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Raptr is unveiling the public beta test of its social network for all kinds of video game players. While it’s a crowded market, the company has a good chance of becoming a central hub for gamers who want to know what their friends are playing online, regardless of game type.

The Raptr social network will be able to access gamer data from a variety of sources. That includes PC games, Mac games, Xbox Live member accounts, casual games based on Adobe’s Flash technology, Facebook and certain games for the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3. (The latter two just don’t have as much gamer data available.)

“Our goal is to eliminate the need for gamers to monitor isolated islands,” said Dennis Fong, founder and chief executive of Raptr.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is also announcing today it has raised $12 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and the Founders Fund.

Fong, a serial game company entrepreneur and one-time champion professional gamer known as Thresh, said that the company learned a lot from its 1,000-member private beta since February. The company added a number of new features. The version launching today can extract data about a gamer to build a kind of 360 degree view of the their habits. When you click on the Friends tab on the Raptr site, you can see at a glance the game and the platform your friends are playing and whether they’re logged in or not.

It can, for instance, tell you what games your friends are playing. It can share achievements from games — such as achievements rewarded for completing levels in an Xbox 360 game. It can help you discover new games you might like by telling you which game your friends are playing the most.

The Raptr service also updates games automatically so that users don’t have to worry about downloading bug fixes. And it allows a player to display all of his or her gaming identities in a single place. All of this, of course, depends on everyone opting in to volunteer the private data.

It remains to be seen if Raptr’s cross-platform approach will be better for gamers. Its competition includes many single-platform social networks, such as Xbox Live on the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation Network on the PlayStation 3. Other rivals include Xfire (a company that Fong founded) on the PC, Gamestrata, GamerDNA, WePlayThis, UGame, and MyGameMug. On top of that, Electronic Arts recently bought the similarly-named gamer social network Rupture, started by Napster founder Shawn Fanning.

Fong believes that the key will be to get Raptr adopted rapidly. While he was at Xfire, Fong and his team accomplished that task by cutting lots of distribution deals that allowed the Xfire service to be bundled with the hottest games. Viacom’s MTV bought Xfire for $110 million.

The company also has an alpha version of its Mac client software. So far, Raptr supports thousands of games, including 2,000 Flash games. Among the most interesting features: Raptr lets you see how popular a game is among your network of friends. You can see how often the game is played over a period of time. On top of that, you can see when your friends are most likely to be playing.

The company has also rounded out its management team, hiring Ranah Edelin as vice president of marketing and business development. He previously worked at Electronic Arts, where he managed all of the online businesses for The Sims label, one of EA’s four big divisions. Raptr also hired Dave Swenson as vice president of engineering. He spent seven years as a senior director leading various product development groups at eBay.

Me, I’m going to start a gamer social network called Rapture.

Two startups visited by the vowel thief, Raptr and Rmbr, showed themselves off for the first time today at the Game Developer’s Conference Startup Launchpad. In all, five companies presented, but we’ve already covered or mentioned three: iminlikewithyou, Live Gamer and TwoFish (coverage here, here and here).

Here’s the executive summary: Raptr is both an application and a website. The app is a utility for gamers that keeps all their games up to date and downloads new content they’d be interested in. The site tracks personal statistics, aggregates info and files, and maintains a community. Rmbr is a photo sharing website that incorporates games and social networking to make people more interested in their own and others’ photos. Below are longer explanations of both sites.

Raptr
Raptr is another startup by Dennis “Thresh” Fong, a championship-winning gamer who also co-founded and sold Xfire to MTV Networks for $110 million. Those are serious credentials in the gaming world, but when Fong started his presentation, I started to worry that he’d lost his mojo.

The application Fong has created is a utility that must be downloaded and installed onto user’s computers. What it does is index all the games a user has on a computer and keep them updated — a serious pain point for dedicated gamers, Fong said. It’s essentially a sort of Windows Live Update for the game-obsessed. If that were the entire thing, it wouldn’t make for much of a business.

However, while it’s running, Raptr also keeps track of user statistics: Which games they play, how often, for how long, and so forth. That data is sent to the website, Raptr.com, where it’s collected onto an automatically-created profile. The company can also keep track of statistics for Xbox Live players.

Like another company we recently covered, Gamestrata, this one can uses the data it collects both for the player and for their friends (although it appears to gather less info than Gamestrata does). Users can thus keep track of what their friends are playing most often, and what they’re playing right at that moment.

The website goes a step further, setting up recommendations for downloadable game mods and maps, and even automatically downloading demos of new games overnight. Fong said he plans on monetizing with advertising and sponsorships.

Rmbr
I did a brief audio interview with Gabe Zichermann, the founder of Rmbr, a couple days ago. Zichermann was one of the first marketing chiefs of the GDC, and helped sell Trymedia to Macrovision in 2005. However, this is the first time he’s publicly showed off his new company.

Zichermann’s complaint is that online photo sharing utilities like Flickr and Photobucket aren’t fun enough for casual users — only people who are real aficionados tend to use them on a regular basis. His idea is both to make dealing with photos more fun, and automate more of the process of keeping a collection up to date.

To start with, users are rewarded for basic actions, like logging in or interacting with a friend (this is also true of iminlikewithyou). The point system is throughout Rmbr, and helps users feel continually engaged.

Once photos are uploaded (the site can also sync with other sites to automatically acquire content), the highlight is on simple games that also serve the purpose of tagging and categorizing photos.

For example, there’s a Photo Challenge in which users are shown photos and asked to guess what their friends said about those same photos. Between this and the comments that friends leave on photos, the system can automatically determine tags that can be attached.

Zichermann also showed off another game — a takeoff on Memory, in which players are presented with several rows of face-down cards. They have to flip the cards over to see what’s on the face, and match pairs of identical photos to win.

Perhaps most interesting was a Facebook application Zichermann said he’d release soon. The app simply makes a place on a user’s Facebook profile where a daily, random photo is displayed. Friends are allowed to vote on the photos, and their votes are reflected back on Rmbr, where the photos are organized according to their rank.

The site is still in private testing mode (as is Raptr), so we can’t show off anything more specific. Zichermann did make one more interesting comment, that he plans to make money with virtual item sales. It sounds unlikely, but as panelist Susan Wu noted, none of the biggest photo sharing sites have been well monetized or sold at particularly high valuations. Virtual items might just be the way to go.