Facebook Groups and new privacy dashboard will change how you game

Mark Zuckerberg
At a press conference held at Facebook headquarters--in a cafeteria, oddly enough--in Palo Alto, Calif., company CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a few of his team managers presented some groundbreaking changes to the platform: redesigned Facebook Groups and application privacy settings. While no mention was made at the event of how these changes would affect us gamers, the big Z just made it a lot easier for us to both collaborate and keep safe while we play.

See the changes and what they might mean to you after the break.

Groups Beat Clans
Facebook GroupsMost likely the biggest change to the platform since Places for smartphones, Facebook Groups allows users to create groups for any occasion (it's all in the name) that are private by default. What's more interesting is that these groups look a lot like your standard Facebook wall with most of the normal features included like photos, news feeds and most importantly, chat. For the first time, people can chat with multiple users at once, but only when in a Group.

When it comes to games, Groups is going to make collaboration that much easier. No more chatting within different programs or creating silly pages for your new FarmVille Crafting Co-Ops or Cafe World Catering Orders. This can all happen within a group tailored specifically to that game or even that task. Want to make sure your catering crew is cooking the right stuff for the 1 Year Anniversary Party? Just make a Group in a separate Facebook browser tab and chat live with your friends about who's baking what. Finishing timed missions in Mafia Wars like the new Social Missions will be a cinch now that you can collaborate live within a Facebook Group. And to think that players used forums before.

Stop Sending Me E-mails!
Ever signed up for e-mail updates from a Facebook game to get that sweet bonus only to find to your inbox filled to the brim within days from notifications of how many friends want to chop your trees down? You can now change how each of your applications, including games, accesses your account with the revamped "Applications and Websites" page in your account privacy settings. Say you want to know the last time a game accessed your information and decide that you don't it to post to your wall at all. This is where you can find that detailed information and shut out the game from doing so.

Facebook Applications
Now that Facebook gamers can tweak how games access their information, perhaps more players will be open to sharing their progress than before. I can't imagine how many gamers hit the "Skip" button constantly while they play to avoid sharing their information.

All things considered, these changes could shrink social gaming communities down to small groups of friends and family from the legions of social gaming communities who in most cases know nothing about one another. What will make or break this change for me is whether developers give players the option to publish their accomplishments and requests to Groups rather than News Feeds. Whether that cheapens or strengthens the primary function of social games is up for debate, but if I'm going to create a group with my close friends for a specific game, I want to be in the know. Regardless of what side you take, taking on the more daunting, hardcore tasks with your friends just got a helluva lot easier.

Could Zynga really double its paying fans? CrowdStar's CEO thinks so

Sure, it's shattered every other record out there, so why the hell not? It Girl maker CrowdStar's CEO and OpenFeint chairman (busy guy) Peter Relan agrees when asked whether CityVille creator Zynga could truly double its paying base of players. If you remember from last week, company CEO Mark Pincus made the bold claim during a presentation to investors in Boston.

According to Relan, this could happen one of two ways: Either Zynga simply grows to engross 300 million unique monthly players (the number of Facebookers is slowly nearing 1 billion globally), or somehow get more like 4 to 5 percent of its existing players to start paying up. Even with the norm for paying players being 2 to 3 percent, this would be quite the challenge for the company, which is poised for its initial public offering this week.

"Could 30 percent [of Facebook users] play Zynga games over time? Yeah," Relan confidently replies. "That doesn't seem like a 60-70 percent number, right? I think [the latter] one is trickier, and not so easy. But I think that the definition of paying will change. I think advertising may become a bigger portion of their revenue, because often times when you have scale--people are not pulling out their credit cards--you can stick ads in front of them and they become monetized users in that way."

As for whether Zynga's current valuation of $6 to $9 billion is crazy, the CrowdStar chief's opinion seems to have changed since Zynga first revealed it would go public. "I think the $20 billion one was a little suspect," Relan admits. So, if it's really in that range [between $6 and $9 billion], I don't think it's totally out of whack. The fact of the matter is that they are the dominant--by far--player in the US social gaming market. And that's a position, as long as Facebook's alive, unlikely to be challenged."

