How Can Games and Apps Get the Best of Both Social and Mobile?

The intersection of mobile and social is easily the most exciting place to be in technology today—so said a star-studded group of panelists discussing the past, present, and future of "Mobile + Social" at Facebook's f8 developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

"Mobile is the modern vehicle for play now," said Paul Bettner, general manager of Zynga with Friends. "There had been handheld gaming devices before, but there's never been anything like this, where everybody's carrying this device around now."

Consumption patterns are "shifting massively" to smartphones and other mobile devices, according to Playfish founder Kristian Segerstrale, who said the free-to-play social network game developer figures that 80 percent of the time people spend on their smartphones is spent either social networking or gaming.

Social games like Zynga's FarmVille or Electronic Arts subsidiary Playfish's Pet Society are natural fits for mobile platforms, but they're not the only way to leverage the possibilities of both social and mobile technology, according to Alexa Andrzejewski, co-founder and CEO of Foodspotting, which pools restaurant recommendations among friends.

Andrzejewski thinks clever ways to blend social networking with mobility are nearly limitless, particularly given location-tracking technology that's built into so many mobile devices now.

"With our mobile devices, we're leaving trails of data everywhere we go, every time we check in, post a photo, make a call," she said. "The more that we leave these trails, the more that mobile devices are going to make sense of them."

Companies like Zynga, Playfish, Foodspotting, and Turntable.fm , represented on the f8 panel by co-founder Billy Chassen, are all working overtime to make their apps more social. That's always a neat trick, the panelists agreed, because there's as much art as science to building a successful social app.

Andrzejewski had some advice for would-be developers of sticky mobile social apps.

"Leverage people's narcissism," she said, citing Intel's viral Museum of Me project that spread across the Internet a few months ago. "People love their own stuff and their own data."

She said that success or failure in the fast-paced world of mobile social apps can often be measured in mere hours.

"If you put out a mobile social app and you don't get any feedback in the first 24 hours, it's not working," Andrzejewski said, adding that a good way to track what's working with a particular app or service is to track what's happening with users who stay with it versus what's going on with those who abandon it.

If developing sticky social experiences is almost an art form, the other half of the social + mobile formula for existing properties, like migrating a social game to mobile devices from a different platform, is much more of technical exercise, Segerstrale conceded. But that doesn't mean that it's just a simple matter of adjusting for smaller screen sizes, he emphasized.

"Pop Cap does portable experience really well, for example," Segerstrale said. "How do you add value through these platforms? Just taking a good PC game and putting it on a smaller screen, what's the point? You must offer the hard core gamers actual value on each platform you're on."