For those unfamiliar with the company, Raptr is a social network that revolves around gaming, which allows users to keep tabs on what their friends are doing throughout the gaming world, offering recommendations for games to play, accomplishment updates, and a host of other features. One of Raptr’s coolest features is its multi-protocol chat client that allows gamers to see what games their friends are playing in realtime, whether they’re on PS3, Xbox 360, or PC (including casual Flash games, Steam and Xfire) — even if they don’t have Raptr accounts. If one of your friends is online and playing a game, for example, you can send messages to them from the Raptr client regardless of which platform they’re on.

What grounds these features and gives them value, according to CEO Dennis Fong, emanates from the fact that Raptr is “all about the data”. Users opt-in to sharing their personal data (and Fong says 99 percent of users have opted-in), allowing Raptr to pull their entire profile from, say, Xbox or PS3, etc., to see how far they’ve progressed, what achievements they’ve unlocked, what games they’re buying, and more. It is this data, along with Raptr’s automated check-in functionality, that makes Raptr a fully-loaded social and recommendation platform.

This data is also being offered (for free) to analysts, journalists, and more, so that they can watch current trends in gaming, like how many people are playing Madden and playing Cityville. And as long as this data never ends up in the hands of advertisers, it can become a goldmine, with a ton of prospective uses — like so many other discovery and recommendation services, the more it learns and the more data collects, the more useful and personalized it becomes.

Riffing off its dataset and recommendation algorithm, today Raptr is launching a cool new feature: a personalized, social news platform that serves you the latest news that’s relevant to the games you’re playing now. The new feature is kind of like Reddit or Digg for gaming, and looks fairly similar to the Facebook news feed. Like Facebook, all the news you’ll see in your feed comes from other users in the platform, with the exception of course being that the news is algorithmically served to be personalized to your gaming tastes. So, it’s discovery mechanism is leveraging both your social graph and your personal usage history.

Another difference with the Facebook news feed is that you can vote a piece of news up or down, you can sort through news taxonomically by category, or you can hide the content if it’s not contextually relevant to you and your tastes. The feed is also partially curated by a content team at Raptr, to ensure that the feed includes that human element, which is intended to ensure total personalization and relevance. Furthermore, unlike Facebook or Digg and Reddit, there’s no front page, each user has a news feed that’s personalized to them, so everyone sees something different.

Raptr has raised $27 million in funding from Accel, Founders Fund, and several other well-known angels and VCs. Founder and CEO Dennis Fong, whose past companies include Xfire, Lithium, and Gamers.com, said that the platform currently has over 8 million users, and is pulling in over 500K users per month.

Considering that Raptr users can now submit and share a mix of content including news, videos, screenshots, status updates, and reviews, chat with friends in-game across platforms, and that its service leverages a mass of data to provide excellent recommendations and game discovery, the startup has built one badass platform. I don’t like using this word, but Raptr’s services are truly “robust”, with recommendations, discovery, and a personalized news feed, it combines Pandora-like discovery qualities with Reddit-like news offerings. For avid gamers, it’s got some bells and whistles worth checking out.

Raptr’s mission is simple: to make it easy to play games with your friends. Essentially, Raptr is a social networking platform for gamers to track games and share achievements. Users can also share their stats, rankings, achievements, and characters with friends. And they can automatically broadcast their gaming activity to their friends on Raptr and other social sites including Facebook and Twitter.

The network also supports games on PC, Xbox, and PS3; and allows you to see your friends while they are playing games on a number of consoles. You can then chat and browse the web in-game.

And the startup, which had north of one million members last July, has grown to over 6 million members in less than a year.

Of course, Raptr is an independent social gaming network and faces competition from companies like Zynga and Playdom which are mostly centralized within Facebook.

A year ago, Raptr rolled out a multi-protocol chat client that allowed gamers to see what games their friends were playing (this included support for both PC games and console games).That worked fairly well, but CEO Dennis Fong says that it came with one big caveat: it only worked if you got your friends to sign up for a Raptr account, which was obviously a significant hurdle. Raptr’s latest release fixes this, allowing you to see if your friends are playing games on their PS3, Xbox 360, and PC (including casual Flash games, Steam and Xfire) — even if they don’t have Raptr accounts. In other words, the service is now far more useful than it used to be.

