Viximo taking social games beyond Facebook and Myspace

"Beyond Facebook?" I can almost hear millions (thousands? hundreds? tens?) of our readers crying out. "There are social networks besides Facebook?" Indeed there are, and I'm not just talking about MySpace, either. There are dozens of smaller social networks out there eager for games, just as there are dozens of social game developers looking to diversify away from Facebook's iron grip.

The problem: Most of these social game developers probably don't want to go through the trouble of customizing their games for dozens of different social networks, each with their own technical, submission and payment guidelines. This is where three-year-old Viximo comes in. Today, they announced the launch of a unified platform that lets developers submit a game once, to Viximo, to be deployed to dozens of social networks Viximo has partnered with, including Blackplanet.com, Quepasa.com and Zorpia.com.

While none of these partner networks rival the size or exposure of a Facebook or MySpace, together they represent tens of millions of potential new players for any given game. And anything that makes social gaming less synonymous with the world's largest (but not only!) social network is fine by us.

An Angry Birds 'social' game (and three others) is in the works for 2012

So, we're just going to assume that by "social", Rovio game designer Jaako Iisalo means "Facebook". During the Social Games and Virtual Goods World conference in London, England, the Angry Birds designer told Pocket Gamer that four new Angry Birds games will launch next year. More specifically, one of them will be a "social" game.

And, will you look at that, Angry Birds is already on Google+. Granted, there are versions of the iconic everywhere mobile game on Facebook, but none of which seem legitimate. (One even seems to stream the Google Chrome version of Angry Birds through to Facebook.) While this could just as easily mean an Angry Birds game on a mobile platform with heavier social features, the developer has said in the past that the franchise will hit Facebook.

Honestly, how Angry Birds is available on the Intel AppUp store and in retail stores across Europe before officially on Facebook is beyond us. At any rate, we can likely expect these other three Angry Birds games to tap into new genres, since Rovio has expressed interest in exploring new types of games for its irate avian creatures. And just when you started to grow bored of it.

Would you play Angry Birds on Facebook more than elsewhere? What other genres would you like to see the Angry Birds characters take a part in?