Desktop Dungeons on Core Elements

The first Episode of Core Elements suggested that we check out a game called Desktop Dungeons.  It was a great suggestion.  Core Elements #2 is out today and they are talking with Danny Day of QCF Design, the creators of DD!

The game is challenging and routinely kicks my ass.  Check out the free alpha version of the game.  It is definitely worth it.  Reminiscent of Nethack, Castle of the Winds, DD is a great game to play a few minutes at a time.  The graphics and game play are simple.  Like any great indie game they feel a bit retro.  The changes and updates are well worth following because they definitely have great ideas for the game.

Talking the business side of things for a moment.  The company is following in the footsteps of Mojang, by releasing the Alpha for free.   This is my absolute favorite method of building buzz for a game.  Then follow up with a graduated pay scale for Beta and Full Release.  If you get in early you have a feeling of being 'in the club'.  And the discounted price is nice as well.  This works really well as long as there is a commitment to updating and expanding the game over time.  Any company that attempts this, but doesn't keep the 'long tail' is doomed to get a bad name.  Considering all the news coming out of QCF about graphic changes, gameplay  updates, and additions it looks to me like they are doing it right!  Good job guys, keep updating this great game!

Is modding right for your project?

Getting started in game design is tough.  Starting your own project from scratch and trying to build it into a real game is a long and challenging road.  The learning curve is steep.  What if you want a gentler introduction into game design, an easier learning curve?  You can mod other peoples games.  On Tuesdays we're going to start exploring modding a popular game.  This week, as an intro to modding we're going to discuss the pro's and cons of modding, and reveal my selection for the game to mod.  In future weeks Tuesdays are going to be all about modding that game.

Pro's of Modding:

• Fast
• Low pressure (your not on a development team after all)
• Overhead is done
• Good way to learn design of game mechanics

Con's:

• Most likely not going to be doing it professionally.
• Not going to make much money from it.
• Possibly confusing if there aren't any other modders out there.

What are some great games to Mod?

• Starcraft
• Starcraft 2
• Any Unreal engine
• Minecraft

We're going to focus on Minecraft.  This may not seem like the best choice from a coding standpoint.  Java is not optimal for game design.  This has to do with how Java manages garbage collection.  Basically it tries to handle it automatically, which is hard to code around.  However Java has some major advantages.  It works well on the net.  Minecraft can be played in a browser window.  Additionally Minecraft has a large and growing fan base, and finding good tutorials, video, and other information is getting easier all the time.

Getting started with Modding Minecraft
Once the code is no longer obfuscated (there are programs to help you do that) Minecraft is actually really easy to work with if you want to play around with some basics.  As you learn more you can explore more deeply into the engine, like the fellow in the linked letter to Notch.  I have not yet done this, so I don't want to speak to how easy it is to alter the basic game engine...  Well not at this time anyway.  But the learning opportunity is there.

Resources:

• The New Boston: Start with this site to learn the basics of Java, and also the more advanced Java Game Programming.
• AKAhenry: Henry has some Minecraft Specific tutorials on the basics of coding minecraft.  His website is brand new, and it looks like he's planning on adding more content and more videos.
• On my Youtube channel there are some links to various tips and advice.  They are mostly the same topics as AKA Henry, but it's worth while to check them out and hear the same information put in a different way.  More will be added over time.  Also check out my liked videos for lots of Minecraft related stuff.

Robots Love Ice Cream give away contest.

Having supported the Kickstarter page for Robots Love Ice Cream, I get a free copy of the game.  Unfortunately for me, I do not have an iOS device yet.  Fortunately for you, that means I can give it away to one of my readers.  Within the next four days some form of contest will be devised...

If the Kickstarter isn't funded then of course I won't have a game to give...  So you might want to donate something to the project because if it is funded then you can get a free copy!  You could donate just $5, and still win a copy of the game!  Or you could support the project and get a copy of the game.  Either way a great looking project gets support.

I have four days to devise some way of giving out my rights to a copy of the game to one of my followers or to someone who makes a thoughtful comment on one of my blog posts by the 30th.  You should comment or follow today.  If you can't think of anything to post, then maybe you could suggest some random way to determine who gets my copy.

While you're being generous, if you really wanted to you could buy me an iPad...  What?  Just saying!

*** Edit ***

I have doubled down on my pledge.  So now you get the game and the soundtrack.  You get my entire donation package as long as you leave a comment or are a follower of my blog.  There is just 11 hours left on the kickstarter page and just under $6000 left to go.  If you dream of creating games someday, or you know how hard game design is, please consider donating at least $5.

