In yet another huge stride toward bolstering its app platform, the company announced plans for its own central app hub inside Facebook itself, making it easier for users to discover Facebook-integrated apps, as well as easier for developers to submit and feature their apps on Facebook itself.

Until now, users had a handful of ways of discovering apps through Facebook; the company touted “social discovery” as its strong suit, as users were encouraged to find apps through their news feed. The idea is, you’ll find the apps that are most relevant because they’re the ones your friends use. They’ll surface in your newsfeed, and you’ll pick the ones you like while ignoring the ones you don’t care about.

So this is somewhat different. To be clear, it’s not exactly a proper “App Store” competitor to take on the likes of Apple or Google’s respective hubs. It’s more of a centralized location so that everyone — users and developers alike — knows where to go to find Facebook apps. And that didn’t exist before.

But the social discovery part still plays a huge factor. The apps that show up when you visit the App Center will be those that Facebook finds most relevant to you — that is, ones your friends are using, or ones that are scoring particularly high on Facebook’s own internal ratings system that judges just what apps should show up.

“Success through the App Center is tied to the quality of an app,” wrote Facebook employee Aaron Brady in a blog post. “We use a variety of signals, such as user ratings and engagement, to determine if an app is listed in the App Center.”

This is a big deal for building out the future of the platform. Part of what will determine just how much time users spend inside Facebook is the amount of content they have to play around with, and the company relies on outside developers for that. The unveiling of the Open Graph at Facebook’s F8 developer conference last year was the first step in this direction, making it easier for third-party developers to fully integrate their applications into the Facebook ecosystem. Then came the different verbs with appropriate apps — like “Listening” with Spotify and “Watching” with Netflix — broadcasting user activities across Facebook, thereby upping the potential for others to try out those third-party apps.

But as Facebook seems to realize with Wednesday’s announcement, developers can’t rely entirely on social discovery for their apps to grow. Sure, you’ll get the occasional breakout successes like SocialCam, Viddy or Pinterest through organic growth, but users still need a home page to browse through apps.

What’s more, the new App Center will feature additional ways for developers to get paid. The only initial payment options for developers who actually wanted to earn money through Facebook apps were via in-app purchases. So for an app like Farmville — which relies on users buying virtual goods to make money — the original sort of system works well. Now Facebook will give the option for developers to offer paid apps. That makes it easier on developers’ apps for which in-app payments make little sense.

So if the App Center takes off, the impetus for an app to succeed isn’t dependent on a sudden burst of viral growth. In theory, a developer’s app can simmer inside the App Center and eventually bubble up to the forefront of users’ App Center dashboards.

It’s also another potential revenue stream insofar as splitting the cash on paid apps and in-app purchases. And more app use, of course, means more engagement within the Facebook platform. That means more ads. And with the wealth of new data Facebook will receive by looking at the apps its subscribers are using, it also means better targeted ads.

Now it’s up to developers to make apps worth downloading. And what’s good for developers is good for Facebook.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is set for the week of June 11, while Google’s I/O event runs June 27 to 29. Now, as noted by ZDNet, Microsoft has started sending invitations for a mobile developer event for June 20 and 21.

Of course, that assumes developers can get into these events. Both Google I/O and WWDC sold out quickly.

A Microsoft representative confirmed its event, but declined to offer any details on what would be on the agenda or who would be able to go, beyond those who were invited. Redmond has been extra quiet about its plans beyond the current “Mango” version of Windows Phone 7.

The rest of the industry hasn’t been so quiet, with various partners talking — occasionally publicly — about the next version, dubbed “Apollo,” shipping later this year. Several reports have suggested the next version will shift from the current Windows CE core to one based on the desktop version of Windows.

Microsoft has said that current Windows Phone apps should run on the next version of the operating system, but has not committed that the operating system will run on existing hardware.

Apple’s stringent guidelines on submissions to its App Store are no secret to developers: Abide by our rules or prepare to get your app nixed.

So why, then, did Dropbox recently blow by Apple’s guidelines with its software development kit?

Here’s the deal: Last week, developers utilizing Dropbox’s SDK in their own iOS apps started getting rejection notices from the App Store after submitting their apps for review. As evident from this saucy exchange between a developer and an Apple employee, Dropbox’s SDK included a link to the desktop version of its site, which allows users to purchase an upgrade in storage space for the service.

