Facebook Garage this Thursday, Social Gaming Dynamics

The June garage is soon upon us - this Thursday evening, at the usual venue of Sun Microsystems, 45 King William St.

This week we're focusing on social gaming dynamics - what makes great social games inside facebook, how do you make classic games that go on for years, and how do you apply gaming dynamics to non-gaming applications?

On top of our already announced speakers, Karl Bunyan from Social Cash and Alex Fleetwood from Hide & Seek, we'll be joined by:

Sam Mathews, founder of Fnatic, one of the world's leading professional video gaming teams, talking about the professional gaming industry and what it takes for a multiplayer game become a classic that will last for years; and

Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces.com, talking about how they've applied gaming mechanics to increase engagement and retention in a non-gaming community site.

Sign up to the event on Facebook here and buy your advance tickets here.

See you there! Doors open 6-6.30 with pizza and beer, and talks starting at 7pm sharp.

Facebook are destroying all competition in the UK

Hitwise have released some stats today showing that Facebook took over 43% of all UK visits to social networking sites over the weekend - compared to just 5.97% and 3.18% for Bebo and MySpace respectively. They were the second busiest website in the whole of the UK, only beaten by Google.

What does this mean? By doggedly keeping to a pure platform play, keeping user experience at the fore, and aggressively pursuing innovations to the way people use and interact with their social graph online (live stream API, Facebook Connect, etc) Facebook have charted a course which is setting them up to be the primary social identity platform for the web as a whole. Combined with their upcoming payments platform, they could blow not only the majority of other social networks out of the water, but also payment providers such as Pay Pal and Google Checkout.

With this future in mind, what's likely to happen to the social web? I don't think it's going to be too long before other social networks, like Bebo and MySpace, accept that their strength isn't in being a social platform; it's in providing for social content. Once they realise this, they won't worry about needing to own the social data below the content, and will integrate Facebook Connect. YouTube have already done this; a big sign coming from Google.

As a platform for applications and fan page engagement, Facebook will remain an important player, but far more important will be their role as a distributed social platform for the web. Other social networks will focus on creating niche communities, but won't try and beat Facebook at the social data ownership game. Long live the king...

Update:

I should also add that the Hitwise stats include social video sites, like YouTube - which came a distant second at just over 17%. Out of just Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, Facebook took around 80% of the UK visits.