If you subscribe via RSS, I have no way of knowing who you are.  Follower via blogger, I can see.  So please leave a comment somewhere on the blog to have a chance to win a copy of Robots Love Ice Cream!

Thank you!

The Adwords Experiment: Week 1

Catch up on the Adwords Experiment here!


The Bid: $.01 per click.  That was the hard upper limit of the bid. Much like bidding on Ebay auctions you can enter $100 per click if you want to and the system will only charge you the amount necessary to outbid everyone else.  But to force the bid to the lowest possible, put it on .01 cent per click.

The Limit: $10.  Just to make sure the campaign doesn't run through all $100 of the budget on a single day.

The Results:

Adwords results:

Bidding a penny on 19 keywords which all have low competition resulted in four clicks.  And only on the first day of the campaign.  What's interesting is that the Average Cost Per Click is four cents, when the bid was a penny.  There is some kind of inefficiency in the system, or perhaps operator error, which caused the clicks to cost more then the penny bid.  As there were so few clicks, we can't be sure about the reasoning.  But this may actually be an informative error.  We may accidentally know that we get more clicks at four cents, then at one.  However, we're going to stick to the procedure and increase the bid one penny per week.  No conclusions can be drawn yet, the experiment is just beginning!  And kind of  suspenseful start too.

If you have any idea why when bidding one cent, the system charged four cents, leave a comment!  Someone explain if this was an error, or behavior that we will see more of in the future.  Week 2 coming up next!

4 Stages of Game Design

Some questions were raised in the post "Until you launch something, the time you spend is meaningless", about the nature of computer game development.  There are many ways that you can develop a title, so these are not the only way that such stages can be defined.  This is in no way a complete list, but meant to provide basic awareness.  It will also form basic definitions for ideas that come in future posts.

Achievement: Sole Proprietorship.

This blog is now a business.  This day had to come sooner or later.  I'm currently looking into Affiliate Programs instead of Google Adsense.  There are a host of gamer targeted websites which have such programs.  I will be very choosy about which one I present to you.  It will need to be a product that I actually like and would or have purchase(d) myself.

Harcos Laboratories Mana Energy Drink

ThinkGeek and J!nx come to mind (because I'm on their websites frequently).  Does anyone have any suggestions or preferences about good gamer specific affiliate programs?  Any horror stories about terrible programs?

Core Elements: CE #1: Brad Muir

Core Elements: CE #1: Brad Muir: Check out the first episode of this podcast by the Dead Workers Party. "The Shaft" is for the Minecraft fans. "Control Point" is a Team Fortress 2 podcast.

Core Elements covers a lot of general gaming information. There's some history, chats with developers, company analysis. It's worth checking out if you are a game developer or a game player.  They assigned some homework for the next podcast.  Check out Desktop Dungeons in preparation for Danny Day in Episode 2 of Core Elements!

Learning Google Adwords: Keyword Tool

The Adwords Experiment has given me some time to play around with some neat tools that Google offers.  If you are a blogger the keyword tool alone is worth signing up for the service.  Even if you never intend on starting an ad campaign the tool can help you find related keywords that will give you a boost if you are doing SEO.  The keyword tool is so interesting I ended up playing with it for a week or two just to figure out what keywords would be best.  Here is a screen shot of a few keywords for this blog.

As you can see some of them are kind of crazy, and aren't obvious.  They still have huge numbers of monthly hits and very low competition.  Those were suggested to me by the Keyword Tool itself.  Which is awesome as you don't have to quest in the dark for keywords that work well with the ones you already know.

Although the bar assigned to each keyword may not make it obvious, there is a way to tell how much competition each keyword has.  You can cross check the competition bar to find out more closely what it means by opening up a browers window and typing that keyword into Google.  The same day I ran those keywords there was one ad on the 'a game' keyword.  That means that whoever put up that add bid really high (unnecessarily high, as there is no competition for the keyword) to compete with up to 6 other advertisers.

But wait?  You said there were no other ads.  Correct.  That means they wasted money in their ad campaign. Or at least that's how it appears to me.  A lone advertiser is bidding up the price of their own keywords.  Maybe someone has more information about this point.  It would be great to hear from them about it.

Do you know any neat SEO or Adwords tricks?  Share them in the comments!  Comming up: The Adwords Experiment Week 1!

