Playfish: Play Social games with your friends on Facebook and more

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Elevate Entertainment Gaming Site InstantAction On A Roll From time to time, companies we’ve covered in the past check in with us to give us an update on their progress, and we’re always happy to receive those notices even if we don’t always publish something about it here. Yet sometimes, it’s definitely worth it. For instance, InstantAction, a gaming site from IAC-owned GarageGames, has managed to cross the 1 million members mark only 9 months after we covered their launch. InstantAction lets you play 3D games inside your browser using neither Flash or Silverlight, but instead via a proprietary Windows and Mac compatible plugin that works with games programmed in pretty much any language.

FarmVillains One of the Internet's greatest success stories in 2010 can be found in a former potato chip factory on Vermont Street in Potrero Hill. This is the original office of Zynga, the S.F.-based creator of online "social" games — FarmVille, a simple application in which participants plant and harvest crops, is the company's best-known product — that in three years has gone from scrappy startup to the toast of Silicon Valley. Since launching its first Internet game in 2007, Zynga has grown rapidly. The company's true earnings are unknown to outsiders, but industry observers estimate that its annual revenue could now be $500 million or more.

Features - The Social Network Game Boom With over 200 million people registered on Facebook, the most popular social networking site, and millions, millions more on similar sites like MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5, social networking has become a part of daily life. As quoted in the Financial Times, one CIO of a leading U.S. firm found that her young employees "communicate by Facebook and simply will not read their e-mail." Worldwide, social activists are using social networking sites to organize protests. Meanwhile, others have found old classmates and friends using these sites. It's a testament to the power of social networking. Controversies Swirl Over Purity Of Social Games, Microsoft’s Jab At ‘Nerds’ « Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency Earlier this month, Microsoft hosted several press events to introduce its Kinect motion control product to fashion and lifestyle press and bloggers, aiming squarely at the casual set to sell its $200 competitor to Nintendo’s profitable domination of the casual console market.The message Microsoft wanted to send was that Kinect was for the cool kids, and decidedly not its core gamer audience. AtomicPC was at the event, and reported that Microsoft’s director of entertainment and devices, David McLean, quipped to his audience “Gaming’s not just for sweaty thirty year olds in Metallica t-shirts,” among other digs at “basement-dwelling nerds” and “impenetrable control schemes.” The core gamer community’s reaction has been extremely negative.

History of Social Games Social games aren’t new–they’re just games you play with other people. Social games began about 5000 years ago. With some help from the team at Disruptor Beam, we’ve put together a little chart that traces the history of social games from its origins in Ancient Egypt all the way to the present. I’m using the term social network games to distinguish the type of social games (Farmtown, etc.) that are primarily played and distributed via social networks.

Why Social Media Gaming Is Big Business for Your Business Social gaming is barely 3 years old, and ! And your brand can benefit from this hot market. At first blush, social games aren’t too different from traditional online gaming. Both types focus on entertainment appealing to a wide audience, with simple mechanics and relatively short periods of play.

Empire Avenue creates a stock market to measure your social influence (50 beta passes) Everyone wants to know who has the most social influence, but so far, there hasn’t been a good way to measure it. The number of friends you have on Facebook or Twitter is only a partial measure. So a Canadian startup is launching the world’s first fantasy stock market that measures your social influence. Empire Avenue‘s The People’s Market will let users buy and sell shares in each other, allowing a person’s social influence to be measured via market forces. “Online, every writer, blogger, photographer or Twitterer has influence, but nobody has been able to answer the question, ‘What’s my influence worth?’ until now.