Big news for the folks on Myspace, the gaming world is about to about to join in on the social network frenzy on Myspace. News Corp. announced today that Myspace.com has partnered with Oberon Media, a platform for casual games. Oberon Media has experience in PC, online, mobile and interactive TV categories. They also have a nice list of heavy-hitting partners that they currently work with, and the largest social network, Myspace.com is about to join in on the fun.

The Myspace games, powered by Oberon is scheduled to launch in January. The timing of this move is huge for Myspace since the online gaming (now with its own acronym OLG) is growing faster than any other online activity, and will reach 4 billion in revenue by the end of 2008. Looks like Myspace is positioning itself with the help of Oberon to be a part of the booming trend online.

The fairly new social network site MyLifeBrand recently received $750,000 from an undisclosed party – pretty hefty amount for a small start-up out of Utah (by the way my home state). MyLifeBrand launched earlier this year with some big claims about their social platform. I heard about the social network several months ago, but not until recently did I decide to give it a try. So here are my impressions:

• The graphics of the site are pretty cool, but the bright colored navigation buttons on the site are a bit distracting to me, in fact I avoided clicking on them for a good while because I thought they were paid banner ads or something.

• I am a bit confused with the Community -I can’t seem to figure out how to change from the Global community, but I imagine we’ll see more from this as time goes on.
• They have a nifty little way of allowing users to aggregrate other social networks although when I tried this with my Facebook account and it displayed Facebook in a frame – personally not a fan. Not sure how else they could achieve this, but my thoughts on this would be to minimize the MyLifeBrand navigation menus it would allow for a more appealing user experience.

• I tried to import my friends from my Facebook & Myspace accounts and it neither of them worked. Oh well, they are in Bet.
• I like the Jazzbots.com site that is running as a MyLifeBrand social community, and I can see this feature being a potentially high revenue platform if they do this right. If they prove a solid solution for the NBA Jazz it could open some doors for them.

It will be interesting to see what the $750k will do for MyLifeBrand, I would like to see more with the Community idea and the social aggregation.

My first thought when I saw Fmail, a recent Facebook app was why not wait until Google buys Facebook and then we can get the real Gmail app integrated. And what about hotmail? Are we going to see FotMail or FaceMail pop up soon – especially with the talks between Microsoft and Facebook? (j/k)

I decided to add the Fmail app and it actually is really clean and quite functional if you don’t mind the iframe and a small window at that. Not only that but the biggest flaw of all is the inability for the auto-complete of the email address in the “To:” section when composing new mail.

The interesting this about so many of the applications that are flying onto Facebook is that I wonder if the developers actually sit back and figure out if their app will actually make sense to have it on the social platform. I use Facebook every day and I have several applications that I use and many, many that I have tried and discarded. The best apps on Facebooks are the ones that easily fit into the Social Activity Stream and that can tap into the Facebook social graph. If the app doesn’t, well it just doesn’t make much sense to put in to the game.

This particular app to me looks more like an experiment, something the developers can pat themselves on the back with and say “we did it guys.” Nonetheless, and not to be too harsh on the Fmail dev team, this is a good attempt at integrating Gmail into the Facebook social network.