Crave

The Social Gaming Network, a company best known for its Facebook Platform apps, has launched a new iPhone app that uses the handset as...a gaming controller.

Called "iFun," the app is a takeoff on the Social Gaming Network's existing sports apps: iGolf, iBowl, iBaseball, and the like. But instead of playing on your iPhone, you use your iPhone or iPod Touch much like the "Wiimote" device for Nintendo's Wii console. (Both gadgets use accelerometer technologies.) It connects via Wi-Fi or cellular network to your PC. You can then play against friends--remotely, and in real time.

Currently, iFun is restricted to a golf game but will soon expand--as well as to other devices with accelerometers in them, like the Android-powered G1. It also uses Facebook Connect for authentication.

Social Gaming Network CEO Shervin Pishevar told CNET News that the company is currently "lining up advertisers" and is interested in turning iFun into a platform for external developers to create their own games. The Social Gaming Network raised a $15 million investment round last spring, followed by more funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' venture firm.

And--wait for it--here's the recession angle. Playing the free iFun game on an iPod Touch is "significantly cheaper than buying a Wii for Christmas," Pishevar said.

Microblogging service Twitter is a central hub of geek chatter, and if there's anything geeks love to chatter about, it's Apple news.

Consequently, Twitter has bolstered its servers in anticipation of Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), at which healthy doses of Steve Jobs announcements are expected.

"We are expecting approximately 10 times our normal daily traffic so we've made some plans to accommodate this dramatic surge," a post on the company blog explained. Last year at WWDC, the service crashed--as it's often prone to do.

In an extreme situation, the service can go into a "gray mode" that eliminates all but the most essential features. It's also partnered with aggregation service Summize and is encouraging particularly news-hungry Twitterers to check there for updates from Jobs & co. rather than just hitting reload on Twitter--and hence swamping the servers.

Scarlett Johansson. Now on Imeem.

(Credit: Sheryl Nields/Icon International)

If you simply can't wait for Anywhere I Lay My Head, the album of Tom Waits covers as sung by sultry actress Scarlett Johansson, you're in luck. Although it isn't in full release until next week, social-media site Imeem is streaming the album live in advance.

You can't actually download it, but you can listen to the whole thing for free, and judge whether she does justice to the Waits classics or just totally botches them. As a Tom Waits fan, I'm curious to find out.

Streaming-music sites have become a hot spot for album promotions, since they offer a way for Web users to listen for free while pulling in ad revenue and simultaneously making fans wait for a (legal) physical download. Johansson is not the first artist to offer an album early on Imeem; artists like Avril Lavigne and the Rolling Stones have done the same.

Other social music sites like iLike have also been debut spots for album releases--and AOL's been doing streaming album promotions for years.

Ever gotten a text message from the pope? Well, to commemorate the Catholic Church's annual World Youth Day this July, thousands of young Catholics in Australia will be able to say that they did.

ZOMG HAVE U SEEN MY NEW HAT? Text messages from Pope Benedict XVI.

"We wanted to make (World Youth Day 2008) a unique experience by using new ways to connect with today's tech-savvy youth," Bishop Anthony Fisher of the Archdiocese of Sydney said in a statement provided to Reuters on Wednesday. Pope Benedict XVI will be in Sydney for the six-day celebration, which starts on July 15, and Australian youth will be able to connect on a very familiar level: daily inspirational text messages, "digital prayer walls" throughout Sydney, and a social-networking site.

I spent 10 years in Catholic school and we definitely never had anything like this. Guess the digital age does change everything.

According to Reuters, the broadcast, mobile, broadband, and other tech-related services surrounding the event will be provided by the Australian telecom company Telstra, which is preparing for 225,000 pilgrims, 8,000 volunteers, 2,000 clergy, and 3,000 members of the press in Sydney for the celebration.

This post was updated at 6:49 a.m. Pacific time to add comment from Facebook.

Facebook may be getting closer to launching a music service that competes with Apple's iTunes, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

Sources told the publication that Facebook has been approaching major record labels about licensing deals so that it can sell music through its Web site.

