Just when you thought the Facebook gaming sector couldn’t get any more competitive, another report comes out saying things have tightened even further.

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Zynga continues to dominate Facebook games, claiming six of the top ten and four of the top five titles in the rankings produced by our peer site AppData.

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Zynga has increased the amount of money it plans to raise in its initial public offering to $1.15 billion, according to an amended filing the company made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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CastleVille has scored five million daily active players during its first week, making it the fastest growing Zynga game of all time.

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Zynga’s newest entry in the ‘Ville series of social game, CastleVille, just went live on Facebook.

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Buying soap is all fun and games? That’s the angle Simplehuman is going for with its new Made For Each Other Facebook game linked to the launch of a collection of four new soap-and-sensor-pumps.

To promote the soap-pump products, Hello Design created Made For Each Other a digital version of the classic card-matching game, memory.

Players are timed as they uncover pairs; those who find all the pairs the fastest are spotlighted on a leaderboard showing which products from Simplehuman they are eligible to win at that time.

If other players beat the score, however, they can be bounced from the board, which Hello Design Chief Executive Officer David Lai said he hopes “generates excitement and encourages users to play multiple times.”

The game is aimed at generating excitement around Simplehuman’s newest products. It reinforces the idea of the soaps and pumps as perfect pairs by comparing them to other more recognizable pairs—milk and cookies, pencils and erasers.

Lai said in an interview:

We wanted a quick way to get people to understand how Simplehuman’s soap and pumps work together. All the soaps have the optimal consistency to work hand-in-hand with the high-efficiency pumps and no-drip valves, ensuring no messy drips or clogs. I’d like the Facebook game to make people smile. It’s addictive—and we hope that the product makes a lasting impression as gamers play.

The game is now live and the contest will continue until November 21. Click here to play.

In dollars and cents, the excitement will only pay out to Simplehuman if it’s still lingering with the players when they see the products in stores or online.

What do you think, readers? Would an interactive game like the one described here increase the likelihood that you’d buy a soap called Simplehuman?

Fee-based sports-betting system AccuScore introduced a unique approach to sports games on Facebook Friday with its introduction of SKL.

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Social media still can’t take the place of good old-fashioned trick-or-treating and costume parties.

That oversimplification may partly explain why Halloween-themed applications on Facebook are such an underdeveloped category; the relative dearth seems like a disconnect when compared to the high visibility of the holiday in the changed news feed.

A handful of applications on Facebook invoke Halloween, mostly replicating a subset of the options within greeting card apps.

Only one app differs from the trite seasonal greetings meme: Halloween Pumpkins, which has 130,000 monthly active users, has an average rating of 3.8 stars, based on 13 reviews. The game seems a bit like a pumpkin version of Tetris.

Halloween has increasingly become as much of a holiday for adults as children, so the minimum age requirement of 13 on Facebook doesn’t wash as an explanation for why apps for this holiday underwhelm compared to other occasions.

Now that might change if developers figured out a way to create applications that improve upon Halloween photo uploads to Facebook.

But people are content to share Halloween pictures using Facebook’s existing photo albums, tagging and wall posts, without requiring any holiday-specific applications to envelop this practice.

Readers, do you have any other ideas about why there aren’t more Halloween-specific apps on Facebook, and why the existing ones don’t have more traction?

The dollar? Meh. The euro? That’s so 1995. Facebook Credits is taking aim at becoming the new universal currency. And it’s starting with the web.

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Gentlemen (and ladies): Start your engines.

Toyota is using a Facebook game to promote the production model sports car that it plans to debut at the Tokyo Motor Show in December.

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