That’s a feature that Apple has explicitly banned in any iOS apps submitted to its store. According to section 11.13 of Apple’s App Store penal code (er, review guidelines): “Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, such as a ‘buy’ button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected.”

Apple confirmed to AllThingsD that this was indeed the guideline Dropbox had violated with its SDK.

As first noticed by The Next Web, developers were peeved at their apps’ sudden rejections, and rightly so. Resubmitting an app can take a matter of weeks to move through Apple’s approval process. And in the fast moving mobile world, time is money.

“I hope you enjoy rejecting decent apps for having normal functionality while letting all the fart apps through,” wrote independent developer Goran Peuc in an exchange with an Apple representative.

Dropbox’s response to the dust-up? An ever-so-subtle dig at Apple: “Apple is rejecting apps that use the Dropbox SDK because we allow users to create accounts,” a spokeswoman for Dropbox told me in an emailed response (emphasis mine). “We’re working with Apple to come up with a solution that still provides an elegant user experience.”

Update: Dropbox elucidated further after this story was first published, claiming that the problems lie in the inherent difficulties of Apple’s In-App Purchasing mechanism. “Apple requires paid services that allow account creation to offer the option to upgrade via In-App Purchase (IAP),” a Dropbox spokeswoman told AllThingsD in a statement. “We abide by this policy in our app, where we offer upgrades only via IAP. However, we are unable to offer IAP in our SDK to third-party developers due to limitations of IAP. Additionally, our SDK allows only free accounts to be created from third-party apps and has never been used to promote our paid plans.”

And to Dropbox’s credit, the SDK has already been patched, so developers shouldn’t come up against the issue any longer.

It would seem, then, that initially one of a few scenarios occurred: It was an oversight, and Dropbox accidentally left a link in the SDK, and it went unnoticed by Apple for the better part of seven months (which is how long Dropbox’s SDK has gone without alteration). Alternately, it was intentional, and the company wanted to see if the app could slide through undetected. Or perhaps the link seemed innocuous enough to Dropbox that the company thought Apple wouldn’t make a stink.

Obviously, the latter outcome wasn’t what happened.

Dropbox didn’t respond to my request for further clarification, but one would think that the company would have been wise to this beforehand. The slew of iOS app rejections in the past few years have been highly publicized in the tech press, especially the instance in which Apple rejected Sony’s Reader app last year.

In other words, Dropbox should have known better. If there’s a way for you to sell your product within Apple’s ecosystem — be it virtual goods, e-books or online storage — Apple wants its cut and always has. There’s really no way around it.

Perhaps Dropbox wanted to play the honey badger this time — and we all know that honey badger just don’t give a s#!*.

(Image courtesy of Mark Bridge/Flickr)

And if you combine the two? You get Vungle, a barely hatched start-up that just raised a $2 million seed round.

Vungle’s pitch is straightforward: They help app developers make video promo reels for their stuff, and turn them into “in-app” ads (you can see a sample below). There are a whole lot of ways to buy in-app advertising for other apps already — it’s a big chunk of the mobile ad business right now — but the Vungle guys argue that they make it easy. And that unlike iAd, AdMob, Millenial, etc., it’s all they do.

Fair enough. No way to really tell now, as the company is only in “alpha,” with a handful of paying customers that include Path, the buzzy next-gen social network, and Pocket Games, a game developer. A more open beta comes this summer.

At least as interesting as the pitch is the backstory, which has co-founders Zain Jeffer, 24, and Jack Smith, 23, leaving London on a whim to join the AngelPad start-up factory last fall, then finding themselves in a whirlwind round of financing. For instance, they pitched Crosslink’s David Silverman at his home on a weekend, and got a commitment a day later.

Multimillion dollar seed rounds would have been unheard of a couple years ago. Now they’re increasingly commonplace (here’s one for $4.2 million), at least for a certain class of incubator-blessed start-ups. And they’re part of the reason that you’re hearing lots of bubble talk right now.

For the record, the Vungle guys say they had no intention of raising so much out of the gate. But “as soon as you tell people you don’t want money, that’s when they want to give you money,” Smith says. Among those chipping in: Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Charles Hudson, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper.

As part of the announcement, the retailer is also confirming that it will take a 30 percent cut of each transaction, which is the standard across Apple’s App Store, Facebook and Google Play (Correction: In an earlier version, it stated that Google takes 5 percent, which only applies to the Google+ game network.)

