SURF’S UP

The success of Facebook may be the talk of the town, says David Crow, but a number of serious competitors are catching up fast

What’s in a name? If it’s anything of any value, this recently launched but terribly branded British start-up deserves to fall at the first hurdle. Nonetheless, The Money Gaming Corporation, its parent company, has come up with an impressive concept: a social network built around casual gamers. This is not for hardcore XBoxers who spend hours perfecting complex, visually stunning games like Halo 3. Instead, Doof is looking to cash in on the growing appetite for simple, easily learnt games that are typically found on the handheld Nintendo DS.

Alongside Doof’s impressive array of strategy, action and card games – which owe more to 1980’s hits like Windows Solitaire and Pac-Man than current technologies – Money Gaming has built a fully functional social network. There’s an undeniable market for this kind of content, especially as the Chinese craze for playing online games moves westward. Doof is sure to face a hard ride, however, especially from MySpace, which last month announced a deal with casual gaming giant Oberon Media that will see hundreds of games on the network in the next few months.

Take That, The Spice Girls, even Led Zeppelin: 2007 was the year of the comeback. Although some of its critics have already written it off, it’s far too early to wave goodbye to the original social networking site supreme, which hopes to make 2008 the year when it regains its top-dog status. Although Facebook now beats the site in several important metrics, MySpace is still in rude financial health, garnering far more advertising revenue than its younger rival: in 2008, MySpace is expected to pull in around $850m, compared to Facebook’s $305m.

Murdoch’s News Corp doesn’t release specific figures for its subsidiaries but its Fox Interactive Media Unit – which largely consists of MySpace – turned a profit of $10m in fiscal 2007. It has been helped by the site’s now-bargain price tag of $580m as well as a $900m payment from Google, in a deal which made the web behemoth the sole provider of advertising on the site until the end of 2009.