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Many of us are intimately familiar with the rigmarole of personal online-reputation control, especially as the 2011 holiday party season comes to a close. We know to delete any tipsy tweets and comb through Facebook to un-tag ourselves in embarrassing party photos.

Just like you, your business has a online reputation to worry about, and maintaining it takes work. For all companies, from hip startup to old-school enterprise, paying attention to online feedback is incredibly important. More than 92 percent of adult consumers will look up a review online before paying for a product or service, and one wisp of negative commentary can have big repercussions.

There are a few steps every company should take to optimize its rep. To monitor what’s said about your company on social media sites, consider using a social search engine such as SocialMention.com orKurrently.com.

While younger gamers spend more time playing mobile social games, older players are more likely to buy virtual goods and spend more on them, according to a study by MocoSpace.

The mobile gaming community found the likelihood that consumers will make in-game purchases increases greatly with their age -- implying microtransaction-based mobile games that target older audiences could have an advantage in generating revenue.

Zynga is the most recognizable name in social gaming. Facebook members and iPhone owners alike have seen Zynga’s games continuously rise and fall from the top of the charts over the past few years, and with CastleVille’s launch earlier this month, it is unlikely that will change any time soon. The company is likely to go public soon and raise a ton of money, so we thought we would show this primer on Zynga’s social games so everyone can see what the fuss is all about. These simple, time-consuming titles have taken the  world by storm, bringing in hundreds of millions of users internationally since Zynga’s beginning in 2007.

Back in September, game startup Tiny Speck launched an unusual online game called  Glitch. Today, the company said it is “unlaunching” the game. The company will keep the game running, but it will take it back into beta testing so that the developers can rework the game play to make it easier for users to start the game and also to add new tools for fans to create things in the game world.

Rocketbox now Offers Their Highly Realistic 3D Assets as Unity Packages, Making Usage with the Unity Development Platform Easy and Comfortable. 

HANOVER, GERMANY – Rocketbox Studios, well known for highest quality prefab 3d characters and animations, announced that their complete product portfolio is available directly in Unity’s native unitypackage file format from now on. This offers the large group of Unity developers the opportunity to use the assets directly inside of Unity, without the need to export them from a 3d software package. Shaders, textures and animations are already set up for convenient usage in Unity right out of the box – allowing the user to create astonishingly realistic scenes with lifelike animated characters within a very short development timeframe. 

Illustration: Nicholas Blechman/Wired;

Will Wright’s next game, titled HiveMind, will harvest players’ personal information and turn that data into customized gameplay situations, the Sims creator revealed in aVentureBeat interview on Wednesday.

Wright did not reveal what platforms HiveMind is being developed for, nor did he show any images, but said thatHiveMind “could take into account what time of day it is, where you are [and] how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map.”

eBay announced today an integration with Facebook’s open graph for its developer arm X.commerce. The company is thinking social and also unvieled PayPal access, a Facebook Connect-like way of checking out.

“Social design takes word of mouth marketing and puts a bullhorn to it,” said Katie Mitic Facebook’s technology executive at the X.innovate conference in San Francisco.

Facebook recently introduced a new “vocabulary” to its open graph, a platform for developers on Facebook. With this change in communication, people can do more than just “like” something, they can express their true action with the product. For instance, instead of liking Levi’s newest pair of jeans, you can have bought them, recommended them, and more. The idea is people are more influenced by their friends’ purchases than they are by Carfax.com or Kelley Blue Book. If someone sees your action on a product, they may be more inclined to take action of their own.

6waves Lolapps has rolled out its latest licensed title, this one based on an ABC reality series. Developed by CubeToy, Extreme Makeover: Home Editionlets players re-create the charitable home remodeling of the show on Facebook, with more than 160,000 would-be designers signing on per month so far.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition currently has 168,623 monthly active users and 13,715 daily active users.

Sticking closely to the premise of the show on which it’s based, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has players working to remodel the homes of deserving families, such as those who care for multiple foster children or people with special needs. The game presents a series of fictional families to help, but also integrates real life situations by updating each week to include the actual family that will appear on the show’s latest televised episode. No matter which one players choose to help, they start off by choosing a house style and floor plan based on the family’s needs. They then go room to room, selecting wallpaper, flooring, cabinetry, furniture and decorations, placing them until their design has met a list of requests for that particular family.