The announcement is not a huge surprise, since Amazon has been testing in-app payments over the past few months with a number of developers in the Amazon Appstore, which runs on the Kindle Fire and a number of Android handsets.

The payments platform utilizes Amazon’s well-recognized and trusted “1-Click” purchasing experience that so many consumers are familiar with from shopping online. By bringing it to mobile, it will make it easy for consumers to purchase a few more coins inside a game or to subscribe to a magazine.

But while the announcement sounds fairly basic, the rollout is important for Amazon to get right, since developers’ initial reception to the Appstore was a little strained — and stories of making money on the platform have been mixed.

That’s because, unlike other app stores, Amazon has decided to dictate how much an app sells for, and in some cases, the company elects to make apps free as part of its Free App of the Day promotion. In doing so, developers sometimes make less revenue than they would normally expect (especially since there was no potential upside from in-app purchases).

Developers and publishers will be able to set the price of the items within the store, including virtual goods or subscriptions, an Amazon spokesperson said.

Based on developers that participated in the beta tests, so far Amazon’s Appstore looks like it has been monetizing well.

Storm8, which was one of the game developers that participated in the beta test, told AllThingsD that it generated $700,000 in revenue from in-app purchases in March — before Amazon’s cut. The Redwood City developer said it has 10 free-to-play apps in the store, including such titles as Kingdoms Live, Nightclub Story and Farm Story; at one point, four of its games ranked among the five most popular free apps on Amazon.

Flurry, which provides analytics software to developers, also estimated  that Amazon’s in-app payment platform monetizes well, and that it outperforms Google Play, but falls short of the industry’s gold standard, which is Apple.

Still, it’s unclear whether Amazon will be able to woo developers, given that it is so much smaller than the other players. Last month, after celebrating its first year in business, Amazon confirmed that it had more than 31,000 apps in its store, which is far fewer than either Google or Apple.

It’s also unclear how many devices the Appstore is installed on, since Amazon does not share much information, including how many Kindle Fires it has sold.

According to a report by IHS iSuppli, Amazon shipped 3.9 million Fires in the fourth quarter, to claim 14.3 percent of the market. That makes it the world’s second-largest tablet vendor, surpassing Samsung, which has been in the market far longer, with many more devices.

In the future, what could potentially be even more interesting for developers than in-app payments is if Amazon will let them use apps to sell merchandise, such as Rovio’s plush toys, or DVDs and other cross-promotional items.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the possibility.

Last fall, Microsoft aggressively recruited Mr. Weingarten to convince him to build his nutrition app Fooducate for its Windows Phone. Microsoft proposed putting a Fooducate engineer in Tel Aviv through a weeklong boot camp, and offered a new Windows-based Nokia phone for software testing.

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On Monday, the two companies announced that they will together invest nearly $24 million in a new mobile app development program. Dubbed “AppCampus,” the effort will be held at Finland’s Aalto University over the next three years and, according to its proprietors will not only offer funding, but will also provide coaching in app design, usability and commercialization.

Best of all, participants will retain full intellectual property rights for whatever they create while attending.

An interesting initiative and one that demonstrates the urgency with which Microsoft and Nokia are approaching the deficits in the Windows Phone ecosystem. Currently, there are only about 70,000 applications in Microsoft’s Marketplace application store, with some glaring omissions, like Angry Birds Space and Instagram.

That’s a paucity compared to the more 550,000 Apple’s got in the App Store right now. But with this sort of commitment and some luck, Microsoft could begin to close the gap.

Those who attend the BlackBerry 10 Jam in Orlando will also get an early developer prototype running the code. However, RIM stressed that this is not the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone, and that both the software and hardware will be different from what eventually goes on sale.

“This is not a BlackBerry 10 smartphone — it is a prototype running a modified version of the PlayBook OS which will help developers design their apps for the BlackBerry 10 smartphone form factor,” RIM said in a statement. “It’s not the final hardware or OS — it’s a device to help developers get started with designing for what’s coming.”

The device won’t be sold commercially or given to other attendees of the broader BlackBerry World.

“There is limited capacity for BlackBerry 10 Jam, so developers should register as soon as possible to be part of this amazing opportunity,” RIM said.

On Thursday, the Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters to 34 social app developers, among them Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Path, Tapbots, and even Apple, which develops the Find My Friends location app for iOS. Their purpose: To put to them the same questions the Committee has been grilling Apple on. One top concern is how developers treat personally identifiable information.

