Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Odds and ends, Developer
OpenFeint announces iPromote, readies to take over iPhone gaming
During our interview with Danielle Cassley of Aurora Feint, I talked with her about OpenFeint, the code backbone for a social network that iPhone developers can use in their apps. Since then, a number of developers have added the interface to their apps, perhaps most notably Pocket God, which has used the tool only to create the barest of online leaderboards so far. Now the crafty folks at Aurora Feint are revealing another trick up their sleeve: something they're calling iPromote. It sounds like more or less a crosspromotion deal for various apps and games in the OpenFeint system -- certain apps will give their users a chance to pick up other paid apps under the OpenFeint umbrella. While the press release is fairly vague about exactly how it works (they say there will be "a revenue sharing model for sales that occur through OpenFeint"), it'll probably show up in the user's interface as links or promotions for other apps.
There are quite a few of those apps -- Aurora Feint lists over 20 apps that have already integrated OpenFeint, and there are more on the way, including some high-profile apps from Chillingo. Even our friend Steve Demeter, who was working on his own community platform called Onyx, has abandoned work on that to join up with OpenFeint. There are at least a few other such platforms like this that were vying for widespread acceptance on the iPhone, but it looks like OpenFeint is primed to take the top spot. Which means we'll probably be seeing lots of it in applications near you very soon.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
awmyhr said 5:20PM on 4-27-2009
This is great news, however Steve abandoned Onyx for reasons completely unrelated to OpenFeint (see http://demiforce.blogspot.com/2009/03/onyx-rip.html ).
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Kento Ito said 11:57AM on 4-27-2009
are you sure that open feint system complies with iPhone OS SDK rules?
Because I feel that open source stuff on iPhone is a huge violation of iPhone SDK, since only closed source API's are allowed on the iPhone.
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Kevin Gass said 2:32PM on 4-27-2009
After using Feint in Pocket God, I never plan on using it again. I went into a chat room with a quick question. the question, "What are gifts?" (at the time "gifts" were not explained, and i Had no idea what they were.) What was I meet with? "LF Any Grils to Cyber!!!11!" The feint system is trash, and will always be trash. Any game that list including Feint as a bullet point to buy the game will be always be passed over by me. Hopefully devs wise up to this useless add-on and kill it off.
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