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It’s rare that you come across a game that is a uniquely original take on a relatively standard game type.  We see knockoffs all the time, or games that are basically just the same old game idea with better graphics and maybe different icons.  Unlike those types of remakes, Amazing Breaker is a truly original take on a relatively common game concept.

The premise is relatively simple: you draw back your sling cannon to launch projectiles at an object and break it down – sort of halfway between Angry Birds and Breakout.  Except you have different kinds of projectiles randomly given to you and you can control some aspects of them mid-flight.

There’s one that breaks into three as soon as you tap the screen, one that can go through the object your aiming for and explode at a given point (you follow it with your finger and when you let off, it explodes), etc.  This adds a whole new dimension to the game play.  That’s on top of the game’s other core twist..

The objects your aiming for?  They’re made of ice.  They are beautiful renderings of stained-glass-like artwork and your goal is to break them down in as few shots as possible.  It’s easy to hit the objects (missing is actually more work, honestly), but hitting them strategically so as to do the most break-up per shot is a challenge.

You can bounce your shots off the sidewalls of the screen to hit higher points or get around obstacles and you can use the unique missile type you have on each shot to go for unusual shots as well.

This game is very addicting and a whole lot of fun.

For the first time, Facebook for Android is showing more mobile daily active users than is Facebook for iPhone.  The Android Facebook app launched in 2009, a year after the iPhone’s app, though both were internally developed by Facebook.

The Android app, according to Facebook’s numbers, is now pulling 58.3 million DAU compared to iPhone’s 57.4 million.  Facebook released the latest update to the iPhone app which added Timeline access, previously only available on Android, but with Android phones activating at a blistering 550,000 per day, it may not be enough to catch up.

TechCrunch broke the story after independent numbers from AppData.  By contrast, Facebook for BlackBerry and Windows Phone has 29.9 million and 360,000 DAU, respectively.

According to John Constine at TechCrunch: “User counts of the Facebook apps matter because they can influence where Facebook devotes mobile development resources. For years, features were first released for the iPhone version, possibly because its higher user count made it more of a priority. If the Android app becomes significantly more popular, Timeline might be the first of many features it gets early.”

He’s right.  Despite my affinity for the iOS brigade of gadgets, it’s good to see some competition to keep things fresh.  If Android can provide some competition in the market, the Apple products will be all the better for it.

Pandora has two major drawbacks: a small music catalog and it’s only available in the U.S.  A catalog of 900,000 songs to choose from is nothing to balk at, but in today’s connected world of on-demand content, it’s a tiny drop in the bucket.  Add to that the inter-connected world we live in now and you see limitations to Pandora that make it.. well, less desirable.

Other music services like Spotify have been gaining ground quickly, but there is a large market segment that it doesn’t appeal to: music listeners who aren’t interested in surfing.  Many popular music platforms require you to actively choose music, surf your friend’s playlists, and otherwise use the service itself.

Many listeners are more interested in a radio-like experience of hands-off listening where you choose a “channel” and just listen.  Pandora has survived in today’s breakneck world of music streaming almost entirely because it’s one of the few services offering this.  Choose “rock” and that’s what you get, for as long as you want to listen.

Senzari does the same thing, offering what CEO Bill Hajjar calls a “lean back” experience.  You choose a genre of music or load in your own music catalog and Senzari finds similar music – and that of your friends, if they’re connected – to create on-the-fly playlists that you listen to without doing anything but listen.

The music app just drew in $2 million in angel funding and has already shown it can beat Pandora at the content and distribution game.  Senzari is licensed as an Internet radio station in three countries (U.S., Brazil, Spain) and has a strategic partnership with RED Viacom.

Plus it’s got a music catalog of over 10 million songs.  More than ten times what Pandora can offer.

Senzari is currently in closed beta in the U.S. and will open in Spain sometime this month.  Brazil will see it early next year.

CNN Money is reporting that, according to sources, Facebook has purchased location sharing service Gowalla.  The deal is officially unconfirmed, but seems likely given the sources.

Further information says that Gowalla will uproot from its Texas offices and move into Facebook’s space in Palo Alto, California.  Gowalla will become integrated with Facebook’s “Timeline” feature, which is gradually rolling out to FB users now.

Gowalla recently re-built iself as a “travel guide” after failing to attract enough users to really compete with Foursquare, current Mayor of Location-Based Apps.  It’s unknown whether Facebook will keep this new direction or push Gowalla back into Timeline – which seems more likely.

In fact, given Facebook’s history with buyouts, it’s questionable whether Gowalla will remain at all.  With Drop.io, Hot Potato, and others, FB killed them off and moved their talent pool into other projects.  It seems likely that they’ll do the same here, putting Gowalla’s talent into Timeline instead.

There will probably be an official announcement on the take over today and more information may be forthcoming from that.