“At any time, has your iOS app transmitted or have you stored any other information from or about a user’s device — including, but not limited to, the user’s phone number, email account information, calendar, photo gallery, WiFi connection log, the Unique Device Identifier (UDID), a Media Access Control (MAC) address, or any other identifier unique to a specific device?” one question reads.

The distribution of these letters comes less than a week after the Committee asked Apple to send a representative to Washington to explain to it in person how the company is protecting the personal information of iPhone and iPad users.

RIM developer executive Alec Saunders mentioned the program in a Twitter message on Thursday, with the company offering up a few more details on its Web site.

The offer doesn’t give developers much time, requiring Android apps to be optimized for the PlayBook and submitted for listing in the BlackBerry World store by Feb. 13 in order to get a free tablet.

RIM has an app-playing engine that allows programs designed for Android to run on its QNX-based PlayBook.

The company also has a glut of the tablets, and has been running various promotions designed to reduce inventory and boost the number of tablets in use.

“Further details about the promotion will be posted on our developer site as soon as possible, but the plan is to provide one free 16GB BlackBerry PlayBook to every registered BlackBerry App World vendor who converts their Android app for use on the BlackBerry PlayBook,” RIM said on its Web site.

But one of PopCap’s original developers, Roy Liu, believes he has come up with an alternative. Gimmie, based in San Francisco, has created an incentives platform for mobile app developers.

It launches today with 10 mobile app developers in its beta program.

It works like this: In return for using the app, a player can earn points which can be redeemed for real-world products. It’s sort of like a traditional arcade, where players earn tickets that can be redeemed for candy and toys, but instead of gumballs and baseball cards, Gimmie primarily doles out game downloads and other mobile content.

Gimmie is also announcing today that it has raised $200,000 in funding from Tandem, an incubator in Silicon Valley.

Liu, who was one of the lead developers on Plants vs. Zombies for PopCap before it was purchased by Electronic Arts, co-founded the company with CEO David Ng.

The idea is not so different from other in-game incentive programs, which ask users to fill out a survey or download a different game in exchange for free virtual goods or other benefits.

Those types of programs, served by companies like TapJoy and others, have been immensely successful — although more recently, they have been received poorly by Apple and others because they can affect the most popular games list.

Gimmie believes what it is doing is different because it rewards users with items outside of the app for performing actions inside it.

Other companies are also trying to come up with alternative advertising platforms for mobile games. In games, banner ads are often completely ineffective because people are focused on playing the game, and don’t take the time to read the ad or leave the page to investigate it further.

A Chicago-based start-up called Tap.me is creating an ad network for virtual goods, which can gain advertisers on a broad scale for generic items, such as being able to jump higher or more energy across many games.

Starting next week, Playdom said it will begin publishing Triple Town, which has already been on Facebook for some time.

Spry Fox said it will retain all creative authority over the game, and added that, going forward, it won’t have to worry about acquiring new users or figuring out how to run advertising campaigns.

In a statement, Spry Fox said: “Our games have reached millions of users, but never concurrently. We have constantly worried about our ability to scale without major service interruptions or other related problems … We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from [Playdom] and lean on them.”

The idea of publishing third-party content is not new in the world of gaming, but it is for Disney’s Playdom. It said while it sees an opportunity to leverage the creativity of independent developers, it will not be at the sacrifice of developing games internally.

Over the past year, Playdom has struggled to keep up its development after being acquired by Disney, but now it claims to be back on track and has more than a dozen titles under development, including a game based on Marvel superheroes.

“Playdom’s in-house development studios are still hard at work … but we also recognize that there are a lot of independent social game developers creating amazing new experiences, too,” the company said in a statement.

Spry Fox’s Triple Town, a puzzle game that challenges players to build cities by matching three or more of the same game pieces, has received some acclaim of its own. The trade magazine Gamezebo recently named it the best game of 2011.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

The Chinese company is perhaps originally known for bringing World of Warcraft to China through a prior partnership with Activision. More recently, it invested in U.S.-based OpenFeint, which was acquired by Japan’s Gree last year. It continues to work with OpenFeint on a version of the social gaming platform for China.

But the deal with Sony Ericsson in China will be a first for The9, which will be the exclusive operator of its PlayNow app store. It will provide technical and operational support, including testing, releasing and promotion of all apps.

The partnership is not unheard of; Sony Ericsson has leaned on other providers in the U.S., such as GetJar, to manage its app store here.

