Freewebs Drops The “Free†And Launches It’s Own Facebook Gaming Network
Freewebs is taking a step back from its personal website network and expanding into a social media portfolio company under the name Webs.com. The domain will serve as a hub for its new web properties, including recently launched social publishing site Pagii and Freewebs. The site will also include a new property, the “Social Gaming Network” (SGN).
SGN is a game developer that builds applications for social networks. Currently, they’re making games just for Facebook, although Open Social integration seems a no-brainer. Their games include Warbook, Super Snake, and Blocky, as well as two recently purchased games with over a million installs, Street Race and Fight Club (for an undisclosed sum). You can add each of the games to your profile like any other app, which turns out to be a bit of a pain. I’ve started glossing over the Facebook permissions checklist. Each of the games is a decent way to waste away your work day on Facebook, but Blocky took up the most of my time.
The new network makes a lot of sense. In essence, Webs is doing what other casual gaming services like Kongregate and King.com are already doing off the site, but using an existing social network instead of building one. The games leverage the network in varying degrees. Warbook is a feudal RPG that lets you make allies or fight your friends kingdoms. Snake is understandably more solitary. But all the games encourage users to play more games by earning points for virtual goods, or bragging rights by pw0ning their friends on the leaderboard.
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Social Site Rankings (September, 2007)
Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)? Well, at least according to comScore. I asked comScore to do a ranking of social sites in the U.S. and then I reordered the list by growth rate. Here it is:
Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).
In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said).
Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include WordPress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million).
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Freewebs Launches Pagii: Publishing For The MySpace Crowd
Freewebs has launched a new “social publishing” site called Pagii, aimed at crafting highly stylized personal web pages. It’s termed social publishing because the service isn’t only for crafting user profiles, but also crafting layouts for any other content such as scrapbooks.
Pages are designed with a very flexible AJAX page editor that lets users drag, drop, and resize objects and place them anywhere on the page. It’s the kind of system any heavy MySpace user would love. The system doesn’t adhere to a grid layout and allows objects to be layered one on top of another with varying opacities. A lot of the style objects and effects are vector based (SVG), making it possible to rotate and resize them without sacrificing quality. It allows for adding nice effects like reflections and animations to page elements as well.
Objects supported by the editor include shapes, photos, text, html, and Pagii widgets. Pagii widgets allow you to add basic social networking modules such as friends, comments, and personal bio to your page. They can be reskinned to match the rest of the page design. Supporting html code in the widgets means you can also add your favorite embeddable widgets from other services too.
Pagii’s editor creates some of the most flexible layouts I’ve seen, but that kind of flexibility may seem chaotic to some. Other editors like Webjam, Weebly, Synthasite, and Jimdo have taken a more structured approach, following the grid layouts that have become the norm for websites.
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