Casual games companies are getting serious about where they find their next growth driver, and it’s no surprise they see the boost coming from the introduction of social networking features.

Real Networks agreed to acquire Game Trust this week, a company that allows casual games sites to add customisable communities for players.

Its current customers include Miniclip and Slingo, but Game Trust will now provide community to Real’s sites and those of its syndication partners.

Real says 20m monthly RealArcade players as well as those in 200 casual games channels owned by its partners, will be able to connect to one another by early next year.

“Social networking will be a catalyst for the next wave of casual games growth,” predicted James Kuai, a research analyst with Parks Associates.

The developer PlayFirst announced this week that its biggest hit, Diner Dash, would include personalisation and social networking in its latest version – Diner Dash Hometown Hero.

Players will be able customize their waiters and diners and share their designs with others. It also borrows from virtual worlds in allowing players to buy extra items for their restaurant world from prices starting at 49 cents.

“The casual games market is growing nicely, but sticking with standalone games at the current $20-per-game business model isn’t giving casual gamers enough of what they want,” said John Welch, PlayFirst chief executive.

“With the launch of Diner Dash: Hometown Hero, we debut personalisation and sharing features found in social networks and virtual worlds, but with a ‘casual’ approach.”

It seems online casual gamers are more inclined towards social networking than most.

Nielsen/NetRatings reported recently they were 30 per cent more likely to participate in bulletin boards and 75 per cent more likely to visit a chat room than internet users overall.

Some very big bets are being placed on finding the next online media conglomerates. One thing these companies have in common: they don’t spend too much money on content, but have models designed to aggregate large audiences on the Web.

Glam Media, which claims to have the largest reach of any Website aimed at women, is understood to be looking to raise $250m from private investors. Glam likes to think of itself as a US-style TV network for the Web. It creates a small amount of content, a brand and advertising: other websites with relevant content that want to sign on to the network have to commit to an exclusive relationship, making them the equivalent of the "owned and operated" stations of the TV networks (though Glam doesn’t go actually buy them outright.) This aggregated audience has now reached 25m unique visitors.

Glam took its latest step this week with a distributed media platform that lets it place widgets containing its search box and ads on partner sites. The company won’t comment on the capital raising plans, but it is understood to be shooting for revenues of more than $100m next year.

Meanwhile, Demand Media has just raised another $100m, reportedly valuing it at $1bn. As we reported back in April, this is another content-lite media company. Former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt has built broad internet reach by buying up a portfolio of domain names: many of those sites do nothing except carry ads from Google. Turning this into a "real" media business, with the brands and content that create real user "stickiness" without breaking the bank, will be Rosenblatt’s next challenge.

Both of these companies have decided to stay in the private markets for their next leg of growth. If all goes to plan, expect them to make waves in the public stock market by the second half of next year.

As energy drink-addled Master Chief wannabes emerge from their caffeine haze having conquered Halo 3, they are sure to begin exploring the game’s interesting user-generated features.

The most interesting of these is Forge, a map editor that lets Halo players roam around the game’s multi-player battlefields dropping weapons, vehicles and other materiel around the map. Players can then save their custom-built maps, invite friends and even upload them to the web site of Bungie, Halo 3’s developer, where they can be shared and commented on by the entire Halo 3 community.

But Forge is not the only interactive, user-generated feature in Halo 3. The game’s multiplayer mode features a ‘flim’ option that allows players to record their most impressive kills and other highlights. Videos of a gamer’s last 25 sessions can be edited down to just the highlights, then tweaked to show the action from different camera angles. Saved films can be uploaded to share with other players.

Overall, it’s an impressive suite of interactive features, one that Halo 3 players are likely to enjoy long after they crack the game’s main single-player campaign. Such interactive features are bound to become more common in video games for the Xbox 360, as Microsoft attempts to drive more users to its Xbox Live online service.

One of the consequences of the evolution of the web from a text-heavy to an increasingly video centric medium is that search tools also need to evolve.

UK-based Blinkx and AOL’s Truveo unit led the way with video search tools that enable users to track down and watch video clips by entering search key words in a browser window.

Clipblast takes video search one step further by making it possible to search and watch video through a widget without having to launch a browser or visit a particular web site. As Demo presenter Chris Shipley noted, delivering online content directly to users bypassing the standard browser is an emerging trend worth watching.

Clipblast’s founders claim the service has the largest web video index and that its web video crawler identifies and indexes most new video uploads within minutes. The privately funded company hopes to tap into the growing demand for video search advertising revenues - a market expected to reach $3bn by 2010.