The PlayNow store in China will include games, as well as other apps and content, such as ringtones. It will work on Xperia phones that operate Android and Java.

Feature phones continue to be the dominant phone factor in China, but increasingly smartphones are being adopted, said Chris Shen, general manager of The9’s Mobile Business Unit, in an interview.

He said that since games are the company’s strength, it will be looking to partner with other content providers to integrate other products into the PlayNow experience. So far, 50 games have already been added to the store.

Shen said it will receive a cut of the revenues from sales of games, advertising and microtransactions. The9 must also share the revenue with third-party developers.

The company, which trades on the Nasdaq, has struggled to regain revenues that were lost after its World of Warcraft contract was not renewed in 2009.

In the second quarter of 2011, it reported a loss of $1.9 million on revenues of $3.9 million. The company’s stock fell 2 cents today, to trade at $6.80 a share.

Mobile-software developers have long complained about Apple’s limits on them. Chief among their gripes is Apple’s rule that developers registered through its standard developer program cap testing of their app to 100 devices before the software is sold in the app store. Developers say the rule curtails the amount of feedback they receive to improve their apps.

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A new start-up, Openspace, is launching a physical store where consumers can visit and discover the latest mobile applications.

“If your iPhone has a problem, you take it to Apple. If your Android tablet has a problem, you take it to Verizon, AT&T or Best Buy,” said Openspace founder Robert Reich. “But if you have a question about which camera app would be great for taking pictures this weekend on the slopes, where can you turn?”

To help solve that problem, Openspace opened its first physical storefront last week in Boulder, Colo. Open six days a week, the store is staffed by “App Gurus” who make recommendations and try to eliminate “app-rehension.” (Their joke, not mine.)

Previously, Reich founded Boulder-based OneRiot, which uses social data to make mobile advertising more targeted. The company was acquired by Wal-Mart in September.

Openspace is just getting off the ground, so all the details haven’t been nailed down — like how the operation will make money. But in the next year it hopes to partner with developers to take a percentage of sales that result from applications promoted in the store.

Consumers can also do things the old-fashioned way and visit the company’s Web site to get recommendations. On the site, the company categorizes applications by interests — many of which won’t be found on iTunes — including such nontraditional subjects as Occupy Wall Street, zombies or “games a 10-year-old girl will enjoy.”

Developers often complain about how difficult it is for their applications to be discovered, and frequently pay for advertising or third-party promotion. So it’s possible that a physical app store could be one more way to get the word out.

Whether Openspace will be able to make enough money off referrals to offset the high costs of real estate and full-time staff will be the bigger question.

“It was strictly a business decision,” said Kabam’s COO Chris Carvalho, quoting a line from The Godfather.

Carvalho said that in return for Google getting a 45-day exclusive, Google has agreed to drive traffic to the game through various marketing techniques. In addition, Google only takes a 5 percent cut of revenues from virtual goods sold inside the game, compared to Facebook’s 30 percent cut.

Together, those two incentives could make for a more profitable game, even if Google’s audience is much smaller.

“We’ve found our games monetize very well on the Google+ platform, and their team to be incredibly responsive and willing to get things done quickly and efficiently,” Carvalho said.

At last count, roughly 40 million people have joined Google+, and to date, it has a total of 28 games. In comparison, Facebook has more than 800 million users worldwide, and literally has too many games to count.

Getting heard above all those distractions on Facebook can be costly, so clearly Kabam feels it has a better chance to stand out on Google.

It will be important to see if other developers feel the same way and follow in Kabam’s footsteps. If so, Facebook may feel pressure to make games easier to find (other than the developer purchasing more ads), or even adjust its revenue cut, as some have suggested may occur with increased competition.

In all, Kabam has three other games on Google+: Dragons of Atlantis, Global Warfare and Edgeworld.

The Godfather will not be the first exclusive on Google+ Games. Rovio launched Angry Birds first on Google+, and still hasn’t officially launched yet on Facebook (probably due to the large costs, since Rovio is known for being outspoken about Apple’s 30 percent revenue cut on mobile devices).

Kabam has licensed rights to “The Godfather” movie from Paramount Digital Entertainment to build a big-budget social game for Facebook, based on the American Mafia classic.

Kabam, which is based in Redwood City, Ca., is known for making hardcore social games that appeal to gamers typically found using videogame consoles. That differs from Zynga, the leading social games company, which makes mainstream games for the largest audience possible.

