Keeping up with social games like Farmville and Social City can be difficult if you have a life.  These appointment-type games require you to plan how long you will be away from the game for.  If you miscalculate, your crop or factory may expire and you lose the progress you’ve made.  Fortunately you are given a number of different timed products that range from a few minutes to a few days.  If you know you won’t be able to play until you get home from work, you can schedule a crop or the factory to be ready in nine or ten hours.

Social City recently released an iPhone app that extends the game on Facebook to your phone.  After linking the two using your Facebook credentials, you can manage your factories and residences on either platform.  Throughout the day when you’re on the go you can receive a notification the factory contract is complete and you can quickly clean and start a new contract.  There’s no need to bring your laptop along and provides a minimal distraction.

Currently the app is limited to collecting new residents and starting new factory contracts.  But if you’re looking to get more resources, like money or population, this is a great option.  The iPhone doesn’t support Flash which most of these games use.  Using your phone to play these games is nearly impossible.

While Mafia Wars has been on both the iPhone and Facebook for some time, there is no link between the two platforms.  This makes advancing difficult across platforms as you’re playing two different games that have no connection to each other.

As a developer, this dual platform is both easy and difficult.  Because the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, the game has to be recoded into Objective-C.  It also has to be reformatted to fit within the screen resolution and style of the iPhone that users have come to expect.  It can be easy since most games call a web service that can be used by both platforms at the same time.  This allows sharing some resources across the different platforms.

Hopefully we will soon see more of these cross-platform games that allow players to play for even longer.