Ubisoft Launches Facebook Gaming Portal

Ubisoft is getting into the Facebook gaming business with UbiFriends, a games portal on the popular social networking site that launched today with TickTock, a game that tests your ability to e-stalk your friends.

Facebook is big business, and Ubisoft is getting in on the social networking party with UbiFriends, their just-launched games portal for the site. While it's unclear exactly what kind of content we'll be getting on UbiFriends, I wouldn't put money on seeing anything of the Beyond Good & Evil variety.

The first offering from UbiFriends, TickTock, is of the type you see fairly often on Facebook, with a basic gimmick built to kill time and goad you into overloading your friends' inboxes with invitations to play. It's a very Facebook-y experience: a trivia game that feeds you status updates from your friends and then asks you to ID those friends. So, if you're constantly checking your News Feed (don't be afraid to admit it), here's the game for you.

Insubstantial as it is, TickTock's sort of an interesting experience, if only as it serves a way of checking how much time you really spend finding out what your friends are doing in bite-sized info nuggets. I for one, now know that I need to stop reading Facebook so damn much, because I'm too good at this game.

Obviously, I'm missing the point. Ubisoft says TickTock is "about leveraging user generated content to interact with your friends." It's also "it's the first of many applications that we're building for our UbiFriends portal," they say, so hopefully we'll get some meatier fare in the future.