A lot can happen in 10 weeks if developers are on the ball.  That is the case with OpenFeint.  Back in mid December, I did a review of this gaming social networking platform.  If you are not familiar with OpenFeint, I would recommend reading that rather lengthy review first and coming back here.

The reason why a re-visit is warranted for this product is two-fold.  First, they have come out with their own stand-alone app, and second, the OpenFeint team have made a lot of back-end improvements.  And, unlike other apps that produce an update, this has a ripple effect across every game out there that uses OpenFeint and utilizes it to its fullest.

OpenFeint is much more than just a platform that allows for leader boards and high scores.  In fact, with the recent updates, it has addressed just about every suggestion that I made in my initial review.  With the 2.4 release of OpenFeint, they have added location support, notification if a friend is online, a really cool ability (if the game allows) to save your game progress in the cloud and pull it down and play it on a different unit, and the really cool stand-alone app has a nice interface to a free game of the day.

A lot of the free games are worth what you pay for them, but sometimes you find a real jewel.  And, since both the OpenFeint app is free and the daily game is free (for the day), there isn’t much risk in checking it out.  And, since you can browse the catalog of OpenFeint games and see featured one, ones your friends are playing, recommendations, and a random selection from the thousand plus that are available, it makes for a nice distraction to occasionally see what is available.

The bottom line is that OpenFeint adds a lot to the games that implement it.  If you have never set it up or checked it out, I suggest you do so.  To not use it is to really miss a whole new dimension of the games that implement it well.