The 2008 Social Gaming Summit is going to be Friday June 13th in San Francisco and if you have any desire to make your web service more engaging, then be there. Game mechanics are proving to be beneficiary in even the most serious services. In a year or two events like this will draw thousands so get in on it while you can still talk one-on-one with people on the ground floor and hear it from them years before it all becomes textbook knowledge.

A snippet from the program:

There are a lot of interesting asynchronous activities happening on social networks. Some of them are traditional games, others are games in disguise. Join us and hear from some of the leading voices in this space share their views on how to build great gameplay characteristics into social networking applications and what opportunities exist for gameplay to take advantage of the social graph.

The speaker list is a who’s who of the industry and the panels should be superb. I’ll be the starstruck one on my panel as I’ll be aside the leaders of Gaia Online, Habbo Hotel, and IMVU. I’ll be rounding out the conversation and sharing how the in-site games created, run and promoted by our members for other members are critical pieces to our passionate usage and engagement. Furthermore I’ll show how with very little effort it can happen in almost any sized community if nurtured properly.