However, Relan spoke to the famed Facebook game maker's internal culture. "[Zynga] has got a 'take no prisoners' style, and that works very well as long as the performance is there." We'll see whether the performance is there this weekend, no doubt.

Will Zynga raise $1.15 billion when/if it goes public this week? For how long can the social games giant keep this up, and could it really grip 30 percent of Facebook users worldwide?

Keep the little ones off of Facebook: MokoFarm is FarmVille for kids

MokoFarm
You love them to tears, but your kids want shut the heck up about FarmVille. And what (good) parent wants their toddler on Facebook? MokoMomo Interactive has released MokoFarm for the iPad for $1.99 on the App Store. This game is said to give kids the FarmVille experience and might teach them a thing or two in the process. And near everything in the game is touchable.

And we all know your kids like to touch things--you put those plastic things on the outlets around the house for a reason. MokoFarm doesn't look like it's limited by the boundaries of normal social games like energy or lengthy time constraints. However, kids can also share their farm creations through their parents' Facebook accounts. According to MokoMomo, the game is narrated to help the younger folks learn new words.


Of course, the common FarmVille-like tropes are all present like buying animals, crops and new buildings to deck out the farm. That said, nearly every piece of content, including the animals, appear to be interactive. Kids can tap the windmills to make them spin, touch trees to shake their leaves and tap critters to make them run. Your tike can even take pictures of his/her farm to send to you. Sure, it's no FarmVille, but for what it's worth it looks pretty darn close.

Click here to download MokoFarm on iPad Now >

[Via E27]

Does your kid(s) bug you about playing FarmVille? Do you wish Facebook games were more kid-friendly?

Facebook's Zuckerberg 'pretty sure' company won't make social games

Riiight. We're onto you, Mark. Jokes (momentarily) aside, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) and COO Sheryl Sandberg told journalist Charlie Rose during a PBS interview that aired Monday night that Facebook will not build its own social games, Business Insider reports. However, it's interesting to note that the Big Z is the one who led the conversation into games, and continues to praise them.

"One thing that we haven't talked about at all here are games, right," Zuckerberg told Rose. "I mean, games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga."

Despite his deep enthusiasm for social games, the Facebook chief said, "No, I'm pretty sure we're not going to build any games." That is, after Rose repeatedly interrupted the guy ... jeez. Zuckerberg went on to elaborate that Facebook is better off focusing its resources on creating a single ecosystem for smaller products, like games, music streaming services and more.

The guy kind of has a point. For Facebook to start its own game studio, it would draw focus away from the company's core product: a social network and platform. Here's a piece of the transcribed interview in which Rose appears to interrupt Zuckerberg, like, a lot:

    Mark Zuckerberg: One thing that we haven't talked about at all here are games, right. I mean, games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

    Charlie Rose: Yeah, well –

    Mark Zuckerberg: – which are going public soon and will be valued at most likely at multibillion dollar valuations. And basically all of their games are built on top of Facebook for the most part.

    Charlie Rose: Exactly.

    Mark Zuckerberg: And a huge number of other companies as well. So I mean, does Facebook build any games? No. We build no games.

    Charlie Rose: You say that today –

    Mark Zuckerberg: No, we –

    Charlie Rose: You say that today.

    Mark Zuckerberg: Actually –

    Sheryl Sandberg: I'm pretty sure we're not going to –

    Mark Zuckerberg: No, I'm pretty sure we're not going to build any games.

    Sheryl Sandberg: [unintelligible] we're not going to build games.

    Mark Zuckerberg: We build –

    Charlie Rose: Well, why are you so sure?

    Mark Zuckerberg: Here's why. Here's why.

    Charlie Rose: I'm only saying this because people thought that Steve Jobs –

    Mark Zuckerberg: I'll tell you why.

    Charlie Rose: – would never go into retail, and he did.

    Mark Zuckerberg: I'll tell you why.

    Charlie Rose: All right.

    Mark Zuckerberg: Because building games is really hard. And so that's –

    Charlie Rose: So that's the only reason.

