This week J2Play rolled out major update to our social wrapper as well as a lot of new social features. The profile tab, sidebar, mini profiles, and game icons saw major updates this week as well as some graphic updates to our existing ratings and notification systems.

This release saw a major overhaul of the profile tab both aesthetically and more importantly functionally. The previous profile tab was a static summery page, the new profile tab has many new browsing as well as community features. Users can now browse through all the badges they’ve earned not just the recent ones, see all the games their friends play not just the top 10, browse through the summary of all the challenges they’ve played.

New Profile Page

The biggest improvement to the profile tab is the new Wall feature. Now players are able to comment on each others game wall and see their latest activities in the J2Play Games Network. A native feed is sent to the social networking site when someone writes a comment on your wall.

New Sidebar

The second major widget to get updates on the UI is the chat bar on the right side of the social wrapper. We’ve simplified this widget by a lot, the whole chat bar is now tab driven. The first tab contains the list of all your J2Play friends and gives you the option to invite your Facebook friends to the current application. The second tab is the Chat Room tab, where you can chat with all players who are online at the moment. Finally, Opening players profiles will open up a new tab in the sidebar. Also mouse over current status of any player on the sidebar brings up our new game card.

New Mini Profile

The new mini profile in the sidebar shows a summary of the players profile including badges info, challenge info, and a short list of some of their friends. Players can also view the users wall and comment on it, as well as engage in  private live chat with that person.

New Game Card

Mosue over game icons anywhere in the social wrapper now bring up the new game card. This game card presents users with a quick summary of the game including it’s full title, ratings, genre, and total number of plays the game has received.

The Santa Express

We’ve announced a partnership with a great casual game company Jenkat Media this week, and in the spirit of the holiday season we’ve released their first game with us The Santa Express I encourage you to check this game out and see if you can beat our highscores. You can read the full press release of the partnership here.

The advantage of using J2Play is that you don’t have to worry about the social features as we update our platform all your games receive these updates and keep your applications fresh and relevant, there’s no cost for maintaining your social networking applications. If you haven’t released your games in your system yet, now is a good time to get started, head over to our developer wiki to get started now!