Ubisoft friending Facebook

Following its controversial closure of Scrabulous, Electronic Arts put its own, official version of Scrabble on Facebook last July. Now, Ubisoft--which is partially owned by EA--has publicly revealed its own game plan for the massive online social network.

This morning, the French publisher announced its new gaming portal, Ubifriends, which it claims will now offer a steady stream of new games and applications. The first offering will be TickTock, a trivia game that measures how well Facebook users know their friends. The app pulls data from friends' status updates and "reinforces the importance of a user's social graph." Apparently, popular gamers will also be more successful players, as the publisher states "the more friends a user has on Facebook, the more successful that player may be at TickTock."

TickTock and Ubifriends are the first projects of a Ubisoft internal team based in San Francisco, and the portal takes advantage of the Google App Engine, which it believes "makes Web applications easy to build, scale, and maintain."