Facebook announced last week 19 new items on their development roadmap to be implemented in the last two months of the year and into 2010. Of the 19 items some, if utilized correctly, will help social games become more mainstream and accepted. Others will bury a lot of the existing game models that have allowed the mafia type games to take off.

Inside Social Gaming wrote a great summary of the changes and the effects they will have on developers here. The biggest changes that will affect social games are changes to the News Feed and Notifications:

- 45% of all stream posts come from games and almost the same amount from quizzes. One of the big changes is that notifications and invites are going away closing the News Feed from application activity. Apps that rely on this spam blasting of the news feed will loose their virality.

- Applications will now be able to directly ask for users email address for communication. Developers will get valuable direct access to users but will have to be even more careful not to inundate with mafia-esque messages. People are more protective of their email inbox than news feed.

- The News feed will be the only one-to-many communication method. As mentioned applications will use email to communicate with users but user-to-user will solely be conducted via the FB inbox. This is another step in the direction of cleaning up the News Feed to be more like a Twitter stream with Inbox messages analogous to Twitter DMs.

These updates are for the greater good of the platform and end user experience. It will take sometime for developers to adapt their methodology for developing games and applications to go viral but users will have a cleaner experience and more control over their experience.

See Inside Social Gaming’s article here.

Direct from the source: Facebook developer writes about the changes here.

it seemed that major media companies rarely ever do large partnerships with equals or companies they consider “competitors”. frienemy “coopertition” is nothing new but more often than not it is usually nominal and on the surface only. but with MySpace and Facebook negotiating terms to share content: finally a partnership that really makes sense.

why reinvent the wheel when you can partner with a place that already has 4 wheel drive? Bringing MySpace content to Facebook is a no brainer for FB especially with MySpace’s new focus on the MySpace Music as a platform for discovery and artist tools. and for MySpace it is the shift (or a realization of their denial) from trying to compete to be the largest online community to embracing what they do best.

read more here

http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/09/15/vivox-sets-up-voice-chatting-with-electronic-arts-facebook/