Amazon announces GameCircle, similar to Apple's GameCenter

Amazon has announced a new service for its Kindle Fire platform called GameCircle, which is akin to Apple's own GameCenter service. It's set to provide a series of APIs for leaderboards, achievements, and other socially-centered game-related features. GameCircle has already been tested with a few popular titles on the Kindle Fire, and it's available for developers to sign up and check out right now.

Obviously this has nothing to do with us iOS users, as GameCenter not only covers our needs on Apple's portable devices, but it's also coming to OS X in the quickly approaching Mountain Lion. But this does show that other device manufacturers are learning from Apple's history. Originally on the iOS platform, there was no official social gaming network, and it was a free-for-all between popular networks like OpenFeint, Crystal, and plenty of others. But Amazon's heading all of that off early, aiming to bring developers under its own official umbrella for social gaming.