It's a long-standing rumor that has once again floated to the surface of social-media chatter.

Music sales would provide Facebook with an alternative revenue stream--the site currently relies on advertising, which many have said is precarious for a social network--and would additionally help it compete with bigger rival MySpace.com, which has a service called MySpace Music in the works and has the big-media backing of parent company News Corp. to give it an extra push in the entertainment industry. For the labels, selling music on already-popular social-networking sites is a way to tap into a youth market that has been abandoning CDs.

But it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing for companies that have built music-related applications on Facebook's developer platform. Some of them, like iLike, Imeem, and CBS Interactive's Last.fm, have ad-supported streaming or paid downloads already tied into those developer applications and it's unclear what would happen if Facebook creates an in-house competitor.

The Financial Times article suggests that like MySpace Music, the shadowy Facebook music initiative would likely offer both streaming music and downloads. "While details remain vague, record executives said that they expected a service would offer consumers free streams of music, supported by advertising, as well as the ability to pay for downloads in MP3 format, which can be played on any device," the Financial Times article stated.

The logo for the 'Music on Facebook' page. But right now, it offers artist resources for 'fan page' creation, not streaming music or downloads.

But this all might take awhile. "Facebook Music" is something that has been talked about for months and so far has borne no fruit. Back in October, AllFacebook blogger Nick O'Neill said that he was familiar with someone interviewing for the position as head of Facebook's "music division" and that the social network was already in negotiations with record labels.

But rumors of a full-out Facebook music service grew muddled with early reports about the site's "fan pages," which Facebook encourages bands and artists to create as promotional tools. A Wired blog report about Warner Bros. looking for a Facebook application developer likely dealt with the creation of fan pages and surrounding applications, not an iTunes-like music service as blogger Eliot van Buskirk speculated.

Facebook's "fan pages" launched in November as part of the company's new social advertising strategy. Since then, the company has created "Facebook Music" and "Facebook Film" hubs to promote the creation of those fan pages and offer tools to musicians and filmmakers who want to build a presence on Facebook. And at this month's South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, Facebook will be throwing parties and developer events not only at the geek-saturated South by Southwest Interactive division but also for the indie confab's music and film festivals.

Facebook representatives have stressed that the music and film pages are strictly tied to the fan pages, not any kind of upcoming commerce.

"Facebook did not launch any new music or film products in recent weeks," the company said in a statement responding to a request for comment. Facebook "created informational pages called 'Music on Facebook' and 'Film on Facebook' as guides and resources for musicians, bands and filmmakers wanting to create their own Facebook Pages. The ability for musicians, bands and filmmakers to create Facebook Pages has been available since the launch of the Facebook Pages product on Nov. 6."

The company also highlighted the fact that it does not have a partnership or formal agreement with iTunes and that any links between Facebook and iTunes are on behalf of developers who have integrated them into their third-party applications.

Clearly, Facebook wants to make a play for pop culture, but these latest rumors about big agreements with the record labels aren't much more substantial than the ones we read five months ago.

On Steven Spielberg's rumored social network, maybe you can discuss whether that ghost was really a ghost or just the creepy old caretaker from the abandoned amusement park.

(Credit: Hanna-Barbera)

Who wants to believe? TechCrunch reported Monday night that Steven Spielberg is developing a new social network where people can talk about their encounters with the paranormal and extraterrestrial.

Spielberg, creator of sci-fi classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Men in Black, and the War of the Worlds remake a few years ago, is reportedly himself a believer in paranormal phenomena. In creating a social network for fellow enthusiasts as well as people who claim to have encountered the otherworldly, Spielberg is tapping into a lifelong passion.

But its exact ties to tech and entertainment are unclear. "The project may have originally been associated with Yahoo but the project was killed off before launch," TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote. "But if our sources are right, the idea has lived on and a team in Los Angeles is working to launch it in the next few months."

