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One of the standard ways to get new users introduced to your app is Profile Boxes. Each application on most social networking sites can have a profile box that users can add to their profiles for other visitors to discover. J2Play has ramped up their Profile Box support and now added it to All social sites , including Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, Orkut, Ning, and Friendster. What do you have to do to get this feature? NOTHING, Profile Boxes are now another free automatic feature that all games get by just adding the game to our network which takes around 5 mins.
- Facebook Profile Box Big
The big profile box for Facebook as shown above, displays the game icon, shows the number of challenges waiting for you in the game, your personal highscore, other friends who have this game, links to other games to keep the virality going, and finally the most important feature a “Play Now!” button to get new users to your application.
- Facebook Profile Box Small
Facebook has two different profile box sizes. The smaller version contains the same info minus the game picture and the game links, but maintains all your game related stats and the all important “Play Now!” button.
- Profile Box in Hi5
The profile box is optimized for each social networking site. Above, is an example from Hi5 which shows off the opensocial sites profile box design.
The second automatic feature added this week is the code free/feature free feeds. Previously to get some automatic feeds you had to add some features to your game such as leaderboards, although this is HIGHLY encouraged, we now have an automatic feed that comes with our basic codeless/featureless integration, by just adding your game our network. The following games have taken advantage of this feature:
 SP Trainer |
 Stunt Pilot |
 Plant Cruncher |
 Robo Kill Trainer |
 Dog Fight |
 Dog Fight 2 |
Basic Automatic Feed
Most games fit into our social wrapper just fine and get to take advantage of our chat bar on the side, but few games have fine text and their dimensions don’t fit well within our platform, for these few game developers we have added a full width feature that allows their game to take advantage of the full width Facebook provides. An example is Robokill, and Action RPG game, where the menus and text would not be as visible if the game is re-sized to smaller format.
Robo Kill in Full Width Mode
In summary developers now get Profile Boxes and Automatic Feeds for more virality, also they can use the full width of Facebook for the few games that really need it. Finally you are still encouraged to take advantage of our more advanced integration features such as Leaderboards and Badge to increase your engagement and virality.
One of the most addictive, viral, and engaging features in social games is challenges and we have just refined our challenge APIs to make the features more engaging and viral than ever before. First lets have a brief overview of the engagement and viral features that accompany this feature, followed by an overview of Challenges APIs, and finally how you can quickly make add this feature to your game.
Common tasks on social networking sites include browsing profiles, sending each other messages, commenting and tagging photos. There’s one thing in common between all these activities, they’re all asynchronous, meaning both parties don’t have to be online at the same time for it work. Challenges brings this concept to multiplayer games. People can enjoy games with their friends even if they’re not online. This asynchronous interaction adds another level of engagement to your games. J2Play has integrated this feature deeply with our platform. A new leaderboard automatically gets added to keep track of users wins and losses, which adds another reason for players to continue playing your game. Players can even bet credits on a challenge to raise the stakes and make the game more interesting.
Betting on Challenges
Your game will become more viral by adding the Challenges feature within our network as well as on the social networking sites. Here’s the summary of the additional viral features you get:
- Game shows up in the Challenges Tab
- “VS.” icons is enabled in the chat bar to bring more people to your game
- Challenge Selection Pane added bellow the pre-game ad
- Challenge Notifications sent to user to bring them back to the application
- Result Notification sent to players
- Challenge result Feeds posted to users walls
And my most favorite feed of all Challenge Winning Streak Feed. This shows your friends how good you are in a game, and encourage them to come and beat your winning streak.
Winning Streak Challenge Feed
As illustrated by the screen shot above I’m undefeated in Reversi so I encourage you to come find me online and put an end to this. 
With challenges mode you give users a reason to switch to your game and this results into a pre-game ad view, which increase the revenue generated by your game as well. People can also challenge their friends who don’t have the game installed yet giving you another opportunity to increase your user count.
Any game, even single player games can take advantage of this feature. If you’re already keeping track of a highscore you can add the simple challenge by highscore mode. Where one player initiates the challenge, plays a round, send the challenge to a second player, they play the game, and who ever has the highscore wins the game. Some games that are already taking advantage of this feature are Daily Sudoku, Daily Linguo, and Quick Poker.
Daily Sudoku Challenge Mode
The API is very straight forward, the challenge creation aspect of the process is handled by J2Play, so you can focus on just writing the code to handle the challenge mode in your game. Add challenges to your game NOW by going to the wiki documentation.
One of the activities we all enjoy on social networking sites is playing games and usually the games that let you share that experience with your friends are the most popular ones. Building the technology that allows game developers to create this social experience is a lot of overhead work. J2Play has created a Social Games Platform that allows flash and PC game developers to quickly add social features to their games with minimal work and socialize their games. Here are some highlights of the platform.
I) Auto-Port and reach audiences across 9 different social networks including:
 |
 myspace |
 hi5 |
 iGoogle |
 bebo |
 orkut |
 friendster |
 meebo |
 Ning |
II) Quickly add 7+ social features to your existing game with no additional code:
 Friends List |
 Chat |
 Credits |
 Profiles |
 Notifications |
 Ratings |
 Comments |
III) Take advantage of Viral Marketing Channels with no extra work
- Your game will automatically generate Feeds
- Your game will automatically generate Notifications
- Invite feature will automatically get added to your game
- Automatically get Profile Boxes
IV) J2Play adds 12+ Viral features to your game automatically
- Become part of the growing J2Play games network for even more ways to get discovered
- J2Play games network has natural non intrusive viral discovery features specific to games
V) Quickly add an additional 5+ engagement features to your game with a few lines of code including:
 Leaderboards |
 Badges |
 Challenges |
 Feeds |
 Multiplayer |
VI) Make Money
  |
Ad Revenue |
|---|---|
| Get 70% of the around and pre game ads displayed by your game |
We’ve been working with a lot of great flash game developers that have taken advantage of the flash toolkit, here’s some example games that you can try out today. Fancy Pants is a single player game that added many social features such as leaderboards, and badges to optimize the gameplay experience for the social networking crowed. Another great example is Daily Sudoku which uses our challenge feature, anyone can add this feature to their existing games to make it more engaging.
PC Developers such as Large Animal and Alawar have been taking advantage of J2Play’s PC toolkit to bring their existing PC titles to a new distribution channel, the social web. Alawar so far has released 3 PC titles including the highly addictive Sprill game, you can try this game today. Lego Bricktopia is Large Animal’s first foray into PC downloadble games on social networking sites.
Finally for developer who qualify based on the integration level of their games they get up to $500 of advertising around social networking sites to kick start your user uptake.
You can get started today and socialize your game. Our developer wiki walks you through the whole process you get started now! Feel free to contact me for additional questions or technical support at developer@j2play.net. Looking forward to seeing your games in our platform.
