A company called Scoreloop today announced a service called "Scoreloop Community", consisting of two different functions: a web presence, and a downloadable application for the iPhone that hooks right into other developers' games and applications and allows players to create avatar, view their friends and their activities, and share the challenges and high scores with others. Just as OpenFeint, Scoreloop says they're offering an easy to implement solution for push notifications, allowing players to send and receive messages (as well as promote and encourage the use of games in the service) and the results and earn coins.

Of course, the true test for the services of this type will be in the implementation - while OpenFeint maintains a nice stable of developers, we have not seen too many applications to exploit the latest and greatest versions (Pocket God is extremely popular app that has OpenFeint implemented, but use an old version of software that does not have nearly as many features as the most recent). Scoreloop says that we have over 50 games commitments from third-party developers already (which sounds like Zombie Pub Crawl is the biggest title yet), but even then, it remains to be seen exactly as developers to implement their functionality, and how the players take to the service.

If you are a developer of research to implement the push notifications and the social and networking in your application, it seems that there is no shortage of companies willing to step and help you do exactly that (you can download the 'SDK for free, if interested in Scoreloop the site.) But in terms of how consumers view and use of these networks, it is still a wide open field.