’s Kindap! app is a social game designed to drive traffic to the Travel Channel’s website. Users kidnap their friends to far off places, and in order to escape the hostage must answer a question (the answer for which can be found on TravelChannel.com). “The app includes sophisticated Flash and heavy graphics to meet Travel Channel’s branding guidelines and has seen significant growth since it launched a couple weeks ago,” says Barenblat.

Developers building on the Facebook Platform are well aware of Facebook’s increasing efforts to enforce its platform policies and reward applications acting in accordance with the platform ideals with benefits.

Today, the MySpace Developer Platform team clarified its process for developers who violate the the MDP Terms or Guidelines.

Specifically,

On first violation:

• In most instances,the application developer will receive a notice giving them 48 hours to fix the issue. If the problem is not fixed within that period of time, the application will be muted (muted applications may not send communication) for 48 hrs. If the application is still not fixed after 48 hours, it will be suspended. Should one company have an application in violation of policy once, and then do something with another application, that will be considered a second violation.

On second violation:

• The application will be muted immediately, then suspended after 48 hours.
  

On third violation:

• The application will be suspended immediately.

If a company continues to repeatedly violate our TOU/Guidelines, action may be taken against the company and/or all of their applications, which could include banning them from the platform.

Of course, MySpace said it reserves the right to skip steps for “major” violations. For more info, check out the policy section on the MySpace Developer Platform forums.

Two weeks after hi5 announced support for OpenSocial 0.8 in its developer sandbox, the MySpace Developer Platform team today announced in its platform Release Notes that support for OpenSocial 0.8 apps on the MySpace platform is “coming soon.” What that means exactly date-wise remain to be seen, as MySpace has generally taken the “take things slow and release later” approach on most things platform related so far.

OpenSocial 0.8 is important for developers because it’s the first time OpenSocial has included a spec for building apps using REST APIs, decreasing the need for developers to use and maintain complex JavaScript.

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang recently caught up with Facebook’s Director of Monetization Tim Kendall, who spoke about the different ways Facebook is packaging its advertising products for big brands. Tim says that Facebook is focusing on 3 different types of “engagement” ads:

1) Comment Style Ad: Members can now leave comments on these advertisements, much like wall posts. Brands that are focused on entertainment, new product rollouts, autos and apparel are well suited. The ad can show up to 4 comments per object, and the activity spreads to the users newsfeed.

2) Virtual Gifts Style Ad: Brands can now create virtual items that users can share, spread to each other. This wildly popular behavior within applications and Facebook is suitable for consumer products, entertainment, and some media.

3) Fan Style Ad: A play off the Facebook pages, users with a persona affinity for a product (like Apple) can become a fan, triggering a notification to their network, and could then tie on social ads. Will work great for established brands, like guitar hero, passion products, luxury products, or any brand with a rabid customer base.

Tim’s words reflect Facebook’s plans to find ways to monetize user engagement without sending the user outside Facebook. Because Facebook controls the social graph and the distribution channels of social information, Facebook can offer a lot of value to brands hoping to increase their integration with the social graph and prominance within the distribution channels (feeds).

Facebook’s goals are generally true of anyone trying to monetize social media these days: gone are the days when brands buy clicks to micro-sites. Here are the days of viral endorsements, virtual gifts, and comments on your brand made more visible to friends.

Related Inside Facebook Resources:

• Facebook’s New Social Video Ad Unit is an Engagement Magnet

Although Facebook has increasingly provided more and more application analytics to developers over the last year, developers who require more insight into their users’ behavior must roll their own analytics toolkits or turn to third parties. We recently profiled top Facebook application analytics providers, and new startup Kontagent is emerging as one of the most powerful early products.

Kontagent was originally an app company started by Albert Lai and Jeffrey Tseng. The company built such advanced internal analytics tools that they decided to turn themselves into an analytics company instead. Now, the company is helping developers understand their users, improve their products, and connect with advertisers. We’ll focus on the product here.

Kontagent offers 3 main features: cohort analysis, “virality” analysis, and A/B tracking.

• Cohort analysis allows developers to slice and dice users according to their install date, install source, app version, and demographic. This is a powerful way for developers to see which partners and campaigns are driving the most valuable adoption.
• Virality analysis allows developers to track performance of each viral channel overall, and each message template sent through that channel. Specifically, Kontagent tracks invites sent per user, invite/notification conversion rates, and invite response delay.
• A/B testing allows developers to compare acceptance rates, outbound invite events, accepted invites, and response delay across message templates. A/B testing correctly is an important part of optimizing the performance of each of your communication channels.

In terms of technical setup, Kontagent provides a wrapper for the Facebook client library, that calls Kontagent methods when certain Facebook API methods are called. While Kontagent only supports Facebook apps at the moment, it plans on adding support for MySpace applications in the future.

Overall, Kontagent looks like a solid product, especially for those developers that don’t have the resources to build their own product analytics tools. For now, Kontagent is free for developers, but it does plan on charging for premium features in the future.

For further reference, see the company’s own feature comparison sheet:

Facebook today released a preview of version 2.0 of Facebook iPhone application. The upshot? Both the home page and profile page in Facebook for iPhone will look and feel a lot more similar to the redesigned Facebook home page and profile page.

Still not included in any of the Facebook for iPhone mocks are ads. With iPhone rapidly gaining share in the mobile web market, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook include ads in its mobile products in the next year – particularly to take advantage of the iPhone’s GPS data. Mobile ad network AdMob is giving away $1 million to iPhone developers, so it’s clear that the market is developing quickly.

Home - The home page will have a full News Feed, along with access to filtered views of the News Feed, like Status Updates, Posted Items, and Events.

Notifications - Notifications are now available. When it’s available, Facebook for iPhone will take advantage of Apple’s new “push” service, which will allow Facebook to push notification alerts to your phone when you’re not using the Facebook iPhone app.

Profiles - Profiles now have tabs, like the Facebook website redesign. Feed comments are accessible both here and on the home page.

Find more on the Facebook for iPhone application page.

Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our fantastic sponsors for supporting the growth of Inside Facebook. We highly recommend working with each of them!

Buddy Media builds, promotes and monetizes one of the largest networks of engaging and entertaining social media applications on the web.

SocialMedia Networks is an advertising network for social media platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial.

Zynga Game Network is a leading developer and distributor of social games for platforms like Facebook and MySpace.

NeverblueAds helps Facebook developers monetize their apps using niche campaigns and dedicated reps.

Since the launch of the Facebook Platform, Facebook’s Platform Application Guidelines have expressly prohibited applications that promote the sale of alcohol:

I. Applications may not promote, or contain content (including any advertising content) referencing, facilitating, promoting or using, the following:

4. Sale of liquor, beer, wine, tobacco products, ammunition and/or firearms;

Today, Facebook announced that, with the launch of its Demographic Restrictions capability for application developers, that policy is changing.

Now, Facebook says it plans to allow application content that promotes the sale of alcohol, provided that developers “specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.”

Facebook is currently beta-testing the new Demographic Restrictions feature with a “very limited” set of companies, and the new policy should go into effect in September, barring any big hiccups in the beta test.

This is good news for applications like Booze Mail and Happy Hour, that allow users to send each other virtual drink gifts, as well as other application developers hoping to sell to beer, wine, and liquor brands.

Developers interested in talking with Facebook on any sensitive questions regarding alcohol policy can email developers-help@facebook.com.