Cubeduel Launches Social Game on… LinkedIn?

If you haven’t yet played around with Cubeduel, do it now.  It won’t make you any smarter, but it’s an oddly entertaining way to browse through your coworkers from years gone by in a hilarious, cage match format.

Cubeduel is an unexpected opportunity to evaluate head to head match-ups that you just wouldn’t see in the wild.  Who would I rather have worked with in that telecom job I had ten years ago: Ramu from accounting, or Nathalie from sales?  Predictably, I had never really thought about that question before.  Fun!

Evaluate a certain number of duels and you get to see your own score, as well as those of your co-workers.  All votes are anonymous, so participation, in theory, shouldn’t get you fired.

But what I find most fascinating about Cubeduel is that it was built on the LinkedIn API.  Yes, this is a social game built around your work network.  I can’t recall seeing something like this before, at least not built on LinkedIn.

So will Cubeduel usher in the gamification of the workplace?  Will a stealthy Farmville for the Enterprise startup announce $11.5M in new funding [God help us all] ?  After all, who has more free time and a faster internet connection than somebody in an office?

At this point, we don’t know.

But let this be a gentle reminder to all of us entrepreneurs.

Innovation can come in all shapes and sizes.  It might be the introduction of a new behavior, like Foursquare. It might be the simplification of an existing behavior, like Instagram.  It might be the gravitas of the participants themselves, like Quora.  It might lie in the distribution channel, like Yammer.  Or it might even be the network of people that your app runs on, like Cubeduel.

Food for thought.