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Most of the initial buzz surrounding Apple's announcement on Thursday of its new operating system, iPhone OS 4, centered on the support for multitasking . While this feature has been long anticipated by users and developers alike, another important but less discussed aspect of the update involves Apple's Game Center - a social gaming network to be launched for iPhone and iPod Touch later this summer. Similar to the networks already prevalent in console gaming, Apple's Game Center will allow friend invitations and multiplayer game-play and will include matchmaking and high-score tracking. Sponsor The Game Center may be Apple's attempt to compete with Facebook's dominance over the hugely popular and incredibly lucrative area of social gaming . A report released this week suggested that the gaming company Zynga , maker of six of the seven most popular social games, is worth over $5 billion. Unlike Facebook, Apple does not currently have a social network upon which to automatically connect players and friends, although implementation of the Game Center may well bring this about. Details about the Game Center were not explicit in Thursday's announcement, although the beta release of the operating system will include a developer preview of Game Center and contain a set of APIs so that mobile game developers can build apps that take advantage of the social gaming network capabilities. Echoing the popularity of gaming on the iPhone, initial analytics since the iPad release point to the continued domination of the App Store by gaming and entertainment applications. The updates to the iPhone OS could provide an opportunity for mobile and social game developers and for entrepreneurs in the gaming industry. Discuss
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Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers
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As part of our ongoing series in conjunction with Tableau Software and TweetStats , we've been looking at some of Twitter's most influential users. What it means to be a "top" user on Twitter has changed a lot since 2007. Recently we found out that a high number of followers, which most people use to judge the popularity of an account, doesn't actually really mean anything . However, Twitter lists - where we identify our favorites as "most influential" or "essential" - are still revealing. Today we're using lists to unscientifically analyze what we think are some of the some of the most influential people and entities on Twitter. Sponsor Editors Note: This post is part of a series ReadWriteWeb is producing in partnership with Tableau Software, where we examine interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. You can use Tableau Public to create interactive visualizations like this and publish them to your own blog or website or anywhere online. This is the last week to enter Tableau's User Generated Graph Contest . Winner will receive a free trip to Web 2.0 and $500. Sign up before March 26. We used a variety of lists to identify 485 accounts and then ran those names through Tableau's data visualization tools . What did we find? Surprisingly, the majority of influencers retweet fewer than 30% of the time. Play With the Influencers The top graph shows the distribution of total tweets from all of our influencers. You can play with the data yourself. When you select an account on the right you can see they fall in the larger @, retweet and hashtag trends. The data is from January and February. The Data Dashboard Powered by Tableau Thanks to TweetStats for providing the Twitter data. Discuss
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More Twitter Analysis: Influencers Don't Retweet
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