Amidst the talk of competing social networking platforms, one provider’s taking a different approach to creating iPhon gaming on communities.

US company Geocade, which is installed in top 10 games such as Paper Toss and Ragdoll Blaster, enables you to create leaderboards based on the physical location of players.

We caught up with founder Jim Caralis - based in Cambridge, MA by the way - to find out more.

Pocket Gamer: Can you explain what the inspiration for Geocade is?

Jim Caralis: The idea is to bring back those old days when it was cool to have the high score at the local arcade. That's pretty much lost with today’s global high score leaderboards and Xbox Live-like implementations. The mobile space needs a platform that is made for it, not a copy of existing console solutions.

Why do you think that geo-location is such an important feature for a social network?

Leaderboards get pretty boring for all but the top scorers. Being ranked 100,000 doesn't do much for most gamers, but you can always compete for the high score in your local town or state, and additionally still compete on a national and global level.

Location also allows for social interaction at local places. For example, all of the games on our platform come as standard with the ability to detect your location at baseball stadiums across the US and allows players to compete for the high score at that stadium.

We are expanding that functionality to other sports and locations (college campuses etc). And we allow players to create custom leaderboards, so, for example, users can create a Pocket Gamer leaderboard and compete amongst other Pocket Gamer fans.

Do you enable hooks into social networks such as Facebook?

We have new Facebook functionality in beta that allows for every publisher to have an Facebook application created with their game. Users can view their scores for that game online and publishers can cross-promote other games. We’ll have news of more functionality soon.

How do the different geo-location capabilities of the iPhone and iPod touch affect what you’re trying to do?

From a technology perspective it’s pretty much abstracted. For the purposes of locating a local gaming community it works very well on both devices. If location is not available we default to a global leaderboard.

You’re a cross-platform mobile technology, so what’s the split between the mobile platforms you support?

Right now overwhelmingly iPhone, but we have several games on Android and one nearly complete on the Blackberry platform.

Your website mentions ad revenue share, so how does that work?

Yes. We split advertising revenue with game publishers and we have games implementing our platform making some real money.

There’s a lot of competition in the iPhone market in this space, so why do you think developers should choose Geocade?

There are a couple of reasons: implementation, features and business model.

Geocade can be implemented in under an hour and adds very little overhead to the game.

Location-aware leaderboards (over 40,000 cities and towns across the world have leaderboards), custom leaderboards, huge cross-promotion opportunities (100,000 free impressions on our network), and revenue share.

We have a revenue model with actual revenue, 70+ games live and those games have been installed on over 8 million iPhones. We have funding too and are going to be around for a long time.

Can you reveal anything about future features?

Facebook is becoming a big part of our strategy. I mentioned Facebook apps for publishers, but we see a huge opportunity for location-aware leaderboards for Facebook games as well. We have also just released cross-promotion features, and shortly will release location-aware game discovery.

Thanks to Jim for his time.

You can find out more about Geocade on its website, its Twitterfeed,  or by contacting gamedev [at] geocade.com