Today, Geewa is pleased to announce we have successfully ported our casual gaming platform onto Facebook.

Built using our tried and tested multiplayer technology, the Geewa platform allows Facebook users to enjoy Geewa’s original games as well as more than 5,300 single player games, many of them handpicked. All are searchable in real-time. From a user perspective, we are bringing to Facebook all the benefits of a fully integrated set of features like our Avatar editor, Avatar virtual items, hall of fame, weekly leagues, our virtual currency (G-Points) and our Pro Player subscription model. Users can search for the most played games, the best rated games or discover newly added games (we add on average one new game per day!). The availability of our Live Games platform on Facebook also means you need install only one app for access to all our games. Once a user has the Live Games app installed, they can search and discover all the available games and challenge their Facebook friends to a real-time synchronous match in the popular Pool live! or Word Soccer live! or many others.

Since our platform is connected to our central database of players, Facebook users will be able to compete against players from outside of Facebook. At peak, more than 20,000 people are currently connected to the platform which has been in production for one year at some of our existing partners’ websites.

Play full screen! One of the drawbacks of the Facebook page format is that it is not possible to play a game in full screen mode. Live Games makes this possible thanks to the integration of Facebook Connect to our platform. In one click, players can now easily move back and forth between the Facebook environment and our website to enjoy their favorite games in full screen splendour without losing their Facebook identity and network of friends.

Going forward we intend to optimize our technology for Facebook’s Newsfeed and fully open the platform’s API to allow other casual game developers to benefit from our virtual currency, multiplayer engine and the various underlying set of features the platform hosts.

At Geewa, we believe that the future of casual gaming will be characterized by social gaming companies luring users away from social networks into the open-web where they will have a greater granularity of control over the user's experience and the underlying technology. The recent launch of farmville.com is a testimony to this vision. To achieve this, companies will need to start investing in platforms into which their games can be slotted in order to benefit from cross-platform features. Such platforms also reduce the time-to-market necessary to launch new games since some functionnalities will already be available at the paltform level.

We have now released a neat new feature on the Geewa site which allows to search for more than 5,500 casual games directly in your browser's search bar. Just go to Geewa.com and click on the arrow down in your browser's search bar. It will offer you to install the Geewa Casual Games Search Engine.

That's it. So now whenever you feel like taking a little break from your browsing addiction, your Gmail or your RSS reader, just select Geewa in the search box and start typing what's on your mind. Our search engine will search through games names and descriptions and bring back titles, descriptions as well as the current number of people playing the games now.

This feature is only available for browsers compatible with OpenSearch so if it doesn't work for you, maybe it's a good time to switch or upgrade your browser. You would not want to miss instant access to thousands of games and players would you?

Last summer, June 2008 to be precise, the Geewa team started to draw up the first feature lists for a major upgrade of our gaming platform. As we began the long and sometimes tortuous discussions, which would eventually lead to the launch of the upgrade in November 2008, it became blindingly obvious that we needed to go to our dedicated community of users for an authoritative (but not definitive) view on what stays and what goes into the all new Geewa site.

And so began my first foray into creating and running a survey. My only other survey experience in a previous job with a large mobile operator consisted of delivering a 1 page market research brief to the internal ‘Insights’ team who then passed that along to an external market research agency who then presented their findings to us in a marathon PowerPoint session 2-3 months down the line.

Clearly, that was neither desirable nor feasible in the context of a start-up environment like Geewa (or arguably any other environment you’d care to mention). Based on my experience last year, here are the critical factors to take into consideration when you go to your user base looking for answers…

1. Set out and agree on your objectives for the survey

Be very clear about the goal of the survey (in our case input for a new product launch). Keep the survey as concise and focused as you can. Resist the temptation to ask a million questions just because you can.

2. Choose the right publication channel for your survey

Geewa is an online multiplayer gaming site. For us it made perfect sense to link to our online survey from the free inventory we had available in our pre game advertising space. Our response rate was excellent and, of our users who started the survey, 74% went on to complete it in its entirety.

3. Choose the right survey tool

If you have an online component to your survey then you’ll find plenty of sites like SodaHead, PollDaddy and LimeSurvey that offer you different flavours of polls and surveys most of which can be set up in minutes. We chose SurveyMonkey and used their $20 a month paid option which gave us more flexibility in the way we set out the survey and, more importantly, collected and analyzed the data. They proved to be excellent value for money.

4. Closing the survey is only the beginning

Depending on the size and reach of your survey you will have a mountain of data to interpret once the last response has been collected. Make sure your survey tool allows you to collate and filter that data easily otherwise you’ll be looking at a few late nights trying to make sense of it all.

Oh and you might be surprised at the answers that come back. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some of the key conclusions we drew from our survey and how the results both confirmed and challenged our underlying assumptions about how people actually use Geewa.