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Earlier this month, Facebook launched its Open Graph tools to allow app developers to more easily share user activity data across timelines and on their own sites for integration.  While controversial, as the usual privacy concerns were aired, the tools have been utilized in some interesting ways.  Here’s a few of them.

Fab.com’s $10 monthly credit for opt-ins. This is really cool.  Usually, your data is seen as a free-for-all by companies and Facebook itself.  Fab.com, however, is rewarding users for opting in to shar etheir shopping data with them.  For the next five months, Fab pays $10 a month in credits to users who opt into their Facebook social shopping app.  The company has also added little nuances that use the tool in other interesting ways, such as hiding purchases when they’re called “gifts” in the timeline so the person its for won’t see it in on your profile.

Ticketmaster product finding. Rather than throwing out random ads at people in hopes a percentage of them want to actually buy tickets to see the artist or event being promoted, Ticketmaster has come up with a way to watch opt-in users’ streams to offer ads related to what they’re talking about or using.  Listening to that new band on Spotify?  If they’re coming to your area, Ticketmaster will offer you tickets to the show.  Nicks fan living in Texas?  No prob, when they come to town, you can get seats on the proper side of the stadium.

There are a lot of other apps out there now, but most are doing what you’d expect them to do.  Zynga is basically self-promoting by watching the games people play or talk about and mentioning similar titles of their own.  More will be coming as Facebook speeds up the approval process.

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.

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.

Canonical, the company that markets the open source Linux distribution of Ubuntu, will be porting Ubuntu to smart phones, tablets, and more.  The company is expected to make an official announcement at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.

The move is not entirely unexpected, since the entire impetus behind Ubuntu has been to create “Linux for humans” rather than for machines – something that Canonical’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has in common with Steve Jobs, whose focus was on user experience rather than machine code perfection.

So can this work?  Would Ubuntu work on smaller machines?

As it is currently, probably not.  But Apple’s OSX wouldn’t work on mobiles either, so Apple made iOS.  The biggest difference between the companies being size and the fact that Canonical doesn’t seem to have plans to build and market their own device, only something that will run on devices.

Some of the current design trends in Canonical’s proprietary Ubuntu desktop interface, Unity, are actually there in order to facilitate a smooth transition for users when moving from a Unity-enabled computer to a Unity-running smart phone or tablet.  This is intended to create a uniform user experience – something few Linux users are interested in, by most accounts, but which everyday (read: non-technical) users can appreciate.

So when can you expect to see Ubuntu Unity on a smart phone?  Probably not anytime soon – in fact, likely right around the time you see Windows 8 and Microsoft’s planned Metro interface; around 2014.

With Google acquiring Motorola Mobility and Microsoft fast moving to (maybe this time) embrace mobile, it could be a very shaken market by the time Canonical gets their foot in the ring.

Google added a dozen games to Google+ this week, including popular titles like Angry Birds, Zynga Poker, and more.  The Google+ Games service opened quietly, but immediately got attention from users who saw the privacy implications in Google’s permissions agreement when using one of the games.

Of course, games on social platforms like Google+, Fecebook, etc. require some access to the user’s profile.  After all, social games aren’t all that social if the game can’t see your network and tie you in with friends who are also playing the game.  It’s when the requests for information go beyond that and begin to get nosy that people get dicey.

Google+ Games requires users to allow the game access to almost their entire profile: from email to real name to Circles and their inhabitant’s importance.. This is a little too much for many users, who are complaining loudly about the intrusion just to gain access to some simple browser games.

Games began rolling out on Thursday, August 11 and are now available to nearly all G+ users.  Game announcements are currently limited to the Circle in which a friend is housed on your account.

On Google’s side in this debate is the fact that all of the permissions sought are listed right up-front when the user first accesses the game.  The user can refuse and not play the game and game announcements are currently limited to only those which players choose specifically to share with their Circles.

While many Google+ users are irked about the games being added (and the permissions requested), they are no worse than any other in the industry – better in some regards.  Through creative use of Circles and by choosing to ignore the Games tab altogether, G+ users can almost entirely avoid games on the platform.

For Google’s part, adding games is a big move towards competition with Facebook on the mainstream popularity front.

In a guest post on TechCrunch, Tom Anderson, former President and founder of MySpace, talks about Google + and Facebook and how Google is going to radically change the social networking game and how Facebook must react if they want to be relevant five years from now.

He writes:

If it’s not obvious yet, Google+ is going to be able to “undercut” Facebook when it comes to game developers and platform transactions. Instead of taking a 30% cut of all Farmville seeds (or whatever people are buying), Google will be able to take a smaller percentage for themselves. They may even take nothing. And when it comes to “monetization” on the G+ “website,” Google’s trump card against Facebook is that we may never even see an ad on G+. Google has plenty to gain without ever showing an ad and, put simply, Google doesn’t need the money. Facebook’s got to know this, and it’s got to have them just a little bit concerned.

Everything, according to Anderson, hinges on how Google launches their G+ platform for developers.  The way he sees it, Facebook really screwed up with the way they’ve handled this, giving developers almost total free reign and then being perceived as the bad guy when they began pulling in those reigns and tightening their grip.  He does give Facebook kudos for how they’ve handled branding and business uses of the site, a model of encouraging individual users before business which he advises Google to follow.

Anderson points out one of the big mistakes that MySpace made and how the delicate balance between regular people, advertisers, small businesses, and platform developers is tough to maintain, but crucial for long-term survival and growth.

His points are very valid and definitely cut to the core of what is happening in the current social media shakeup.