The Adwords Experiment

Google was nice enough to send me a free $100 gift card for Adwords.  For anyone unfamiliar Adwords is the tool that lets you place ads in Googles search results.  You create an ad, and then bid on keywords.  The amount of competition, and your bid, determines if Google users see your ad or not.  For some keywords the competition can be fierce.  They keywords for most game related projects, however, remain very low in competition.

This 'windfall' represents the total marketing budget of The ZoRTS Project.  Instead of advertising a game which doesn't exist yet it seemed like a better idea to get the word out about this blog.  The real goal is building a community of folks who can tell me when I'm saying something stupid (always appreciated) about game design.  This way the project benefits from more knowledge then I currently posses.  Also learning how Adwords works should be a marketable skill in this day and age, right?

Upon getting the gift card my first step was to contact thetrafficblogger and asked his advice.  He is my go to guy for all things blogging and social media related.  His suggestion was to start a campaign with as many keywords as possible, that have low competition, and start by bidding $.01 on clicks.  Thus began 'The Adwords Experiment'.

The Goal: Get 10,000 hits using $100
Whoa!?!  That is a lot of hits, where did that number come from?  That goal came from TheTrafficBlogger himself.  Maybe he tossed it out randomly.  Or maybe from the point of view of a professional blogger that should be a reasonable number, he must get 10,000 hits a post...  But for a newbie like me?  It is quite the challenge.  But why not a randomly chosen big goal?  Right.  Jump in feet first!

The Method:
Week 1: One cent per click. Started July 14th to July 21st
Week 2: Two cents per click. July 22nd to July 28th
Week 3: Three center per click. July 29th to Aug 4th
Week 4: Four cents per click.  Aug 5th to Aug 11th

Now I will also be spreading the word about blog.zorts.net in other ways at the same time.  This behavior would loose points in the scientific world.  But as this is a completely new blog, its fair to allow for other traffic sources.  At the moment Reddit is my biggest source of traffic.  There could be some expansion from Empire Avenue readers.  It will also be very easy to figure out which hits came from where. So the analysis can include both with Reddit, and without.

First Hypothisis:
There is some cheap 'magic number' that will get me enough hits to break even between Adwords and Adsense.

Second Hypothisis:
There is some even more magic number which will net me a little profit for my trouble.

The Conclusion:
10,000 hits using only $100?  That is definitely a challenge.  We shall see if the final tally comes anywhere close.  Before collecting the data, I have no idea what to expect.  But imagine if that could be done!  Regardless of how the experiment goes over all, I'm sure this is a valuable learning experience.

There is a post qued up for tommorrow with some general thoughts and a couple things noticed about Adwords.  Expect additional posts as more is learned about Adwords.  Keep checking back for updates on the experiments progress.  Each week will get recapped on a Tuesday as an additional blog post!  As always ask questions if there is something that hasn't been explained well.  Those kinds of questions really help me curate the blog, and help make sure the blog posts make sense as well as provide valuable information.  If you can think of anything that should be added to the experiment, comment below.

"Game On" by Jon Radoff

"Game On; Energize your business with social media games" 
by Jon Radoff

First Impressions:
I picked up the book and flipped through the index to see what was in store for me.  I got excited about the book just reading the index.  The topics the book covers excited me because they are relevant to me.  That excitement is completely justified.  The book promises, and delivers, detailed, multi layered information about more than just game design and development.  You get some history, some theory, and a whole lot of practical ideas and suggestions about creating social games specifically, and all kinds of games generally.

For example the first chapter contains a quiz that sort the reader into one of three categories.  They indicate multiple points of view to enjoy the rest of the book from.  Then Jon explains that humans enjoy taking quizes, and enjoy sorting themselves into groups they identify with.  Brilliant.  Absolutely brilliant.  Without telling you Jon has shown you a game, which you have opted to play of your own choice.  He has facilitated you self sorting into a category which includes a cute little icon.  All of which you are happy to do.  All the while telling you that it's ok to skip this or that part making you feel like you are completely in control of your experience through the book.  It slowly dawns on you that he has demonstrated, in the first chapter, exactly the kind of thing that he has promised in the book.

"Game On" is clearly targeted at non gamers wanting to build social games.  It reads as though written to hold the hand of someone who is may be a professional, but doesn't understand the first thing about social games.  But don't be fooled into thinking that it is a book only for social games.  For example The ZoRTS project is not a social game, but I found tons of applicable material in this book.  If you have a game project, or are thinking about starting one, reading this book will force you to think about how you design your project, how the game itself works, and where the fun is for the players.  More than just a text on designing social games to promote a brand or product, "Game On" teaches enough about game design topic that amateurs will get something out the book.