When you see that one of your buddies is online and in a game, you can send messages to them from the Raptr client regardless of which platform they’re on. For some games, you can see even more supplementary information — for example, if someone is playing Madden 2010, you can see which teams your friends are playing as. Another recently added feature is a chat overlay, which PC gamers can pull up on top of the game they’re playing without having to switch — or “alt-tab” — out of their gaming session.

Raptr does all of this with its own technology, not through APIs sanctioned by Sony, Microsoft, and the other gaming platforms. This obviously isn’t the ideal solution, but these gaming networks tend to be walled gardens and give third parties minimal access to their communication channels. Still, the fact that Raptr had to build the technology itself makes the barrier to entry that much higher for competitors (assuming the gaming companies don’t try to block Raptr).

Fong, whose past companies include Xfire and Gamers.com, says that Raptr has quietly rolled out some of the service’s biggest improvements in the last few months, and that user growth has reflected this. Overall, he says the service has “north of 1 million users” and is growing by half a million users a month. Given the second statistic it sounds like the service probably has significantly more than 1 million users, but Fong wouldn’t get any more specific.  He did give some predictions for the future, though: he hinted that a year down the line, we may see a ‘Raptr Connect’, which would allow games to tie directly into the service.

The new client is based on AIR (which means it will run on Mac and PC) and integrates support for all major chat protocols, allowing gamers to keep in touch with their friends from a single app. Raptr isn’t anywhere near the first desktop multi-protocol chat client — I’ve been using Adium for Mac for years, and Windows has programs like Trillian available, both which support protocols like AIM, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger. But what Raptr can do that the others can’t is monitor whatever game you’re currently playing, be it a full-fledged PC game like StarCraft or one of the many casual games found on Facebook and MySpace. Overall, the service can recognize over 32,000 different games, including stand-alone Flash games that you’ll find embedded on countless sites across the web. Raptr’s client also includes support for some game-specific protocols, like Xbox Live.

This information is broadcast to your friends as your current away message/status (something like “Jason is playing Counter-Strike”), which is visible to anyone using a standard IM chat client. But the service is even more powerful if your friends are also using the Raptr client, as you’ll have the ability to automatically join whatever game they’re playing with one click, with the application handling all the relevant server settings.

Interestingly, the new application means that Raptr is competing to some degree against Xfire, the company that Raptr founder Dennis Fong co-founded and later sold to Viacom. Xfire also offers a chat service for gamers, but Fong says that Xfire is geared more towards hardcore gamers, and doesn’t offer support for other IM protocols or the ability to detect browser based games, like those that might be played on Facebook.

Alongside the new chat client, Raptr is launching a ‘Game Manager’, which brings much of the service’s social network functionality to the desktop. Using the manager, you’ll be able to access your Raptr profile, view the achievements of other players, and see which games have been recommended to you based on your past preferences. There’s also a listing of all of the games installed on your desktop (you can update them directly from the Game Manager), and a library of popular Flash games that Raptr has included with the software bundle.

Raptr can expect the new products to be adopted quickly, primarily because the service is now being heavily promoted in many popular PC games. Raptr has scored some major deals with game publishers, including Activision/Blizzard, THQ, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), NHN USA, Gamescampus, and Gala-Net. These publishers are behind some of the world’s most popular video games (Blizzard is behind a little game called World of Warcraft, along with a slew of other very highly regarded titles, and SOE made the reknowned EverQuest series).

So why are publishers so eager to integrate the service? Raptr adds a viral channel to gaming that has not previously existed before — when I go to play World of Warcraft, all of my friends know that I’m playing, which may prompt them to start playing as well. And in an age when paying for and installing a PC game can be done without leaving your desk through services like Steam, the ability for a game to go viral becomes even more powerful. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and it puts Raptr in a very good position.

Raptr, the social network that revolves around gaming, has launched in public beta. The robust site allows users to keep tabs on what their friends are doing throughout the gaming world, and also offers gaming recommendations, accomplishment updates, and a host of other features.

The site is designed to appeal to casual and hardcore gamers alike. In fact, Raptr avoids using the term “gamer” entirely, instead choosing to describe itself as a “social platform for people who like to play and discover games” – founder (and former competitive gamer) Dennis Fong says that many people associate the word “gamer” with a hardcore audience, but Raptr is for everyone.

