We are excited to announce a new, self-serve feature that allows developers to create a customized look and feel for their in-game payments experience. Think of it as a way of creating customized skins on the fly that match and blend with the colors of your game. This, in turn, helps to extend your brand and to increase user engagement and conversion rate.

So, how does it work? Simple. All you do is share the hex code of your game’s primary highlight color, and we do the rest. We generate a color palette and gradient that matches and blends with your game’s look and feel, and you are ready to go.

Here is how you instantly customize the payments flow for your in-game payment.

Log into your Social Gold account to configure your in-game payments offer.

Edit your Account Settings

Choose the integration (offer) you want to edit (or create a new one). Next, go down to the advanced settings. Go to the customize highlight section and add the hex code of your game and hit enter. Hint: You can always change the hex color if you are not satisfied with your original choice.

Edit your integration settings

Set up the Primary Highlight Color

Save, and voilà! You have a a new, customized skin that matches and blends with the look and feel of your online game.

Colors to match your game

The new, customized in-game payment window appears in the context of your website/online game and blends in with the flow of the game. As much as we love our color schemes, they can sometimes appear jarring to the user playing your game, especially as they are about to open their wallets and send you money.

Why would you want to customize the in-game payments experience? There are three simple reasons. First, you can now control the look and feel of your website. Second, you can improve your conversion rate. Our initial tests have shown an improvement of around 10% across several applications. Third and most importantly, by deploying a natural, blended looking in-game payments experience, you provide your users with a natural way to pay without interrupting the flow of their game. The payment window appears in the context of the game and blends in with the flow of the game. This ensures that the user stays engaged in the game.

So, go ahead and give it a spin. Take control of your game and effectively increase user engagement, increase conversion rate, increase your revenue, and most importantly extend your brand. Skin your Social Gold in-game payments flow now!

Don’t forget to let us know what you think and ping us. We want to hear from you.

We presented our virtual economy analytics as a part of the Facebook garage on Analytics. Here are the slides.

You can also browse them on Slideshare.

In brief: Social Gold platform can help create vibrant virtual economies, in large part due to the detailed, insightful and actionable analytics. Specifically, you can get insights into inflation, determine whether to increase prices (or if the market in your economy is automatically increasing the prices), figure out the right pricing of your virtual goods, and most importantly decipher the items that drive your revenue.

We are always looking for comments, suggestions, feedback — email us at business -at- jambool.com.

Who are you voting for this November?

Jambool launched a contest between the two candidates. Fans of each can now show their support and compete head to head — who gets more share of support every day, and who will get more votes?

Login today to check it out: Vote 4 Obama, or Vote 4 McCain!

I’ve recently had conversations with friends about finding the right local resource for everyday needs — plumbers, car mechanics, restaurants, house contractors.

By far, everyone trusts recommendations on Yelp for stuff like restaurants. It is one of the primary factors in people deciding where to eat. A few friends also swear by Yelp for car mechanics, doctors and plumbers.

But it gets interesting when you have to make a decision for overhauling your kitchen and paying someone $50,000 and redo your world. For one, interestingly, people feel uncomfortable in recommending any contractor even if they’ve used one themselves. And it is also extremely hard to come to trust reviews on Yelp for an investment this size. Most people go with the recommendation from their real estate agents, and with someone they get a good vibe with (or someone who gives them the best quote).

My own experience has been that I use Yelp to cross out places or services I don’t want to use. I look for the negative recommendations and even sometimes read the comments. But all said and done, if a doctor, mechanic or restaurant is recommended I’d try it because the risk is relatively low. On the other hand, for a contractor who I’d pay thousands of hard earned dollars, Yelp reviews will only go so far.

What do you think? Does Yelp help you in deciding the local services you use?

Graphing Social Patterns conference is next week, and if you haven’t already registered, we highly recommend you do — it brings together the best community of social applications developers. Going by the past conferences, the panels and speaker tracks are invariably excellent.

For readers of this blog, who are planning to come, here is a discount code that gets you 20% discount for conference registration: gspe08fos.

Graphing Social Patterns has become the premier conference in the social applications and social networking space. GSP East is in Washington, D.C., on June 9-11. Vikas is speaking on the Virality and engagement panel.

Do look for us there if you are attending.

Reza along with Ken and Aaron organized the Facebook Dev Garage in Seattle on May 5th. It was a free event, sponsored by Microsoft and Facebook. It was a great event with presentations from several developers based in Seattle who gave demos. There were also talks by Facebook and Jim Scheinman (EIR at Charles River Ventures).

We were interviewed by a journalist from Time magazine last week. The article is rather truthful in capturing the essence of the overwhelming number of applications on Facebook: Read it here:

Suffering From Facebook Fatigue?

We’re hoping that Send Good Karma does have a positive impact on helping the fatigue. Positive karma helps, doesn’t it?

We presented at the appnite contest last night at GSP. It went quite well, though we didn’t win. Thanks to everyone who voted for us!

It was a strange conversation at a panel today at Graphing social. At a panel that featured folks from Bebo, Friendster, Meebo and Netvibes, at one point the panelists were talking about the impact third party applications have on the user base and the platforms.

I was very surprised to hear Jessica Alter from Bebo bring up “regulating” third party apps and developers so they behave well on all platforms. It seemed to get quick yays from Friendster and Netvibes, to the extent they were all ready to create a working group right then to regulate these apps.

It seemed to me a case of the platforms suddenly turning prude, especially one like Bebo. I think even Facebook’s recent strategy to turn down the ability of apps to tap into the social graph falls into the same category. Social networks — Myspace, Facebook, Bebo — are all largely built around very inane set interactions. None of these networks have any really deep collaborative components, or even anything that is significantly useful. So they turn to third party apps to build it on their platform.

What they don’t realize (or they realize but refuse to admit) is that users on their platforms aren’t really in the mood for deeper apps. Deep, rich apps don’t do well on Facebook. It is a reality. Spammy, inane apps do quite well — and that is a reality as well.

So they try to force it upon external developers. Turn off virality. “Regulate” them. If the trend continues, like it seems to be, the story of open social platforms will be a short one. Myspace, Bebo, Hi5 even mentioned that they would prefer to open the gates to virality slowly. Maybe they are justified in worrying about the impact to their user base, but they should probably set their expectations right as well.

On the panel, thankfully, Seth Sternberg from Meebo voiced an opinion against the cry for regulating apps.

In fact, even otherwise, Seth Sternberg impressed me on that panel more than anyone else. I’ve not interacted with him before, or heard him before. I hope to, though, in the future.