Today there is big news from Kongregate, the social gaming website. On Monday Kongregate will be launching the Facebook Challenge Platform. Kongregate is an indie gaming site with over 4,000 original user-uploaded Flash and Shockwave games. Kongregate has decided to launch a platform which enables users to challenge their friends to compete for Kongregate points in one-on-one, asynchronous challenges.

Players using the platform can compare their high scores with immediate friends, others in their network, or across the entire Facebook network. Individuals can also play alone if they’d like. I often times get sucked into playing Dolphin Olympics 2 for a couple hours. While I currently do not leverage all of the features of Kongregate.com, which includes personal accounts with points and achievements, the system synchronizes accounts on Facebook to accounts on the website for those that use it.

For developers there are new APIs that make it easy to port games to the Kongregate Challenge platform with little effort. While not all of the games will be launching initially, the platform will launch with Dolphin Olympics 2, Filler, Particles, Ragdoll, Avalance, MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2 and others. This new platform is a direct competition to Zynga and SGN both of which already have plenty of active users. It will be interesting to see if Kongregate experiences the same explosive growth that many of the Zynga and SGN games did during launch.

Below are some screenshots of the games running on the Kongregate Facebook Challenge Platform from within Facebook.

Dolphin Olympics 2

Guitar Maniac

Jumpcat Challenge