Is your Facebook Wall becoming cluttered with details about your latest Angry Birds achievements and Farmville progress? Then you're exactly the kind of person iPhone game developer Ngmoco is looking to attract with a new service planned to launch in the US soon.
Above: Some of Ngmoco's iPhone games
Mobage (pronounced "moe bah gae") will be introduced next year as a way to connect its players from across mobile game platforms. So iPhone and Android users can share content and interact with one another.
Ngmoco CEO Neil Young said it was driven to build a social platform based on the fact that Facebook doesn't seem like the appropriate place to share gaming achievements. "Sometimes you don't want your friends and family knowing that you're playing these games every day," he said.
So Mobage will be the solution to that problem, at least for people who really like Ngmoco's games.
Of course, Mobage won't easily stand out from the rest of the crowd. Facebook already has a pretty strong mobile presence, and really, if you want to socially interact with someone on your phone, you'll do it through Facebook. Plus, other game-related social networking servicesare cropping up.
And for iPhone owners, there's Game Center, an Xbox Live-like service that's already attracting a lot of mobile gamers who want a game-centric social service. And Windows Phone 7 has Xbox Live integration.
Of course, Mobage's interoperability between platforms is the main differentiator here. We'll see if it actually makes any sort of splash in the social networking world. Hint: Based on most other attempts, we sort of doubt it.
[Source:CNN]
Nov 24, 2010
