Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, September 14, 2009

• Cops & Robbers, Facebook Style
• Play4Iran: A Twitter-Based Iranian Political Action Game
• Finnish Social Games Developer Ironstar Helsinki Continues Expanding
• ToyBots Woozees: SGN’s Secret Project Connects Physical, Online Toys
• Zynga Goes to the Mattresses: 22 Lawsuits Filed This Year, and Counting

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

• Fatfoogoo Expanding into Social Games
• EA Executive Joins Outspark
• Zynga Bringing Offers In House with DoubleDing?
• Come2Play Adds Virtual Currency Monetization Platform

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

• Tapjoy Releases Free Version of its Ad Optimization Platform
• PlaySpan Survey Shows Some Interesting Virtual Goods Stats
• Notes from GDC Austin: Juicy MMO and Virtual World Monetization Numbers
• MySpace Exec Jason Oberfest Joins Gaming Company Ngmoco

Thursday, September 17, 2009

• Conduit Labs Raises $3 Million
• USA Network Continues Social Gaming Expansion with New Deals
• Korean Game Company Nexon Grows in Europe

Friday, September 18, 2009

• A Look at Social Games from Japan
• Forget Those White-Label Games, Check Out LOLApps’ Diva Life
• Social Gaming Roundup: Playfish and Playdom Expand in SF, and more

Texas Pete Hot Sauce recently handed out 10,000 free samples through Facebook home page engagement ads and its Facebook Page, and the company is hoping to build on that campaign’s success buy recruiting more Fans with the promise of free hot sauce.

To promote its variety of flavors, Texas Pete was offering a limited number of product samples and included discount coupons for Facebook Fans. The company hoped to pass out 10,000 samples over a four week period, but hit that number of requests in just 6 days. Each sample contains a 1.9 oz. bottle of the consumer’s flavor of choice, can koozie (a bottle cooling sleeve) and a coupon. The coupon holds a unique bar code which the company hopes to use to track the redemption rate.

We’ve seen companies have success using Facebook as a springboard for sampling, with Splenda using a dedicated Fan page a few months ago to gather insight into public reaction to one if its new products.

Now that Texas Pete has seen that its Fans are paying attention, it’s looking for more of a Facebook presence. The company is promising to add a coupon for a “Buy One Get One Free” Texas Pete product to its Fan page if it can reach 100,000 Fans by Nov. 15th, Ryan Helmstetler of The Sales Factory, who built the campaign for Texas Pete, tells us. The page is currently around the 35,000 mark, but shouldn’t have a problem reaching the 6-figure mark by the mid-November cut-off date given recent trends in the “Food-For-Fans” campaigns that are becoming popular.

This approach is very similar to the Fan Woody campaign which just netted TGI Fridays a half-million Fans and counting (currently close to 640K) after the promise of a free Jack Daniels burger. While TGI Fridays also promoted their offer through more traditional media outlets, like television, Texas Pete seems happy to let word spread virally from its Facebook page. Given the brand loyalty that the hot sauce enjoys, it should only be a matter of time before Facebook users are flocking to the page to offer themselves up as Fans and get their free goods.

The past two days, we’ve seen a wide variety of companies presenting at TechCrunch50 somehow make use of Facebook — some built apps or used Pages, some accessed profile data, the news stream or photos through Connect. Here’s a quick review of what we saw, in chronological order, including links to other sites that have covered the companies in more detail.

SealTale: This doesn’t seem like a new idea. SealTale lets you place an endorsement widget on a web page, including a simple frame on Facebook. More on CNET.

Udorse: An endorsement site where people can endorse items in their Facebook photos, potentially convincing friends to buy them as well. More on TechCrunch.

Refmob: Cross-site service where people can get paid for referring their friends to jobs; includes a way to refer Facebook friends. More on VentureBeat.

Mota Motors: Used car marketplace site that accesses Connect to let buyers and sellers include their real Facebook profile photos. More on SocalTech.

YourVersion: News discovery engine site that lets you share stories on Facebook. More on TechCrunch.

Metricly: Simple analytics service that includes a way to track fans on Facebook. More on VentureBeat.

Crowdflower: Online workforce placement service that apparently includes a Facebook app where you can earn virtual currencies in exchange (I don’t see the app). More on Caem.la.

Cododot: Event-planning and invitation service focused on women. It lets you post invitations to Facebook. More on Techgeist.

Threadsy: Social stream aggregator site that lets you read information from Facebook along with other social sites. More on CNET.

Radiusly: Imagined as a sort of Twitter-LinkedIn hybrid, the company also lets you post items to Facebook. More on VentureBeat.

[Photo via Noah Hendrix.]

While Zynga has partnered with a variety of offer monetization platforms over the years, we’ve been hearing that the company has been increasingly driving some users to an offer network it may either own or be strongly allied with. Now, we know the name of that service – DoubleDing.

While we haven’t been able to confirm if DoubleDing is either owned by Zynga or is a separate entity controlled by the company, its executives, or investors – Zynga has not responded to our request for comment yet – we do believe that it’s part of Zynga’s strategy to bring a greater part of the monetization value chain closer to being in-house.

Why would Zynga want to do so? Two reasons…

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