Jon is like a magician who can make his magic tricks more splendid by showing you how they work.  He pulls back the curtain on games and gaming, but instead of revealing a disappointing Wizard, you find something even more amazing and splendid then you thought it would be.

Valuation in Empire Avenue. Or How to make money in Empire Avenue.

In case you haven't seen it yet Empire Avenue is a game, played like a stock market.  Check out my first impressions of the game.  Each stocks value is derived from two things.  The number of your shares other people purchased, which I mention first because in this post I'm paying less attention to.  Second the activity of the social media accounts attached to your ticker symbol.  When you sign up you tie your twitter account, Facebook account, YouTube account, and other social media into your EA account.  The game measures your activity on those accounts, and bases your stocks value on that activity.

This game is a neat tool which has been helping me get better at social media.  It just so happens that I'm a bit new to twitter (see below), and am not in the habit of tweeting regularly.  But I have real world goals that I want to meet, and being better at social media helps me reach those goals.  For example getting people to read this blog and click on ads.

A real world company derives its value from the Balance Sheet Equation.  It's really way more complicated then that, but this is a generalization for folks who are not Business Majors, or Chief Financial Officers.  A ticker symbol on Empire Avenue however is valued by the sum activity of the various accounts you attach to it.  Here we have a pretty picture of my Twitter activity.  You can clearly see how my twitter activity adds into my overall valuation.  You can also clearly see that I do not have many followers on twitter.  ;)

Retweets btw are other people retweeting my stuff.  Not me retweeting other peoples tweets.  Took me a good week to figure that out, during which I was doing a lot of retweeting.

I use a Twitter account as a starting point for determining the value for one very important reason.  EA tracks twitter activity for people who have not joined the game yet.  It does not track information for Youtube, Facebook, Flicker, etc unless the owner of those accounts joins the game, and attachs them to their EA account.  This represents a tremendous advantage to twitter accounts.  As well as a huge opportunity.

The calculation seen above is run on every twitter account Empire Avenue see's.  Which appears to be all of them.  Once you join the game EA displays a list of all your followed twitter feeds.  At the moment far more of them are going to state they they are not playing EA, then are playing EA.  The game ranks and values the twitter accounts.

***
With one exception that I just discovered.  If you use the Facebook Empire Avenue app, you can purchase shares in Facebook accounts before they start playing Empire Avenue.
***

Once a player joins EA, then others can buy and sell shares of the twitter account, plus other social media.  This brings the irrationality of humans attempting to buy good deals and sell bad deals.  In other words their share price is no longer a measurement of how active they are on social media.  It becomes subject to the whims of humans.  Which brings volatility.  There are many people on EA who are making Eaves by capitalizing on this volatility.  Or using buy back strategies.  Which are both good strategies, just not one that I want to add to the conversation.  I want to add another tactic to the arsenal.

I'm going to use the term "Fundamental Value" in future blog posts to refer to the portion of someone share price which comes from just their social media activity.  Your "Total Value" is the Fundamental Value plus every share bought by your shareholders on EA.  The Total Value is going to be subject to the whims of the market (ie the opinions of the people out there) while your Fundamental Value is not.  Hence the neat sounding name I have coined for it.

When making your first purchases on Empire Avenue I recommend finding the twitter accounts of people that you know who are not playing EA.  You are buying them for the fundamental value of their twitter activity.  If they happen to start playing, their share price will go up simply by adding additional accounts to the game.  Initially you should buy those twitter accounts who you know have a vested interest in continuing to tweet.  Those who rely on social media, or have built their own business on it, for example.  Avoid purchasing those people who just lurk on twitter.

This should give you a solid base of dividends with which to branch out into people whos' behavior is riskier.  If you give this strategy a try, let me know how it work for you!  I would love the feedback especially if we can put some numbers on this idea.  See you on EA!

Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex | Video on TED.com

Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex | Video on TED.com

Use this mentality when designing your first game. And your second game. And your third game...

In fact use this mentality in your entire life. Admit that you don't know. Think of things that might help and try them. Good luck, keep trying.