The "wisdom of crowds" motif has become a tired cliche in online circles in recent years. With the latest in low-cost interactive Web technologies, though, there finally seems to be a real wave of experimentation underway in how to harness the knowledge of the masses.

The range of that experimentation is intriguing. Two of the companies presenting at the Demo conference - a showcase that tries to filter out the best tech start-ups, though the "winners" of this contest still have to pay $18,000 to show up - represent the extremes.

Paul Pluschkell, founder of Spigit, spent much of his career on Wall Street, and it shows. He has devised a full-fledged stock market-like game for exposing and rating new ideas. The notional currency of this system is the spigit - players start out with 25,000 each and "invest" their money in what they think are the best ideas in the market.

It looks dauntingly complex. Ideas have to clear a number of hurdles - among other things, they have to generate buzz, attract a certain number of pageviews, and find approval with people designated in the system as experts - before they even make it as fully-fledged "companies" to be traded on Spigit’s secondary market of ideas.

Yet Pluschkell has some impressive early users. SAP is trialling the system as a way to surface good ideas among its workers. It already has an internal social network, but clearly this doesn’t have the built-in incentives needed to get people to play. Another new "prediction market" on display at Demo is Fluid Innovation, which asks users to guess at the value of new software products (it’s aimed at companies looking to license out software they developed for internal use.) This may sound like a job for experts, but thanks to the wisdom of crowds it should only take a couple of hundred semi-informed guesses to yield a useful answer, claims Andrew Allemann, the company’s president.

At the other extreme is Ami Kassar, chief innovation officer of credit card company Advanta. He was looking bleary-eyed this morning after spending much of the night watching how his new baby, Ideablob, fared on its first day in the wild. A system for people who have a vague idea for starting a new business but don’t know what to do next, Ideablob is as amorphous as the name suggets. Users enter a one-paragraph description of their idea, then let it loose for others to comment and vote on.

So what’s changed since the days when chat rooms ruled the Web? According to Kassar, it doesn’t take much to turn the random postings of the many into a more useful and directed conversation. Just apply the better user interfaces of Web 2.0 and a simple rating system, he says, and users respond.

Another new start-up applying that approach is Attendi. This is dressed up as a search engine: enter a term and it returns a list of people who have had conversations on the system about that subject (Attendi is built on Jabber, the open-source messaging technology.) Users get to vote on each other, creating "experts" who rise to the top of the search results on each subject. Attendi also shows presence: if you have a question, it aims to link you in a live chat with someone else on the system. That conversation is indexed for future use, and can be viewed by anyone on the system.

Complex or simple, these new experiments all rely on one thing: a willingness on the part of the masses to tell the world at large what they think on a whole range of subjects. How powerful is this urge? Who knows. But at least better tools are starting to appear to find out.

Q: Where can you find 1m screens, at the heart of a multi-billion-dollar industry, that are just waiting to be connected to the internet?

A: Las Vegas, Atlantic City and anywhere else that players of the slots congregate.

WMS (a public company founded more than half a century ago by Harry Williams, whose main claim to fame was inventing the "tilt" mechanism in pinball machines) showed off an intriguing hybrid slot machine today that could bring social networking to the one-armed bandit.

The trick will lie in marrying two completely different experiences. Devotees of the slots have an innate suspicion of digital technology: they prefer to trust a purely mechanical system that pits man against machine. WMS’s idea is to overlay another, transparent screen on top of the slots window that adds a layer of 3D graphics and interactivity to the experience, without actually replacing it.

Using this, WMS is working on ideas for creating multiplayer games, or identifying individual players so that casinos can pitch offers directly to them. Can a Facebook for like-minded arm-crankers be far behind?

It is always good to kick off a conference - particularly a tech startup beauty show like Demo - with a splash. That is just what DemoFall’s longtime organiser, Chris Shipley, did with Digital Fountain, the kick off demonstrator at today’s event in San Diego.

Digital Fountain, a privately funded Fremont-based digital video infrastructure startup, showed off itsDF Splash technology which cleans up "lossy" IP-delivered video guaranteeing near broadcast quality video even when a sizable number of packets are dropped.

Digital Fountain demonstrated the technology’s rather impressive performance by deliberately dropping one tenth of one percent of the packets in a video stream, then half of one per cent and finally cranked the packets lost up to 20 per cent. Even with one fifth of the packets dropped, the video looked smooth and the accompanying audio was clean - pretty impressive.

