Handling logins and invites for a social Android game

Question

I'm writing a social game for mobile devices. The overall interaction would work like an online Risk or Scrabble game (invite friends to a game, take a few turns per day, view results of friends' games).

I'm trying to decide how to handle logins, invites, and "friends".

Options:

1. Have users sign up with a username specific to my game. Invite people by username/e-mail.
2. Automatically identify users based on some the Device ID or their primary e-mail address.
3. Use an existing service like Facebook.

Option 3 automatically gets me the user's real name, a profile picture, and a list of the user's "friends". But maybe with Option 1 or 2 I could still get that information from the phone? (Eg derive friends list from the user's address book.)

Option 2 might have the lowest barrier-to-entry. Just start the game and you're already good to go (don't have to create a username or type in Facebook credentials).

(Though I'm currently writing it for Android, I might do an iPhone version and want the two versions to play well together.)

Advice?

Answer 1

IMO, unless you want to develop some niche social features, yhy not delegate the socializing part to a third-party SDK like Skiller or Score Loop. Such SDKs would automatically handle the social interaction part for your app. For example, in Skiller, all you need to do is to hook up your app with the SDK by defining a few configuration attributes and it requires simplistic changes to your app source code.