Gamer Buddy List
The feature that will likely see the most use on Raptr is its buddy list, which allows users to see what games their friends are playing across a variety of platforms. While this can already be accomplished on a number of gaming networks, including Xbox Live and Steam, there isn’t a comprehensive service that keeps track of this information across multiple networks. The site offers downloadable clients for both Mac and Windows, which will track what games are being played and update the server accordingly (users can also use a Facebook Chat-esque interface from within the browser).

If Raptr can become the de facto standard for gaming buddy lists, it will be a huge success. Though it may come as a surprise to some, one of the most important facets of modern gaming is the social aspect. Gamers often align into Clans, and will readily boot up a game whenever they see a familiar screenname pop online. Unfortunately, existing networks are proprietary and only allow users to see who’s logged on to a single network.

Phat Lootz Newsfeed
Another impressive feature on Raptr is its news feed, which allows users to keep track of their friends’ activities thoughout many of the site’s supported games. The site keeps tabs on a wide variety of data, including in-game achievements from Xbox Live and high scores from Guitar Hero. Some games (particularly those with a supported API), allow the feed to get very detailed – you could conceivably use the site to track all of your quests for loot in World of Warcraft. Others send updates with more generic messages, like “Jason Has Just Played Chess”.

Gamers can also use the site’s profile section to display a list of their achievements, including the Gamer Badges seen on the current generation of consoles. While this may seem a bit silly, many gamers are extremely enthusiastic when it comes to earning in-game trophies and awards, and will value any opportunity to display their merits to a broad audience.

http://raptr.com/thresh/raptrcard

Automatic Game Updates
When we first wrote about Raptr in February one of its biggest selling points was its ability to automatically update PC games, saving users the hassle of hunting them down themselves. Since then, the feature seems to have become less important to Raptr, in part because automatic updates only apply to native PC games, which only constitute a fraction of Raptr’s game database.

At launch the site includes support for thousands of games across platforms including the console systems, native PC games, and web-based Flash games. Unfortunately, many of these games don’t make their data accessible – Raptr has to rely on a number of different methods to keep gamers’ activity status up to date, though some developers have made this easier than others. The issue is best demonstrated by today’s consoles: Microsoft has given Raptr access to Xbox Live backend, allowing the site to efficiently monitor user progress across all games. Conversely, Sony has yet to implement an accessible API, which means Raptr can only support select games.

In the long run, we’ll likely see gaming networks become more open, as cross-platform gaming buddy lists and accessible rankings can only help the industry. Raptr is positioning itself as a central hub for these services to play nicely, which would make it immensely popular. But as a casual gaming site, it may have some issues – I have a hard time picturing a casual game player taking the time to download one of the service’s clients or fill in a profile.

Raptr’s social networking shares a number of features in common with Rupture, Napster-founder Shawn Fanning’s startup that was aquired by EA for a reported $15 million. EA apparently aquired Rupture for its technology – the site, which was originally developed as a social network for World of Warcraft players, never launched to the public.

Approximately 100 people are currently in the beta, all friends and family to the Raptr team. Today the company is taking signups for new beta users on their home page, and will be letting a couple of thousand new users in shortly. A full launch is expected in a couple of months.

As I mentioned yesterday, Raptr has two components. A Windows based software download that keeps games up to date automatically, and a website social network that pulls game data in from the client as well. The product is similar to Valve-only Steam, although it has a lot more to offer users and is developer agnostic. Today, Raptr supports 1,000 titles, including World of Warcraft – Steam has a hundred or so.

The website is a game-centric social network. Users add friends and can see what games they are playing, installing, updating, uninstalling, etc. You can also see what games your friends are playing right now.

Raptr looks at the games you play, and how much time you spend, and compares that data to other players to recommend other games to you that you might like.

More Screen shots below:

Raptr has both desktop software and web service components. The client keeps PC-based games completely up to date behind the scenes – patches, updates, etc. are downloaded automatically. This is very similar to Steam, which keeps Valve games updated – although from what we hear Raptr will support at least a thousand games from all different developers out of the gate. The website, at Raptr.com, will pull in gaming data from the Raptr client and will include a social network around friends, stats, games, groups and other content. The website will also include a news feed of what all your friends are up to.

That’s all I know about the service for now. I should have more tomorrow. The launch date is still months away. The company is also rumored to have closed, or be closing, a significant round of funding.

Dennis Fong, who’s 30, is one of the world’s top gamers. He cofounded Xfire, a freeware instant messaging service targeted at gamers, in 2003. In 2006 it was acquired by Viacom for $102 million. Fong is also an advisor to WeGame, which we covered last month.