EVCin

When Zynga stopped cross-promoting their synchronous poker game, it signalled that asynchronous game play may be the better long-term game mechanic for the Facebook platform. I look at the stages of Zynga’s social game development and how the fast growing audience has responded to earlier games. I also see a growing disconnect, where games are pushing the boundaries of users social bonds, subtly coercing users to befriend strangers to unlock new items and levels and wonder if a better filtering mechanism could help the growth of both Facebook, game developers and users.

Even though there is a mad rush by developers to get users to bookmark their application on Facebook, there is little data at all on how users are using Bookmarks. Using a unscientific sampling, we find that few users are leveraging bookmarks in their current state and Facebook’s planned revamping of Bookmarks may be a way to revitalize this feature for both users and developers.

The push by marketers to be “bookmarked” has been going on since the Favorites tab first showed up in web browsers. A bookmark on Facebook is the Holy Grail for an app developer: sitting in the footer of every Facebook page is the only way to be consistently “above the fold” and in the view [...]

One of the more interesting applications of the Social Game “sticky factor” that I introduced last week is the ability to look at the life cycle of some of the most popular games and identify some of the key feature roll-outs that greatly increased engagement. The sticky factor is simply the daily active users (DAUs) [...]

I spoke to the New York Chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) last week, touching on a previous blog post but updated with more data showing how:

Facebook is rapidly capturing the traditional casual game demographic that has been a mainstay of sites like Pogo.com (over 400% growth between February and September of [...]