Facebook Testing Games Discovery Sidebar

Facebook has introduced a "Discover New Games" sidebar module that alerts users to what games their friends are playing on the social network, and invites users to join them. Like other modules and advertisements on Facebook, the Discover New Games box appears on the right-hand side. It shows a game that users haven't installed, the names and icons of their friends playing that title, and a link to start playing, according to a report from Inside Facebook. This new sidebar could potentially make up for some of the lost "virality" channels that developers have lost access to on the social network over the past year -- such as Facebook's changes to its application notifications designed to reduce spam and abuses of the system. Facebook previously allowed games to publish users' in-game activities to their news feeds for their friends to see, essentially advertising the title. Recent changes on the site, though, made it so only friends playing a game will see published updates related to that particular title. These virality adjustments resulted in the site's most popular games losing millions of monthly users (or in the case of Zynga's FarmVille, tens of millions of monthly users), as many developers depended on those channels to reach new players or remind current users to play their titles. The "Discover New Games" sidebar is currently being beta tested and hasn't been rolled out to all users on Facebook yet.