The game, which launched today, is set in the Prohibition era of the 1930s, preceding the setting of the first film by about 10 years. Players and five crime families will battle for money, power and respect, with the goal of becoming the “Don” of a family.

The illustrations are cinematic, with extremely dark and menacing graphics, which is a dramatic shift from the cartoonish art and happy, smiling characters found in most Facebook games today.

The payments company will be using the name V.me to differentiate it from its more well-known services found at thousands of retail locations around the world.

Consumers will be able to fund the digital wallet using a variety of sources — a Visa, MasterCard or bank account.

It will be used to check out online using a user name and password, rather than having to key in the 16-digit number each time. The idea is similar to eBay’s PayPal, and to services by Amazon as well as e-wallet services being developed by American Express.

It will also be useful for checking out while shopping from a browser or application on a mobile phone or tablet. Later next year, Visa plans to roll out mobile payments to the register, where consumers will be able to tap and pay using near field technology.

The digital wallet is in a closed beta today but will be coming out in early 2012, after the holidays.

Jennifer Schulz, Visa’s head of product, strategy and innovation, said the wallet is intended to be open and funded through sources outside of Visa, and therefore “we wanted [the brand] to evoke Visa, and link to it, but without saying Visa.”

To accelerate the adoption of Visa’s payments services, including V.me, Schulz said Visa is unveiling a new developer program that will give anyone, including retailers, merchants and start-ups, access to its payments services.

The tools give mobile developers easier ways to accept payments on the phone, and help game developers that want to sell low-priced digital goods. There are also tools for big-box retailers.

American Express is also trying to woo developers, but rather than focusing on opening up its platform to developers, it has created a $100 million fund to invest in digital commerce opportunities.

Visa’s developer center brings its subsidiaries — including Authorize.Net, CyberSource, Fundamo and PlaySpan — together under one roof.

“We are announcing the Visa Developer Center, which is our platform for engaging developers globally with our Visa payment solutions,” Schulz said. “It provides us with a platform for engaging an important set of constituents.”

Those are some of the takeaways from the latest in a series of surveys from Appcelerator and IDC.

Interest in the Kindle Fire has been high in a number of recent surveys of both developers and potential buyers, all of whom seem to be attracted by the device’s low price as well as the fact that Amazon has its own App Store. Appcelerator says interest in the Kindle Fire nearly matches that shown in the iPad prior to its launch.

On the operating system side, Apple has solidifed its lead while Android has slipped a bit but remains the clear No. 2 in developer interest. The interesting shift has been for the No. 3 spot, where Windows Phone has been gaining to pass Research In Motion, which is seeing waning interest from developers for both the operating system powering today’s BlackBerry devices as well as the QNX software that runs inside the PlayBook tablet.

Interest in developing for BlackBerry OS phones fell seven points, to 21 percent, with interest in QNX-based tablets falling six points to 13 percent.

Interest in Microsoft’s mobile operating system appears to be strengthened as Nokia readies its first Windows Phone products, with half of developers interested in the OS citing the Nokia partnership as a key reason. Overall, about 38 percent of mobile developers said they were very interested in Windows Phone, an increase of eight percentage points and a record high for Microsoft.

“The third major mobile OS after iOS and Android is now clearly Windows, driven largely by the Microsoft / Nokia partnership and underscored by the new Nokia Lumia 800,” IDC analyst Scott Ellison said in a statement. “Amazon has shown exceptional early success in appealing to developers with the Kindle Fire, showing that price and differentiation are keys to competing in the crowded Android tablet space, rather than simply chasing the iPad market.”

Two-thirds of developers are interested in developing HTML5 apps, the same number as in the prior study.

To help make that case, the company has hired Richard Kerris, a veteran developer relations executive who has led efforts at Apple and, most recently, for HP’s WebOS. The company is also aiming to get Nokia devices into the hands of as many developers as possible, announcing last week that it will give out 25,000 devices in the coming months.

The biggest challenge, for both Nokia and Microsoft, is convincing developers that they need to bother developing for more than just Android and iOS.

“They are looking at two rather successful platforms in terms of the numbers and so forth,” Kerris said. “The challenge will be to show them … the opportunity.”

Nokia faces a particular challenge in North America, where it has been all but absent for many years and where the company’s Windows Phone products are still not yet available.

