Feature

Why Facebook Connect matters for iPhone games

Playing with your real friends is always a good idea

Why Facebook Connect matters for iPhone games
Today's launch of Facebook Connect for iPhone, including several games using the functionality, is a big deal for iPhone gaming.

It sounds pretty simple: sign into an iPhone game using your Facebook login details, and then compete against your Facebook friends' scores, while publishing your achievements to your news feed.

But it's huge. Rather than creating their own communities, iPhone developers can now tap into people's existing networks of friends. That's important for two reasons:

1. The ability to compete with friends is a powerful reason to keep playing a game regularly, especially if you're getting notifications when they beat your score (more on this in a minute).

2. The viral element of iPhone games becoming part of people's Facebook news feeds, especially with the recent changes making these feeds more dynamic. I can think of dozens of Facebook friends who'll be scrambling for the App Store the first time they see 'Stuart is playing Who Has The Biggest Brain? on his iPhone' pop up on their feed.

We can only hope that lots more iPhone games will incorporate Facebook Connect in the coming months. And actually, this is one point where we're not sure we agree entirely with Playfish boss Kristian Segerstrale.

In our interview published earlier, he says that to be successful, games have to be designed to be social from Day One, rather than just have social features (e.g. Facebook Connect) slapped onto an existing mobile game.

Although undoubtedly true on the Facebook website, we think pretty much any iPhone game with some form of scores/times/achievements will benefit from this technology.
Need For Speed Underground, Rolando, Asphalt 4 or Zen Bound with Facebook Connect would be great, to name just four of our favourite iPhone games. So there is an argument for iPhone developers to incorporate the technology without having to redesign their games from the ground up.

But now that Facebook Connect is available for such use, we hope Apple runs with the idea and thinks about how to support it in the iPhone software.

With version 3.0 due to be unveiled on Tuesday at a media event, we wonder if push notifications will be included, allowing social games on your iPhone to alert you to what friends are up to more dynamically than they can at the moment.

We understand why Apple has taken its time in allowing such notifications - there's a danger of intrusiveness if every app or game installed on your iPhone is pinging status messages at you throughout the day.

But if Facebook Connect is going to be as big for iPhone games as we hope, then it would make sense for Apple to look at how the Facebook website uses notifications and news feeds, and incorporate some of those features into the iPhone OS.

Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)