We all like games.  And some of us (I won’t name names) like cute, avatar-riddled games, with custom virtual environments and other nonesense only a gamer could apprciate.  But where would we gamers be without a powerful cloud infrastructure to replicate virtual goods, deliver them on-demand and provide multiple points of access to our favorite games?

Cloud optimization services provider, Akamai gives us some insight to that world, helping us to contextualize the cloud from the casual gaming perspective.  Akamai’s Rich Media Accelerator services are used by WeeWorld, a global social game, now enjoying faster page loads with a 30% improvement rate.

Weeworld.com is an avatar and social game based in the United States, but it services teens all over the globe. The website is a place to customize avatars, socialize, play games and chat. It currently has 40 million users that express themselves by customizing their accounts through WeeWorld’s large quantities of rich, interactive and dynamic content, including animations, videos, and graphics.  But, the richer the content, the slower the page, eventually putting the website into the perils of being a passing trend as users demand for faster applications performance. This is where Akamai enters the picture, tagging a solution for highly dynamic and interactive websites.

“We wanted to increase the speed of our page load times globally,” said Lauren Bigelow, WeeWorld Chief Operating Officer. “We needed a solution that could allow us to accelerate the dynamic, interactive elements of our rich media assets and the core web pages themselves, improving the overall user experience across the globe.”

An increase of 8-15 percent in page load is seen in the United States, 20 percent on a global average and more notably, 30 percent in several other regions such as Europe. This has caused a 10% increased in session times as well.

“The Akamai approach made sense. We knew we had to get our content closer to users to achieve the desired improvements in speed and consistency, especially given the large amount of dynamically-generated content we deliver. Akamai has also proved cost-effective, giving us the best of both worlds when coupled with the performance improvements we have seen,” Bigelow added.

A virtual world similar to Weeworld, Meez, is prepping a mobile launch as well. This is another example of how the cloud is enabling access to social gaming, even on mobile phones. Another popular social game developer on the cloud, Zynga, is the maker of FarmVille & other FB-popular games, and in order to scale (grow up & out to millions of FB users), it needs a strong cloud system behind it and that’s where Puppet Labs, a leading open source in data automation, comes in.

Also quite recently, Akamai released a State of the Internet Report tackling internet speed statistics, and was also able to offer an interesting look into the Egypt internet blockage, which reflects the turmoil going on in a nation currently at unrest.