In an interview, Kerris and his boss, Marco Argenti, talked with AllThingsD about the challenges and opportunities facing the Finnish phone giant.

One of the ideas that the pair are kicking around are ways to offer developers help in building their business — not just their code.

“A lot of one- or two-man shops, they may know how to write an app but they may not know how to get their businesses off the ground,” Kerris said.

Kerris said it is all part of convincing developers that Nokia has something unique to offer them.

“It’s not just about great technology,” he said. “That’s one piece of it. If you don’t have all of the other pieces figured out you are not giving them the full opportunity.”

Kerris said that Nokia wants the big developers, for sure, but also has its sights set on emerging application creators.

“You want to definitely have them but the real opportunity is going to come from the next generation of developers,” he said.

While much of the outside attention is on Windows Phone, Argenti and Kerris stressed that the company also has a case to be made for developers to create new apps for Nokia’s existing platforms.

“There’s actually still quite a bit of an opportunity for developing on the non-Windows Nokia architectures,” Argenti said.

While that may sound like a bad thing, optimistic developers could find a positive way of looking at it: There’s still a lot of room for growth.

Facebook told developers on Friday it was changing the way it measures the number of people who visit an application, and yesterday, the full impact of that announcement became blindingly clear.

“Everyone lost about a quarter of their users,” said Peter Relan, the CEO of Crowdstar, which now has 12.5 million monthly active users down from 17.8 million on Friday, according to AppData.com, which publishes data on a daily basis.

Facebook explained it traditionally measured and reported app usage based on the number of people who visit an app, similar to the way in which many Web analytics companies measure Internet traffic. But now it measures the number of people who authenticate the app, or give permission to the developer to see its information.

In essence, it’s shifting from measuring “visitors” to measuring “authenticated users,” which more accurately reflects the usage of an application.

“From our perspective, it’s the users who get through that make the money, so to some extent, the old figures weren’t revenue-generating numbers anyway,” Relan said.

More importantly, however, the shift will be psychological.

By simply changing the way it measures its figures, Facebook is able to make it appear that the social gaming market has expanded. That’s important because many developers thought the market was saturated and locked up by developers like Zynga, which has hundreds of millions of players.

In other words, the thinking was that if such a major percentage of Facebook’s roughly 800 million users are already playing games, what’s the point?

Now, all of the sudden, there’s a larger pool of non-gamers.

“I think Facebook has some challenges. Because mobile is taking off, they want to show that there’s still more growth available on Facebook; otherwise it’s too saturated,” Relan said.

While Facebook may attempt a positive spin on this news, the impact of the recalibration was really startling over the weekend.

Zynga, which has more active users than the next 15 social game developers combined, lost almost 20 percent of its user base. Today, under the new measurement standards, it has 195 million monthly active users, falling from the previous number of 262 million, according to AppData.

Electronic Arts, which is the second-largest social game developer, saw its user base shrink to 71 million from nearly 98 million.

In Facebook’s original explanation, it tried to downplay the impact: “While this change will result in a perceived decline in active users for some apps, the number of users actually engaging with an app or playing a game is unaffected by this change.”

Of course, there’s always a chance in the future that the key industry metrics will change again. “It’s a young industry,” Relan said.

At eBay’s developer conference, kicking off Wednesday in San Francisco, more than 4,000 developers and merchants will receive a preview of X.commerce, the company’s new technology platform aimed at developers.

The nonconsumer-focused platform will enable developers to use the tools to build applications for retailers who are looking to have a larger presence on social networks, online and on mobile phones.

Also on stage will be some of eBay’s new partners, including Omniture, Adobe’s marketing and advertising unit, and Katie Mitic, the director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook.

Mitic, who recently joined eBay’s board, is expected to announce a partnership between the social network and eBay.

The X.commerce division will draw from many of eBay’s existing technologies, including PayPal, but will also tie together several other acquisitions, including Milo, which has created an online database of offline inventory in physical stores; Red Laser, which is a barcode scanning technology; and Magento, which assists in the creation of online storefronts.

In essence, eBay is looking to partner with physical retailers to generate more sales online or by driving more foot traffic to their stores.

That’s in steep contrast to Amazon, which has increasingly focused on driving more and more spending online. It also has focused on the digital distribution of content, such as books, music and video, and is placing a huge bet on hardware, like the upcoming Kindle Fire, hoping to rival Apple’s iPad.