Game idea != Product

Scott McMillian, formerly head of MacGuffin Games, gave another great presentation at Boston Post Mortem Wednesday night.  It was a second showing of "Death of an Indie Studio", a post mortem discussion the rise and fall of his own small business.  There should be audio and perhaps video of the entire presentation coming along soon.  Which will be really valuable to get the nuance of some of his statements (the art and business continuum, for example).  For now you can find my notes and links to the slides.  The official post from Boston Post Mortem is now up, with more visual goodness!

How to set up a website to manage game design.

Previously in 'Cheap Game Design' it was mentioned that you can use google to provide a place to practice good project management.  Today we're going to walk through setting up a website like the one built for the ZoRTS project.  The first site constructed was an internal website that the team could use to keep up with the project, store resources, and discuss the project without anyone outside the project being able to see it.  After setting up the internal site, the external site is much easier to start as you already have practice.

1. Create a gmail account.  Make sure that all members also have gmail accounts.
2. Go to sites.google.com and start a new website.  Access the site permissions by pressing shift + S.  The first permission you see is for the entire world.  Click the blue change button and set the site to private.  Add your team members and allow them to view or edit as you see fit.
3. Set up the pages you will need, some suggestions below.  They will follow the same permissions as the main page you already created.  Here is google's step by step instructions for sites.google.com if you aren't familiar with it.
4. Open up google docs and start creating your Game Design Document, or upload the document if you created it some where else.
5. Create a new page on the Google site.  Edit the page and select Insert in the upper left hand corner of the screen.  From the drop down list in the "Google" Section select "Document".  This will bring up a list of all the Google Docs you have created.  You should see the Game Design Document on the list.

What kinds of pages will I need to manage my project?

• Issue Tracker (Feel free to post an issue in the example to test it out!).  There is a great youtube video explaining how to set up an issue tracker.  That video convinced me that for a bootstrap project sites.google.com was the way to go.
• Tracker for social media (login information for forum boards, facebook page, twitter accounts, youtube account, etc.) that your game uses to find players.
• Game Design Document (or documents) - Google docs are great for this...  You can make a page that links directly to them.
• Timeline, Gantt chart, etc.

Now that you have the internal website up and running figure out what information can go public.  Making the external website is very similar to making the internal one.  You might need a few more pages, such as News, Events, Pictures, etc.

If you think of any pages that a project like this could really benefit from, post a comment!  If you were creating a computer game what kinds of things would your team need to know about?

Is Empire Avenue a Meta game?

So how is this for meta.  An entire game where you earn value on a fictitious stock market by using social media.  This is kind of a description of Empire Avenue.  Tonight I did my IPO in a category for Game Development, and I found Scott Macmillan over there.  So I seem to be in good company.  My impression of the game in the first five minutes:  Interesting...  Where does A=L+SE+R-E fit in (look for a new post on that)?  Kind of a lot of new stuff to learn.  People are investing in me awfully fast, am I a stock market bubble?

Can someone recommend my blog on EA?  K, thx.  I'll buy 50 shares of you if you do.

It seems like if one were to play this game in a determined fashion it could improve your ability to navigate in social media.  Considering that I enjoy blogging about games on social media, to me this is very Meta.  It looks a bit like another tool to "spread the word", and drive some traffic here.

So am I writing this post to get more hits on my blog from EA?  Or am I writing this post to drive more players to EA (If you want to play, as me for an invite)?  Whoa...  The ultimate answer is Yes.  Yes I am.

***
Edit:

Found some interesting articles on EA around the web.  They seems to indicate that there is social media buzz about the game, but I've never heard of it.  Good intro article on http://advertising.scoop.co.nz.  An opinion about this being 'gamification' or not.

"Until you launch something, the time you spend is meaningless"

I wanted to share this post because I feel this everyday.

One of the challenges of game design is knowing that until you launch something, the time you spend is meaningless to the outside observer.  It may be very meaningful to you.  But you will get no traction with others till you can actually produce something.

Whenever I hang around the Boston Indies crowd I feel pressure to produce something. Feeling this pressure is a good thing, because like the author of the blog it gets me motivated to keep working.  Without producing something you cannot be judged as a peer in Indie Scene.  You have to stand above the crowd of gamers with 'good ideas' and 'passion' and actually produce something.  That feeling motivates me to do something and I love it!

Why Do Games Publishers Exist? They won't forever.

I like this post by Colin Campbell at GamaSutra, because I don't think we need the publishers.  Not to say that Colin is wrong about anything, he is absolutely correct, and his analysis of what a publisher is and what a publisher does is spot on.  And I bow to his great knowledge of game creation.  The use of Minecraft to make the point is exactly where I would have gone myself.

