This week’s release is a pretty exciting one.  For quite a while now we’ve been discussing how exactly to implement user-defined application achievements as well as our own Sharendipity achievements.  Well we’ve settled on a plan and we’re happy to announce a new Achievements feature available to all application creators.

Achievements are a way to establish goals for playing a game or using an application.  Sometimes they’re difficult accomplishments, such as reaching a new high score, and sometimes they’re just for fun.  Either way, it gives application creators a new way to engage their users and allows your friends to see what you’ve been up to in Sharendipity .

One example of a Sharendipity achievement is the Application Creator, which you can earn by publishing your own application in Sharendipity.  As shown below, when these achievements are earned your Facebook friends will be notified through their news feeds (if you are using a Facebook account):

There are additional Sharendipity achievements for both creators and players, such as reaching a certain number of plays for one of your creations, or ranking first place in a published game.

You can create your own achievements through a new option in the Director menu under the Application heading.  The Achievements Manager dialog will display all achievements that have been defined for an application, allowing you to create new achievements and edit existing ones.

To highlight how some of the achievements might be used, I’ve also published a new game called Block Boxer.  This is the view that I see as the creator of the achievements:

The game itself is pretty challenging but a lot of the fun is in trying to unlock all of the achievements.  Here are a few more games that have new achievements :

Scramble, a sliding-puzzle game that uses the Flickr interestingness feed.

Dodge, a game where you have to avoid the enemies by moving your mouse.

For more information and discussion about the Achievements feature, check out the Wiki page.

We have been rolling out new features and stability improvements nearly every week. We are especially excited about last week’s release because we have incorporated additional viral channels within Facebook.

Users can now challenge their friends to a game contest from within Sharendipity using Facebook notifications. This provides an exciting new level of social engagement for game-related applications currently published on the platform.

Furthermore, from a creators perspective, they now get this tight social integration for free with every Sharendipity application they create and deploy on our platform. No programming is required on their behalf to take advantage of this powerful element of Facebook. Simply add the high score action to your game, and the friend challenge framework will appear on your asset page. Very fun stuff!

More is on the way! Come check out some of the creations that have been published thus far, and challenge a friend today!

Inching closer to being totally open… In the fall, we made the decision to transition our initial launch to the Facebook platform. The primary driver for this move was the attractiveness of quickly and cheaply acquiring users. We’re introducing a new way of creating software so any help we can get in recruiting is a plus. We also felt that our vision lines up perfectly with the Facebook audience as they look for new ways to express themselves online and with their friends.

We immediately ported our alpha release to the Facebook platform and began leveraging the viral channels available to spread user activity within Sharendipity. At the same time, we continued to introduce new creation tools, improve stability, and fold user feedback into the client. The next step was to loosen the grip a bit to encourage more adoption of our platform, and provide a real audience for our content creators.

In that spirit… we’ve made some changes to our accessibility on Facebook. As of a few weeks ago, anyone can install Sharendipity and run the applications created by our users (although we’ve still limited access to the creation tools for the time being).

Hopefully this will provide a little more incentive to our early adopters to create new content. We also wanted to start spreading the word on our platform. So if you haven’t done so already, please install Sharendipity and play some of the applications created thus far. There is a mixture of games and slide shows that integrate your Facebook friends. More applications are being added all the time…