While at GSP East, I presented on Muddl, a light fun word game that is anagram like in nature. I received lots of great feedback on the game from folks and encourage everyone to check it out.

It’s currently available on Facebook and Bebo. I’ll be finishing the port to MySpace and other OpenSocial containers soon.

The game play is very simple. After you go to the app you’re presented with some scrambled up letters. You then try to figure out what the word is. If you don’t get the word correct the system gives you a clue. If you’re still wrong you’ll get the first letter of the word revealed. After 3 tries you’ll be provided with another word. The game continues to challenge you as you play by increasing the length of the word.

Photo of Erik © James Duncan Davidson used with permission.

This week at GSP East the big names in the OpenSocial space came forward and basically gave a brief sales pitch on why they’re the platform to build on. Allen Stern has a nice synopsis of the panel. As a developer making decisions on where to focus time and efforts it seems like OpenSocial itself is really just playing catchup to Facebook. Most of the development folks I know are focused on Facebook still and are waiting for OpenSocial. The philosophical discussion aside, OpenSocial is looking stronger and stronger each day. Facebook recently open sourced their platform, but they’ve yet to announce any partners (beyond Bebo) who are adopting it. So their late foray into openness may be moot now.

I saw on Forbes this morning that Time Warner is buying the social network Bebo for $850 million. My experience with Bebo hasn’t been great so far, it’s a blend of the best parts of MySpace and Facebook, but without the reliability or audience size of either. Granted my experience has been narrow - focused primarily on application development after they launched their platform based on the Facebook’s FBML.

AOL, the Internet division of Time Warner, said on Thursday that it was buying the social networking site Bebo for $850 million in cash, placing it in position to go head to head with News Corp.’s MySpace as well as Facebook.

What AOL fails to realize is that it’s original online presence was in fact a social network that they channeled into a portal. Now they’re looking to buy the 3rd - albeit a distant 3rd - largest social network to regain their original community of users. Kind of sad actually. Stats on the top 3 networks from complete.com below. Notice bebo’s not much more than a blip on the radar of MySpace and Facebook. As they say, “good luck with that.” I hope they don’t spam all the Bebo users with free AOL CD’s.