One of my favorite events of SxSW is Facebook’s Developer Garage at The Phoenix in downtown Austin.
Gareth Davis from Facebook led the event with a quick talk about social games with Facebook Connect. The goal is to make apps social on as many platforms as possible. Because you can connect to Facebook on multiple devices, games can be platform independent.
Last year at SxSW, they launched Connect for iPhone. A year later, thousands of developer are building games that let people connect. There are 200 million people playing games on Facebook.
Facebook is working closely with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo on getting more games to use Connect on the console.
Josh Williams from Gowalla came on stage and spoke about integrating with Facebook.
No special news about actually integrating Gowalla with Facebook, but his company Alamofire has a ton of experience with the Facebook API because before they started Gowalla, they build a hugely successful social game called Pack Rat.
John Yamasaki from Seesmic mentioned there would be a “secret announcement” tomorrow, which I will try and bring to you.
Sebastien de Halleux, co-founder of Playfish, spoke next about social games, mainly just pimping out some of his new products. Something more profound that he discussed is that while games have been getting more and more popular, the audience of gamers has gone down.
The games that Playfish are designing now are about reaching friends, not gamers. Not everyone is a gamer, but I’m sure if your friends are playing games, you will wanna play with them.
There are a ton of Facebook developers in this crowd. Learning their API could be one the most important things a developer does.
Have you built any awesome Facebook apps? How do you integrate it with your product? Have you shared any gaming content on Facebook and how was the experience?
