Happy Aquarium creator CrowdStar plans to take its games mobile

In a recent press release, it was announced that CrowdStar's recent explosive growth has led the studio to release two of its games, Happy Aquarium and Happy Island, on Yahoo! Japan through DeNA's Mobage platform. Recently, CrowdStar encroached on the coveted Number 2 position as most popular Facebook developer under the almighty Zynga.

This is a pretty impressive feat considering CrowdStar, a largely independent studio with backing from the YouWeb entrepreneur platform, beat out both Playfish and Playdom for the position, backed by Electronic Arts and Disney, respectively. The company plans to release several more Facebook games by the end of 2010 and continue to hire more team members.

"CrowdStar has its foot on the gas -- we're aggressively scaling the company to build on all the momentum we gained this summer," said Niren Hiro, CEO of CrowdStar. "We're prepared to go to the next level."

Apparently, the next level for CrowdStar is in your pocket as the developer released a bullet list of plans for the future which includes, "Upcoming launches of mobile versions of all its Facebook games through YouWeb-incubator partnerships." Hopefully this means mobile versions of CrowdStar games similar to Zynga's FarmVille for iPhone, which recreates your actual Facebook farm within the mobile app.

While the developer is reporting record growth and shows no signs of stopping with hires aplenty, CrowdStar is going to need some truly new game ideas if it hopes to compete with Zynga much less maintain its Number 2 spot. Especially considering Zynga seems to have caught on to the idea of new game mechanics; it should be an interesting winter.

Yahoo integrates Facebook Connect

Yahoo has been trying for a while to create a social platform as massive as Facebook, but it seems they have just given up. In a press release, Yahoo announced that they would be integrating the Facebook Connect API into the back-end of their system. This will allow users to share stories and content between both sites. Yahoo's Jim Stoneham had this to say:

    With this integration, we are opening the door for two of the Internet's largest online communities to make it easier for people to stay connected. It also enables us to further the Yahoo! Open Strategy, which is aimed at making experiences dramatically more open, social and personally relevant for the more than 500 million people that visit Yahoo! each month.

Will this include integration for Facebook games as well? It's definite that you will be able to share stories to Yahoo, including your progress or gifts in Facebook games, but it's debatable if you will be able to actually play them through Yahoo. Yahoo already has several of the more popular social games, such as Mafia Wars, but they are lackluster implementations rather than true ports.