Here's another theory: What if this is in conjunction with some kind of upcoming Spielberg project, a sort of uber-viral meta-campaign along the lines of the HBO Voyeur Project? (Whatever happened to that, anyway?)

The Social Gaming Network, which operates gaming applications like Warbook and Super Snake for social-networking developer platforms, announced on Thursday that it has opened a platform of its own. Developers can now access an application program interface (API) so that they can contribute; the company is set to let developers in on Thursday night and put out more information next week at the Game Developers' Conference.

The Social Gaming Network is owned by Webs.com, the Web 1.0 veteran formerly known as Freewebs, and currently works with Facebook and Bebo's platforms.

It's the second gaming start-up to put out an announcement about developers this week. Zynga, a similar site recently launched by Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus and funded by Valley luminaries like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, announced earlier on Thursday that it would be launching a developer initiative so that game publishers and developers can get their applications on more social-networking sites. Currently, Zynga's games are compatible with Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, and Meebo, with MySpace.com on the way.

Zynga and the Social Gaming Network aren't the best of friends--Social Gaming Network founder Shervin Pishevar has been critical of Zynga's games, which he claims infringe upon existing ones (Sea Wars, for example, is a lot like Battleship), and company representatives have said that they think Zynga's popularity metrics are exaggerated. Both gaming start-ups claim to be "the biggest social gaming network." It might not be HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, but this is a rivalry that could get ugly.

Something about this just makes me uneasy.

Bragster, a London-based site "for dares and social bets," announced Wednesday that it has secured $3.5 million in Series A venture cash. The funding round was led by none other than Intel Capital, the investment branch of the famed chipmaker.

The premise of the Digg-meets-Jackass-esque site is that members dare one another (or place open dares) to perform ridiculous feats, then insist on video evidence that they were completed. Bragster, co-founded by a former Morgan Stanley employee and an Amazon.com alum, provides prizes to some of the most over-the-top stunts and also sponsors contests like the "Undies at Uni Challenge," which appears to encourage college students to take their clothes off.

So what are some of the top bets and challenges on Bragster? One member has dared another to "slap someone around the face with a fish in a supermarket." O.K., I'd like to see that, however inappropriate it may be. Same thing with "dress like a Spartan and run around in the street shouting lines from the movie 300." Others, like "pour 2 mugs of boiling hot coffee on my laptop," start to make me uneasy. Call me old-fashioned, but somebody could get hurt. At least Johnny Knoxville occasionally informed his viewers that they shouldn't imitate him at home.

Then there's "I bet I can do 15 shots of tequila in 60 minutes." Um, that's called "really dangerous." I hope Bragster has good lawyers.

There's a reason why no mobile social-networking company has broken out yet. They haven't found themselves--on a map, that is.

Mobile networking, at least in the U.S., remains a limited extension of the social-media industry's biggest PC-based players: lighter, messaging-focused versions of Facebook and MySpace.com, as well as instant-messaging software like Yahoo Messenger and AIM. Social-networking start-ups with a major or exclusive focus on mobile use, like Twitter, have failed to amass a following outside the alpha-geek crowd. For mobile social networking to really take off, it's going to have to move beyond providing new ways for people to bug their friends with text messages.

Yahoo demonstrated OneConnect at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

Recent announcements and developments in the mobile media world have indicated that location-based services are going to be the game-changer. These applications, using GPS technology or cell tower triangulation, are being talked about as the move that will push mobile social networking forward--and with good reason. Crafted correctly, a location-aware mobile service could not only tell you which of your friends are nearby, but also inform you of the nearest place where you could grab a slice of pizza (and whether your neighbors recommend it)--as well as serve up advertisements that give "hyperlocal" a whole new meaning.

And with Yahoo's just-announced OneConnect launching in a few months--featuring "proximity alerts" when friends also using the service come within a certain distance of one another--it's clear that the biggest names on the Web see this as a promising market, too.

But don't hold your breath. Location awareness is going to make huge strides in how mobile devices are used, but it's not going to be a quick revolution. Services like Yahoo OneConnect, though brimming with hype, face both technological and psychological barriers that have kept their progress slow and will keep any company, start-up or conglomerate, from making an immediate splash in the space.