However, when it comes to 'disrupting technology' and new companies, I don't think his ideas hold true over the long haul.  The nature of disruptive technology is such that a few small successes with something new stack up till the early adopters become early majority, then the late majority, and finally the laggards.  Internet based publishing is such a disruptive technology which will conform to the Technology Adoption Curve.  Minecraft, Jonathon Coulton,  even Penny Arcade are self publishers.  The number is only going to grow.  Internet publishing is still in the "Innovation" Stage.

Design Management Review Fall 2007

Which doesn't mean that I think Publishers will inevitably fail.  Good companies with smart people will continue to be good companies with smart people.  Bad companies will, and should fail.  Will self publishing be the future for the AAA 50 million dollar titles?  Not any time soon.  But what will happen is something more like Minecraft and Mojang.  Self publishing game companies will become more numerous and eventually overtake the big guys.  But its a long way off from where we are now.

Game design document? How about 'game bible'?

When you're working with 4 coders,  an artist, a couple musicians, a writer, and a project manager how do you keep everyone on the same page about what the game is and what the game is not?  The Creative Lead or the Project Manager must be the arbiter of the contents of the game.  They must have a method for making sure that everyone on the project has a way of understanding that vision.  What is 'canon' and what is 'not canon', to borrow the terminology use by Star Wars (one of the most curated intellectual properties in existence).

Whatgamesare.com had a post recently about Game Design Documents.  Tadhg was commenting on a problem that all project managers have whether they are in game design or not.  It a bit like 'scope creep'.  As a project moves forward stakeholders start to ask for new features.  Changes and additions start to creep in and your scope and project can veer wildly off course without careful curation.  A good Project Management Professor will warn about scope creep.  It sounds like in the Game Industry the GDD suffers from the same problem.

A game design document should not contain information about the overall project.  The game design document should be subordinate to the project document.  The project document should consider aspects of the project outside of the game itself.  There shall be no marketing information in a good GDD.

Game Design documents are not bad, and you should work with one.  Especially when you are new to this  field you can learn a lot from a good GDD template.  They are immensely useful for filling in the gaps of what you have and have not yet thought about.  They force you to consider aspects of the game which haven't immediately jumped to mind.

The ZoRTS Project uses a great game design document.  It was made a number of years ago by Chris Tayor.  The document is linked to by wikipedia and hosted by Runaway Studios.  You can download a copy here.  If you are experience or running a game design company it may be a good idea to create your own format.  But if your an amateur use someone else's document as a place to start.

If you have any doubts or internal conflict about what a game design document should be take a look at the Battlestar Galatica Series Bible.  The game design document should define the setting of the game, and how the game is played.  The UI and the HUD.  Get the flavor of the game into the document.  Record your ideas about the game and what it should be.  Make the GDD a repository for your games canon.  Make it a bible that explains the universe you want to play in!

Zynga needs more friends in its social network.

Some interesting news today about Zynga, just after yesterdays post about Friendster becoming a social games platform.  Apparently they are completely dependent on Facebook.  Not only has Zynga won Facebook, but they have been captured by FB.  This is exactly the kind of thing that I would worry about as an investor.  Single platform dependence is a big problem.  Anything from a temporary interruption to a permanent change in policy on the part of FB could effect Zynga's ability to provide it's games.  That dependence should worry investors even if they feel that FB is 100% reliable.

If I were looking to invest in Zynga I would want to see a comprehensive plan that explains how they are going to get themselves off a Facebook dependency ASAP.  Just because Facebook has become my main personal social network does not mean that making it the sole foundation of a companies future is a good idea.  (Only because I don't have a Google+ invite yet)  Diversification is important to investors.

This does shed light onto yesterdays post.  Zynga has huge incentive to 'play nice' with Friendster.  And Viximo for that matter.  This can act as a test of Friendster...  Managing a relationship with Zynga could really provide a lot of information about how smart the folks at Friendster are.  Knowing that Zynga has no other social networks under it's belt shifts the balance of power to the networks.

Zynga has an incentive to love and support (and maybe even provide money to) anyone that can help them break dependence on Facebook...  Er...  "Grow the user base" (That sounds much more friendly).  Does Zynga work with Viximo?  Hmm.  Maybe they should get in contact.  Zynga needs to add Friendster, Google+, and Viximo to it's 'social network'.