Update 12/5/11, PM: As expected, the announcement was made today and Gowalla and Facebook both say that the Gowalla service itself will cease in January and the entire Gowalla development team will be put on the Facebook Timeline squad.

Social gaming is now a multi-billion dollar industry expected to pull in $14.2 billion by 2015, analysts say.  Yet developers in this space are finding it harder and harder to get their slice of those billions ($6.1B this year).  Growing pains are hitting the social gaming industry hard.

King of the game gang is Zynga, whose titles like Mafia Wars and Farmville have been the most-played games on Facebook for years.  The company is about to go public and expects to raise about $1 billion in revenue from that move.  Money that will pay off some debt and get their next titles out to the public.

Something that Zynga needs to do as Mafia Wars 2, it’s latest release, appears to have been nothing near the blockbuster they’d hoped for.  The follow on to the previous time killer has been wracked with bugs, user complaints, and abandonment after only a few hours’ play by the average player.

While revenues at Zynga are up ($306.8M at least quarter), profit is down by more than half from last year ($12.5M, a 54% drop).  This is reflected in the rest of the social gaming industry too, where costs of acquisition (money to get players) are rising fast as increased competition makes building a fan following difficult.

Electronic Arts, which has only recently moved into the social gaming sphere with the hit Sims Social, a knockoff of their popular Sims series for the PC.  Despite that game’s huge following (33 million users to date, 19% of which play daily), the game has yet to turn a profit.  Why?  Marketing.  EA spent millions marketing the game aggressively, which largely accounts for its popularity.

Analysts predict that only about 1/3 (or 33%) of social games are reaping a profit.

Innovative ideas are changing how games monetize, however.  Zynga has started making in-game ad deals, doing the video game equivalent of product placement – something movies and television have been doing for years.  Others are likely to jump on board with this plan.

However it works out, the social gaming industry is getting highly competitive and over users who are becoming more and more discretionary about their online time.

Major porn companies have banded together to sue ICANN over the new adult top level domain (TLD) .XXX.  The suit is an anti-monopoly claim against the non-profit that oversees most of the well-known TLDs (com, net, org, etc).

The major companies behind the suit are Luxemburg-based Manwin and Digital Playground, which together own many of the Web’s most well-known porn hubs.  They contend that ICANN is price gouging on the .XXX domain and want an injunction to stop the TLD and require its re-opening with competition and “reasonable price constraints.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of California on November 16 and accuses ICANN and its registry company ICM Registry of engaging in “monopolistic conduct, price gouging, and anti-competitive and unfair practices.”

This might seem frivolous, except that it’s very serious and could have long-lasting implications on the domain system as we know it.  The crux of the suit alleges that ICM (a for profit contracted by ICANN) used coercive tactics and promises of millions of dollars in fees if it were made the sole registrar of .XXX.

If Manwin and Digital Playground were to win this suit, it would fundamentally change a lot of how we use and interact with domain registrations and use.  Currently, there are a handful of TLD registrars in the world, each more or less operating regionally.  They pay ICANN a small fee for every domain registered through them and ICANN acts as the world’s “central hub” for domain registries.

When ICANN approved the dot XXX TLD earlier this year, a lot of buzz around its implementation was heard.  Early registrations were opened with companies paying many thousands of dollars in fees to secure their brands on the domain.  Including many who traditionally would not be associated with porn: like colleges and universities.

At $300 per registration, that’s not insignificant, considering that most have many names and variants to protect.  CraigAgranoff.xxx is one thing, but Craig-Agranoff.xxx, CraigAg.xxx, AgranoffCraig.xxx, Agranoff-Craig.xxx, and then several each for all of my owned properties (brands) could potentially ad up to tens of thousands in fees.  A university, for instance, might have their own name (and 3-4 variants), thier football team, their basketball team, their volleyball teams, their sports teams collectively, their various departments, and even famous backers or names of buildings on campus.

Securing these means securing your brand.  Not doing so could mean costly lawsuits later (either to fight misuse of it or to fight potential litigation for your not protecting someone from it).  Most businesses and apparently universities have opted to pay now instead of later.

But for the adult industry, that was not as clear cut.  ICM did not allow some of the domains to be sold in this relatively open pre-market, instead reserving them to auction to the highest bidder.  Despite the fact that the .com/net/etc equivalents may be clear brands owned by others.

These auctions are quite lucrative.  “Gay.XXX” auctioned for $500,000 and many others are going for $200,000 and up.

Another blow to ICM is their requirement that legal rights and claims against them be waived as a condition of registering with them.  This doesn’t look good for them in court.

ICANN should take this lawsuit seriously.  Not only does it have potential to change how domain registrations are made, but it could have long term ramifications for how new TLDs are introduced and the way that they’re handled.