"Moshi Monsters is a virtual pet and social networking game which has captured the minds - and pocket money - of children around the world. BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones profiles the company's founder, Michael Acton Smith."

A good profile. Britain turns out to be quite good at big networks like this - don't forget that we did Friends Reunited and Bebo first too.

"Google passes the test so far. It can essentially duplicate Facebook’s platform for games and bring over a lot of games that already exist elsewhere. The next test is to see how many games it can get and how the performance works when the games scale to millions of players. Facebook may not be that worried about Google for now, but it definitely has to watch its back because its platform is not so hard to clone."

How Google+ hopes to beat Facebook: undercutting it. "For the launch of its Google+ social games platform, Google has found one way to differentiate itself from Facebook. For in-game transactions, Google is only going to be charging a 5 percent commission to game developers instead of the 30 percent that Facebook charges."

"Today we’re adding games to Google+. With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life."

"...we’ve been surprised by the optimism among companies we’re talking to, and they’re not just having wishful thoughts. The specific reasons: Google+ is a respectable product, it’s grown quickly, there are clear social communication channels like Streams where developers could promote discovery and engagement, and the transaction fee is likely to be quite low."