    Mark Zuckerberg: And we're doing - what we're doing is really hard. And we think that we're better off focusing on this piece. I think that building a great game service is really hard. Building a great music service is really hard. Building a great movie service is really hard. And we just believe that an independent entrepreneur will always beat a division of a big company which is why we think that the strategy of these other companies trying to do everything themselves will inevitably be less successful than an ecosystem where you have someone like Facebook trying to build the core product to help people connect and then independent great companies that are only focused on one or two things doing those things really well.

    Sheryl Sandberg: And those companies can't - don't have the discipline to do it, right. They get big, and everyone wants to do everything, and they just say yes. And then they don't do everything well.

[Image Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu]

Do you think Facebook is smart for avoiding the social games space itself, and simply creating a platform for them? How has Facebook done in that regard so far?

Disney-branded Facebook games coming in 2012, Playdom head says

Can we all just say, “finally?” During a panel named “The Rise of Social Games” at the f8 Facebook Developers Conference in San Francisco, Disney Interactive and Playdom head John Pleasants revealed that two to four Facebook games surrounding Disney xd brands will hit Facebook in 2012. The general topic of the panel was the fact that branded social games are taking off.

Pleasants was joined on the panel by Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, EA Interactive head Barry Cottle and Zynga CBO Owen Van Natta. Facebook director of games partnerships Sean Ryan moderated the panel with the preface that branded games will take over the Facebook platform. And he might be right: EA just released The Sims Social, Zynga will soon re-brand its new Adventure World with Indiana Jones and Kabam recently announced The Godfather: Five Families.

Playdom, which Disney acquired in July 2010 for a whopping $740 million, is ahead of the pack with two branded games on Facebook: ESPNU College Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. Both games performed well, thanks to advertising through the ESPN TV network. While Disney owns the ESPN brand, notice how neither of those actually involve the insanely popular Disney characters we’ve come to love.

Honestly, we’re surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Consider this: Disney has its own cable TV channel through which it could, in theory, advertise whatever it wants. Pleasants didn’t get into why it’s taken this long for disney channel games to throw its cast of characters into Facebook games, but did reveal the power of the Disney name.

Gnome Town, which Playdom launched in the summer–and we enjoyed quite a bit–peaked at 530,000 daily players. But just plopping the Disney logo on top of the existing one made users more likely to spend in the game just through trust of the company’s name, according to Pleasants. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants said.

It’s comforting to hear this emphasized by these developers. (Kabam’s Chou shared the same sentiment.) Branded games on Facebook are OK in my book, but the last thing anyone wants to see is the genre become a branding machine.

Disney-branded Facebook games coming in 2012, Playdom head says

Can we all just say, “finally?” During a panel named “The Rise of Social Games” at the f8 Facebook Developers Conference in San Francisco, Disney Interactive and Playdom head John Pleasants revealed that two to four Facebook games surrounding Disney xd brands will hit Facebook in 2012. The general topic of the panel was the fact that branded social games are taking off.

Pleasants was joined on the panel by Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, EA Interactive head Barry Cottle and Zynga CBO Owen Van Natta. Facebook director of games partnerships Sean Ryan moderated the panel with the preface that branded games will take over the Facebook platform. And he might be right: EA just released The Sims Social, Zynga will soon re-brand its new Adventure World with Indiana Jones and Kabam recently announced The Godfather: Five Families.

Playdom, which Disney acquired in July 2010 for a whopping $740 million, is ahead of the pack with two branded games on Facebook: ESPNU College Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. Both games performed well, thanks to advertising through the ESPN TV network. While Disney owns the ESPN brand, notice how neither of those actually involve the insanely popular Disney characters we’ve come to love.

Honestly, we’re surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Consider this: Disney has its own cable TV channel through which it could, in theory, advertise whatever it wants. Pleasants didn’t get into why it’s taken this long for disney channel games to throw its cast of characters into Facebook games, but did reveal the power of the Disney name.

Gnome Town, which Playdom launched in the summer–and we enjoyed quite a bit–peaked at 530,000 daily players. But just plopping the Disney logo on top of the existing one made users more likely to spend in the game just through trust of the company’s name, according to Pleasants. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants said.

It’s comforting to hear this emphasized by these developers. (Kabam’s Chou shared the same sentiment.) Branded games on Facebook are OK in my book, but the last thing anyone wants to see is the genre become a branding machine.