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OpenFeint platform brings social networking to iPhone games

Chat, keeps scores, link up Facebook and Twitter

OpenFeint platform brings social networking to iPhone games
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You’re quite right – the ‘Feint’ part of OpenFeint is indeed the same as we saw in the awesome online Bejeweled clone, Aurora Feint.

The team behind the Aurora Feint games have been hard at work developing an open source social community platform that will be made accessible to all iPhone game developers.

Essentially, this gives game devs the option to quickly and easily add social networking features to their games. This will include chat lobbies, score leaderboards and the ability to link player accounts to Facebook and Twitter.

PocketGamer.Biz chatted with Aurora Feint chairman Peter Relan about the possibilities the OpenFeint platform could bring to our iPhone games:

“It's a full-blown social network for games on the iPhone, and we'll interface with Facebook Connect, Twitter and in the future MySpaceID so that developers don't have to force users to choose one or the other,” he explains.

And the new iPhone 3.0 SDK offers further expansion. “In the future, you might see things like when a group of players in a public chatroom wants to set up a private chatroom dedicated to them, that could be a premium feature that they pay for using micro-transactions,” says Relan.

Aurora Feint co-founder Danielle Cassley (pictured) was also on-hand to explain the further possibilities of developers using the OpenFeint system.

“Push notifications will be huge for our kind of social environment too. Developers will be able to easily link people up – 'your friend wants to play chess with you' – so it'll be really easy to connect people up to play games and let them know when they should be engaging in OpenFeint. That little red bubble above your game's icon is going to be really powerful.”

Already 15 developers have signed up, including big hitters Chillingo and Bolt Creative. But the OpenFeint team is insistent that its platform will won’t just be for the iPhone elite. Smaller, indie developers and free games will find access easy and very affordable, so the entire iPhone community should be able to reap the social networking benefits.

Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.