Right off the bat, there's the gadget factor: A whole lot of people are using cell phones that can't handle geotagging or "proximity alerts," and they aren't going to upgrade anytime soon. Those of us living in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area can easily forget that not everyone has a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Not everyone has a data plan, a built-in camera, or an unlimited text-message plan--let alone GPS capabilities. Plenty of people don't use their cell phones for anything other than boring old phone calls.

And even if they can handle GPS or the lower-tech triangulation, there's a good chance many cell phone customers don't even know about it. "Getting the customer to understand that (GPS) is on their phone has historically been the biggest hurdle," said telecommunications industry analyst Jeff Kagan. "All these cool technologies are available on the phone but nobody knows it. Customers don't know it."

Beyond handsets, cellular carriers play a crucial role in whether a location-based mobile service can take off. Loopt, a mobile social-networking site that relies on location awareness, is still only available on Sprint Nextel and its Boost Mobile subsidiary. Buddy Beacon, a similar service launched by mobile virtual network operator Helio, is available exclusively to the carrier's subscribers. To whittle it down even more, such applications are only available on compatible handsets.

There's a "lack of ability all around," said John Poisson, founder and CEO of mobile photo-sharing start-up Radar.net. "If you're talking about location-based services that are social in nature, you've completely broken the model because you can't do anything social with just a subset of an audience."

"It's like that old William Gibson cliche that everyone keeps recycling," said Michael Sharon, co-founder of geographic tagging site Socialight, which has been making small steps toward integrating location awareness into its mobile service. "It's that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."

A service like Yahoo OneConnect, backed by a well-connected dot-com giant rather than early-stage investor cash, could even the playing field with cross-carrier compatibility, but few details have been released about the product--and a beta test release is months away. It's a gamble as to which phones and carriers will actually work with it.

Privacy worries
There's a bigger issue, though. Beyond any technological challenges, a sizable portion of the population might not like the idea that their locations could be broadcast to others--or logged by their cell phone providers. "There are big privacy concerns," Poisson said. "Privacy is a huge concern when it comes to location-based services, especially when it comes to mobile devices. Any time that the end user doesn't have control over who's knowing where they are, whether it's another human being that they know or don't know, or a company that's collecting that data on an automatic basis, that starts to become problematic."

Some Facebook users were up in arms over their profile updates being shared on the News Feed and later their third-party shopping activity showing up in Beacon advertisements. What would mobile phone users think if their location were to be broadcast to a big list of social-networking contacts? Such a service would clearly have to be opt-in, which mitigates some of the Big Brother-esque worries but can also slow adoption rates.

Socialight's Michael Sharon suggested that location-aware social media will have to find some creative new applications so that it's not just a way to stalk your friends. "I think perhaps one of the reasons they haven't taken off is because friend-finding is an edge use case," he said. "It's the first thing that comes to mind, but it's perhaps not the most comfortable thing."

Socialight, which Sharon co-founded with Dan Melinger, has started to roll out location-aware features, but the start-up has stopped short of the Buddy Beacon route and currently only plans to use location as a way to show you which bars, restaurants, and other attractions (as tagged and annotated by fellow users), are nearby. Helio has launched a similar service and plans to work GPS into it soon. "It's not going to broadcast that to anyone," Sharon said of Socialight's foray into geotagging. "It's just going to show you what's around you."

Perhaps that's the natural order of things. GPS and other location-aware technologies will likely transform other aspects of the mobile experience--search, events listings, business reviews, not to mention mapping and directions--before they move on to influence social networking. After all, this is how the Internet as a whole evolved. Most Web users were trusting Google and Yahoo with their search queries long before they were comfortable uploading dozens of photo albums to Facebook.

This could be a disappointment to those digital socialites drooling at the prospect of interactive maps that chart out exactly where their friends are at a given moment. But on the bright side, this means it'll probably be awhile before your boss is using a BlackBerry to learn exactly where you went on your lunch break.