The opportunity still exists for many to grab even just a small percentage of local commerce — regardless of whether it’s through third-party developers or driving more spending online. That’s because e-commerce today makes up only a small fraction of spending, with the bulk of purchases continuing to occur at physical retail locations.

The X.commerce group in eBay joins three other major groups, including the eBay marketplace, PayPal and GSI, which it acquired earlier this year.

X.commerce is eBay’s biggest move to date in becoming a back-end technology provider rather than a consumer-facing brand. The service it builds will be aimed at developers, who will in turn own the relationship with the merchants.

Take eBay’s Red Laser technology as an example. If a merchant creates an application using the technology, a consumer will be able to scan a barcode in the store, and then find out if the item is in stock. The consumer will then have the option of buying it using PayPal directly on the phone without ever leaving the application.

The most consumer-facing element being unveiled tomorrow is what eBay is calling PayPal Access, which will enable online shoppers to log in to a Web site to buy something using their PayPal account, rather than having to create a brand-new account. By using PayPal, the consumer’s shipping address and billing information will automatically populate the store, saving a few tedious steps. PayPal Access will become available to consumers as online merchants adopt it.

At Facebook’s developer conference today in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled what he is calling “real-time serendipity.”

The announcement will change the way that all users interact with applications, and what information will automatically appear in the new ticker feed that scrolls quickly down the right-hand side of the page.

Yesterday, Liz Gannes explained what Facebook’s new features mean and how they will promote a lot more sharing without clogging everyone’s main news feed.

Well, this is how over-sharing will begin to work.

Before today, applications commonly would request permission to publish a story to your feed one at a time. For example, “Zack just found a mushroom in Super Mario Brothers!”

The audience applauded the action since oftentimes these permissions can be slow and annoying, but without them, it will no doubt disturb people seeking privacy.

Now users will be asked to give permission up front when they start using an application, so all these little alerts will show up automatically. This is being called “frictionless” sharing.

Now when you listen to a song, it will appear in your feed that you have started using Spotify, or are playing a game.

CTO Bret Taylor explains, “Adding an app to your timeline is like wiring a real-time connection between your app and Facebook… There is no step two.”

Zuckerberg says this is the best way to discover new music.

Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek made an appearance on stage to applaud the actions, saying it will lead to more music discovery and ultimately more music sold.

This announcement is tied to Facebook’s announcement that it is now adding verbs to your feed, other than “like,” such as “read,” “hike,” and “want.”

So, on the “read” front, Zuckerberg announced relationships with Yahoo news, the Washington Post and The Daily, where users will be able to click on an item in the stream and read it within Facebook. “This has the potential to rethink the way we read news, but also the way the whole news industry works,” Zuckerberg said.

The open graph will also change the way games are played. “Social games are killing it,” he said. “They’ve been the most succesful apps on Facebook.”

So, from the activity feed on the right of the screen, you’ll be able to see that your friend just played a word in a game of Zynga’s Words with Friends. From the feed, you can click on the alert to open the game board and see the game play.

Facebook is working with a ton of game companies to enable the games for the open graph, including EA, lolapps, Wooga, Digital Chocolate, and Zynga.

Facebook clearly worked with developers in advance to create examples of using the open graph, but Taylor said other developers should be able to update their current applications in one afternoon.

Still don’t get it? Here’s a video:

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Later this morning, I will scramble the private ATD jet to make my way down south to Anaheim for Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting.

That’s right: A bunch of Wall Street types, asking not very challenging questions of top Microsoft execs in a ballroom perilously close to Disneyland.

Taking place this afternoon, starting at 1 pm PT, the confab will include appearances by its top execs, including CEO Steve Ballmer, CFO Peter Klein, COO Kevin Turner, Online Services President Qi Lu and Satya Nadella, who helms the Servers & Tools division of the software giant.

There will be lots to discuss at the confab, including: What is up with Microsoft’s search and advertising partnership now that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz — who struck the deal — was ousted, and whether it is involved in a possible bid for the Silicon Valley Internet giant again; an update on the Windows Phone business; prospects for Windows 8, which the company just highlighted at its huge developers conference there; questions about its nascent tablet business; comments on Google’s recent moves, including its purchase of Motorola Mobility; and, of course, how Ballmer sees his own tenure at Microsoft, given its longtime lackluster stock performance (paging investor David Einhorn!).

In other words: Mr. Ballmer’s Wild Wall Street Ride!

Look for my live blog from the event later today.

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