…..“I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia.” The club has doubled in size in the last 48 hours to…. over 2,000,000 members. I beleive it will double again in the next 48 hours. The phenomena highlights two things, and they are both quite obvious.
The first is that the notification system used by Zynga and others about the minutia of the progress of their friends on Facebook games is simply SPAM. In my newsfeed on Facebook today I was notified that “Douglas found a lost White Kitty on his farm. Oh no!”. What am I supposed to do with that other then pity Douglas that he has nothing better to do with his time then to deal with a virtual lost kitty cat on his virtual farm. I know what this is, it’s spam, and it works like all other spam in that some minute percentage of people click on it and go to the game and register. This notification, I mean spam, works as a zero cost marketing tool, enabling the big game companies to get even bigger. But I believe that with the dramatic growth of “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia” the glory days of billions of daily spams to Facebook users by Zynga and other game providers is numbered. Is this the beginning of the end for the game guys? No, but I do think it’s the end of the beginning. These companies grew huge fast, and they got funded (Zynga raised $180 million at a reported $1.8 million valuation) or got bought (EA bought Playfish for $300mm and Microsoft is reportedly trying to buy CrowdStar the developer of Happy Aquarium and Happy Island) at silly values. Now the game guys are going to have to develop real companies, which will include real marketing dollars.
The second obvious thing that the growth of the club highlights is how powerful Facebook is. To grow from zero to two million club members in a few weeks is truly remarkable. There was a lot of buzz this week about Google’s social networking play “Buzz” (which leverages their gMail distribution). One of the cognoscenti (Jason Calcanis on Silicon Alley Insider) actually wrote that “the strength of Buzz halved the value of Facebook overnight. “ I think he under-appreciates the network effect that will enable Facebook to emerge over the next couple years as the second most valuable media company in the world (behind Google). It’s recent $15 billion valuation appears cheap to me. While Google’s Buzz is cool, there are lots of cool search engines (check out Jason Calcanis’s Mahalo.com), and none appear poised to impact Google’s search. Similarly, Google’s Buzz is late to the party, and with 400 million people already on Facebook, the prize is Facebook’s to lose.
