Zynga Expresses Its Desire to Prosper Beyond Facebook

Mark Pincus, the co-founder and CEO of Zynga

When Facebook first introduced its open platform for developers, Zynga was among the first few companies to take advantage three years ago. Beginning with social games such as CafeWorld, Mafia Wars and FrontierVille, Zynga has now more than 320 million users across the community of 500 million users. Zinga is allegedly valued for above $5.5 billion, as more and more people start living their lives progressively more online, they want to do each and everything with their friends in one place together.

Yelp.Com Also Launches Its 'Check-In Deals' To Its Website

Mobile check-in have been the most up-coming trend of this year, with exclusive services dedicated to this trend like Foursquare and Gowalla start gaining popularity, the already dominating websites like Facebook add their own services like Places and Deals. So, from now onwards Yelp users will also be among those who get advantageous deals from local businesses, in return for ‘checking in’ at places they visit.

It is also rumored that Google is ready to buy a company for anything between $2.5bn and $3bn, which lets allows other websites of different businesses to advertise own deals, and if enough people sign up for the particular deal, it gets available for all the members. According to the New York Post reported, Google’s deal with this company, titled Groupon, will be settled anytime “in the next month”.

Tim, the Inventor of the World Wide Web, Criticizes Facebook’s Data Policies

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, expressed his views in a website the Scientific American journal, in a post entitled ‘Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,’ has condemned today’s successful social networking websites, specifically giving a reference to Facebook as well, for limiting the ‘openness’ of today’s web. He laid emphasis on reminding that “The web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.”

Tim Berners-Lee

Having said that, he went onto criticize the web’s democratic nature of today, has he implied it was being threatened by few of its “most successful inhabitants” than others. He then pointed his figures particularly on the situation of Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster, as they are limiting the amount of data flow freely available across the web, which according to him, is not at all leading to healthy tomorrow. His write was tailored in this manner: "Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph.”

Phrases Beats Farmville for the Throne of ‘Top Facebook App’

FarmVille has now apparently stepped down from its  throne, as its as the app with maximum active users on Facebook, has been over take by another app called Phrases, which is an app developed by Takeoff Monkey.

Phrases is an application which lets the users to select from a wide variety of content to their walls, the list usually includes items like quotes, pictures, and quizzes. Whereas, on the other hand, FarmVille has slightly laid down after remaining at the peak for a long while, with once having almost 84 million monthly users. But the key factor to understand in this analysis is to keep in mind that Phrases has only managed to barely eclipse FarmVille, as it ground around 54.4 million monthly average users. FarmVille number is of about 53.9 million monthly players, which is just around the corner.