In theory the technology could remove the need for Akamai-style edge video servers enabling companies to host video content wherever it is cheapest and makes most sense. Digital Fountain is actually using Amazon Web Services on a pay-as-you go basis so the technology could be rather disruptive for established players like Akamai and Limelight Networks that have invested fortunes in hardware-heavy content delivery networks.

It’s good to see that there are still some internet visionaries out there with really big, outlandish ambitions.

The Demo, which has just started in San Diego, looks like being a great showcase for a wide range of practical businesses being built on today’s internet technologies: online video delivery networks, "wisdom of crowds" marketing systems, workplace social networks, mobile search engines.

Fair enough: these are all technologies that will no doubt support blockbuster new businesses. Some of those company may even be here. But where are the out-sized ideas that will really change the world, to borrow a line from Google’s founders?

Maybe Earthmine will provide the answer. John Ristevski and Anthony Fassero, two graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley, say they are out to "index reality". Their ambition puts even Google Earth in the shade: they want to create an online replica of just about everything. With exact representations of the world, they reckon they will be able to revolutionise things like urban planning. Do they have a chance? Who knows, but you have to admire their chutzpa.

My colleague Paul Taylor and I will be rooting around at DEMO for the next couple of days looking for the next ideas that have a chance of making a difference, both big and small.

Before the internet came along, I once had a vague interest in orienteering – a sport requiring a map, compass, running gear and a whistle - in case you got lost in the woods.

The advent of the web and GPS devices has made all that seem out of date. In 2000, the US removed selective availability from its GPS system, allowing locations to be nailed down to within three metres and leading to the growth of geocaching as a sport and worldwide treasure hunt.

The latest handheld gear available to enthusiasts and walkers turns it all into a social networking tool.

Magellan’s top-of-the-range GPS mapping device, the Triton 2000, combines a colour touch-screen, a compass, barometer, flashlight, microphone, MP3 player and digital camera.

A related website and VantagePoint PC software allow users to draw routes on detailed maps and upload them to the device. Magellan has partnered with National Geographic in the US but is struggling to get access to Ordnance Survey maps in the UK.

The software also allows the sharing of data - users can play back a walk to friends including photos and audio files embedded in the map.

User-created maps are part of a democratisation of cartography, from Google Earth’s tools to free map-drawing software from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Users are also being given access to the latest satellite imagery in a way that could change the nature of search and rescue operations. Google Earth was used this month to comb Nevada  for signs of the plane of missing aviator Steve Fossett and users were each assigned images of small parts of the search area through Amazon’s mechanical turk.

The merry-go-round of big internet companies looking to buy a piece of Facebook is taking another turn, with Microsoft coming into view again - a Wall Street Journal report says it is seeking to invest up to $500m in the social networking site.

Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are all understood to have flirted with Facebook in the past year or so, but it has remained resolutely independent, and there is every chance its founder Mark Zuckerberg would rebuff Microsoft again.

However, there are increasing signs that Facebook’s competitors are seeking to loosen its grip on developers of social networking applications. Thousands of widgets such as iLike have been created as Facebook add-ins, for the millions of users that have been drawn to the platform.

According to Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington, Google is planning to come up with a major alternative. He says Google will announce a new set of hooks or APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to exploit the social connections of users of Google services such as the Orkut social network, Gmail and Google Talk.

Other reports say personal Google Calendars and RSS feeds from Google Reader could be tied into “activity streams” – similar to Facebook’s news feed – in a project codenamed Maka-Maka.

This could raise fresh privacy concerns, but it is more likely to be welcomed if, as Arrington states, it creates a more open system of sharing the “social graph” – the mapping of internet users and how they are related to one another.

At the moment, different social networks and applications cannot leverage one another easily to provide more useful data to their users.

Brad Fitzpatrick, formerly of the blogging company Six Apart and now with Google, blogged last month about how there was “a lot of hesitation in the developer/Web 2.0 community about being slaves to Facebook” (see Marc Canter’s open letter to Mr Zuckerberg last week).

OpenID, a common login now adopted by more than 5,000 sites, is one way forward and Mr Fitzpatrick says the goal should be to make the social graph a community asset with the help of open source software.

Back at Six Apart, the company announced last week it would be releasing code and demos soon showing how people will be able to find their friends across multiple social networks and make their data portable rather than locked into a particular site such as Facebook.

While Six Apart has been the most vocal and innovative company in pushing for Web 2.0 open standards, adding Google as a friend could have a major influence on their adoption.