Games Outpace Movies, Music in 2007

“On average, an astonishing 9 games were sold every second of every day of the year.” — Michael D. Gallagher, CEO, Entertainment Software Association.

The gaming industry has long been bigger than the movie industry. Now its growth outpaces that of both the movie and music industries. While movies grew only 1.8% and music fell 10% in 2007, games grew a whopping 28.4%.

Soon, pretty girls won’t want to be movie or pop stars. They’ll want to be gamer babes.

Google Launches Social Graph API

Once again, Google makes Microsoft look stupid for buying Facebook stock at Zuckerberg’s ridiculous price. They just launched a social graph API that allows developers to harvest relationship data not just within social networks, but across the open Web through XFN and FOAF.

OpenSocial for widgets, and now Social Graph for relationships: Google is building a suite of APIs to blow social networking out of information silos and wide open across the Web. As demonstrated by Facebook banning Scoble for harvesting his own social graph, that openness is Zuckerberg’s worst nightmare.