• customize the layout to suit your tastes or keep the editor’s view;
• verticalize the content to suit your interest areas;
• easily curate ‘finds’ to your networks
• inclusion of social gaming, but absent were meta game mechanics.

Sports Illustrated – Tablet Demo 1.5 from The Wonderfactory on Vimeo.

As regular metarand readers know, I am a big fan of game mechanics. Foursquare combines social networking elements with game mechanics, encouraging users to explore their neighborhoods and make recommendations.

For example, a user can become ‘mayor’ of a specific cafe or pub by checking in there more than anyone else. Updates are shared across services like Twitter which announce when someone takes over as mayor.

I’ve found these tweets somewhat irritating, but I think that is due to the way they are written – it’s usually a few microseconds into my scanning a tweet before I realize its a Foursquare announcement and I move on.

The BART partnership with Foursquare involves awarding $25 promotional tickets to riders chosen at random from those Foursquare users who log in at BART stations. Users can also duke it out to see who becomes ‘mayor’ of various stations on their regular commute routes.

All up, an innovative use of social media, mobiles and geolocation to boost public transport usage.

I’m a big believer that incorporating game mechanics into the design of social business systems can have a significant catalytic effect.

Making business fun, makes for better business.

Ultimately, if designed right such systems can achieve the required inflection points – critical mass, etc to overcome the obstacles noted in the Deloitte study.

Let’s play a game. I’d like you to watch the following video. While you do think of an analogy and follow a linear narrative.

The stairs at the start of the video represent a business before it’s been optimized for social business: functional, static, requires effort. People grudgingly use them.

The escalators are installed. They’re shiny, they move fast and require little effort. Everyone jumps on board. But after a while they lose their soul, they’re just as boring as the stairs were. No-one smiles.

This represents a business that has had social media tools installed without following a systematic design process. At first it seems awesome that you can have a wiki, “Hey look, I’m talking to my other colleagues in sales”.

“It’s amazing. I set up not just one blog, but one for every day of the week!

The company sees the light. They decide to go back to their core business functions – the stairs – and design them right. They integrate game mechanics into their social business systems.

Everyone loves them. People leave work with a smile on their faces. They don’t mind a bit of effort, because they are loving doing it. The system (stairs) now allow people to express themselves creatively.

The business has got its soul back!

Apple has released a series of lists showing which apps have been downloaded the most in the 5 months since the App Store launched.

You can read thro the lists over at MobileCrunch.

The key takeout: funware apps rule.

The Potrero Hill, San Francisco-based Mark Pincus social games venture, Zynga Game Network has closed a $29 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins.

New Kleiner partner and former Electronic Arts Chief Creative Officer Bing Gordon will be joining the board and getting actively involved in operations.

This follows a recent $10 million Series A and the investors in that round (Avalon Ventures, Foundry Group and Union Square Ventures) have participated alongside Kleiner and IVP in the Series B.

I suspect this funding will be used to fuel a number of acquisitions. This is borne out by Zynga’s additional announcement that they have acquired YoVille, a virtual-world app that has over 150,000 daily active users on Facebook.

[Hat tip to Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures]

Electronic Arts has teamed up with Hasbro to bring SCRABBLE to Facebook and Pogo.

Launching later in July, SCRABBLE will be the first EA Hasbro-licensed property to go live on a social networking site. EA has plans to release a number of other Hasbro properties later in the year.

The SCRABBLE Facebook app will allow head-to-head challenges and players can choose between a real-time turn-based game or pause and pick up the play later. Scores and stats wil be tracked and players can be ranked. In addition, players will have access to built-in chat, dynamic animations and be able to access world lists.

Berlin-based skill games company GameDuell has secured over $17 million in Series B venture funding from Wellington Partners.

With a current user base of 10 million members in Germany, France and Spain, the company will use this funding to expand into the United States and other European countries.

The last funding round for GameDuell, which is headed up by a team of experienced Internet entrepreneurs (Kai Bolik, Michael Kalkowski and Boris Wasmuth), was in 2004.

The company’s skill-games include Mahjong, Pool, Solitaire and Sudoku and they are Germany’s third largest online advertiser with more than 200 media partnerships and 80 staff.

Following on from an awesome devJam in Sydney on June 5th, I’m pleased to announce that I’m going to be hosting a further three events in Australia in July.

These events are a must attend for everyone who codes and has an interest in building social media apps.

There will be door prizes and the opportunity to head over to San Francisco and/or Tokyo – read more about these opportunities and each of the events from the following links:

• Sydney July 12
• Melbourne July 19
• Games July 26

We are working on rolling out similar events in other major cities across Australia.

I’d like to thank the guys from Mitchellake for providing us with their uber cool offices for these events.

Gabe Zichermann wants to help you create a personal gallery filled with your favorite social photos and have you compete with others to make your collection the most popular, valuable or visually interesting.

His New York-based company, rmbr, has released a Facebook application called Prized Collection so that you can play do just that. The app is billed as a virtual art trading game and it’s in beta.

You start with a small gallery space and, as a new player, with $4k. Your task is to browse your Facebook friends’ photos and buy or steal their pics to display in your gallery.

There are a number of ‘zany’ characters you are likely to meet along the way. The helpful, but creepy Dr Medici and the cunning Boy Scout – they are there to enrich your experience of the game.

I am a big fan of funware and incorporating game mechanics into social media, but this app has yet to grab me. At the time of writing it had 55 daily active users.

We’ll have to wait until September for the release of the full “personal universe in a box” Spore game.