Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Earlier this summer Facebook announced they were opening up their platform to allow developers to create social applications that could deeply integrate with their functionality and data (and in turn, take advantage of the “social graph” of their 30 million members).

We see the potential here as being enormous, and are already hard at work integrating social applications into our clients’ word of mouth/social media marketing mix. We’ve just released our first app, called Pass the Soccer Ball.

The premise is quite simple – you pass ‘balls’ to your friends who can in turn either pass it down the field to one of their friends or take a ‘shot’ at the goal (with each successive pass improving the odds of scoring a goal). The very nature of the game takes advantage of the “social graph” and spreads virally. In fact, we quietly released the first version of the application last week with no promotion and over 1000 people installed the app in just the first few days (it also boasts an “active user” base in the top 15% of all Facebook apps, according to Adonomics).

This is a sign of bigger things to come, as Myspace, Yahoo, and even Google are rumored to follow suit and release developer APIs that allow deep integration with their platforms. Social networks are becoming the new operating systems

Got a Facebook account? Why not check out the app and pass me a soccer ball?

Related Links:

Facebook Developers API
Pass the Soccer Ball Game (Facebook account required)