EVCin

CityVille leveraged new email invite capabilities and a first mover advantage – of sorts – to help it hit 100 million Monthly Active Users

Survey by Zynga tips off their intention to enter the city building sim genre and take on Playdom’s scorching hot Social City.

Facebook depricated Notificaitons for applications on March 1st – Clearly it’s not the doomsday scenario that some feared as developers are mostly relying on email or fan page posts to replace application-to-user notifications, while user-to-user notifications are being facilitated through creative use of Wall Posts.

Users seem to be struggling in finding games in the new Facebook homepage redesign. While there is a lot of promise in the newly introduced games dashboard, further education cannot overcome the fundamental design flaw of not having “games” as a persistent part of the site navigation, visible from every page.

Looking back at Facebook’s changes to how application developers could use the platform, developers have mostly complied with prohibitions forcing users to give gifts before playing the game on first and recurring visits. Yet the largest developers seem to still be allowed to gate content (like land expansions) based on the number of friends a user has – continuing to put pressure on people who do not want to spend money to extend their social graph to potential strangers in order to unlock content.