It’s not really fair. My TV (and every other piece of home electronics) is a slave to a remote. But because the remote only barks out orders and never asks questions, or listens, it’s a cause for frustration.

We have a Logitech Harmony remote, and it’s a great thing. But because the communication is one-way it’s often as frustrating an experience using it as trying to find the right one of the half dozen remotes scattered around the living room.

Now, imagine a world where every TV, Xbox, Squeezebox, and amplifier had a Bluetooth (BT) or other wireless chip in and as well as listening for orders they can communicate their status both between devices and to their controller.

Couple that with a smartphone (or a dedicated smart remote control) and you have a real universal remote that can be task driven (I want to watch Cable or play a DVD on the Xbox or listen to music), query the relevant devices (to confirm what state it thinks they are in) and then make intelligent decisions about they need to do (on or off, change source, adjust volume levels) – including powering on or off devices in the correct sequence.

Today’s IrDA based devices don’t offer that sort of flexibility or control – the communication isn’t two way, the protocols defined in the 1970’s don’t really have the flexibility or richness and the limitation of line of sight control starts to interfere with talking to multiple devices concurrently anyway.

In this solution there would be no more line of sight problems (can even talk to equipment in a cabinet). No more getting out of sync with the source channel on the TV (because it's cyclical rather than direct access). No more pop from the speakers when the TV turns off before the amplifier (they can communicate... if the TV "knows" it's using the speakers - or the remote does - part of the shut-down process could be to mute the speakers, shut them off and then shut down the TV, or if changing over to the Squeezebox then mute them, change source, start Squeezebox, turn off TV, un-mute speakers returning them to the default volume and EQ for listening to music as opposed to for TV)

The problem today is that while BT to IrDA devices exist that's only half the solution... The back channel to the remote doesn't exist. For this to work the Bluetooth, ZigBee or WiFi SIGs would need to be more aggressive in promoting the value of something like this to the hardware manufacturers. Bluetooth and WiFi are already supported in most smartphones, but ZigBee with its lower power requirements would be an interesting solution if it has the living room range.

For it to work there needs to be one standard that can be rolled out cost effectively. Who is going to step up and lead the charge from the three incumbent wireless technologies (or will we see a new player emerge to eclipse them?)

Zynga are the company behind some of the run-away games hits of Facebook – Farmville, Petville, Mafia Wars, Frontierville etc.

Through a combination or addictive game-play and peer-pressure they have grown to be a significant player in the gaming space.

They have spread from their beginnings in Facebook to hosting games on Yahoo and MySpace and launched native iPhone (and iPad) versions – but in call cases “your” Farm is independent of the underlying social networking platform.

Now with Google’s $100 Million investment and rumors of a forthcoming Google Social Networking platform the logical conclusion is that they are preparing to land on yet another platform.

But … is there more to it than just spreading their gaming reach?

Facebook, Twitter, MSN, MySpace, LinkedIn and others are very proud of their ability to generate, leverage and monetize a “social graph” but essentially all of them only offer vertical integration – unless you’re a member of their “club” they don’t really know that much about you.

What Zynga are well on their way to delivering is something that only really email (and email centric solutions like Plaxo) have had before now – a cross domain social network, and by extension a more accurate social graph than any walled garden can offer.

Assuming that Zynga continue to maintain user data separately from the sign-in platform – isolating and abstracting the communication and sharing mechanisms from the core experience and allowing you to provide multiple credentials to communication with your Google, Facebook, iPhone, Email and Twitter friends seamlessly then they are the position of knowing more about who you are “friends” with than any of the individual services.

What they do with this data will be interesting. The obvious monetization path is to use the information to enable better and better advertising targeting (which makes a lot of sense with the Google tie-in) but I suspect there are other routes they might investigate … and with a potential audience as large as the sum of all their host networks they’ll have a huge audience to experiment with.

FaceBook Credits, Google Checkout and Paypal are all great “virtual currencies” but you don’t always want to maintain too high a balance anywhere just in case something goes wrong and you can’t spend your credit… but with Zynga Game Cash (or whatever they call it) you could not only buy virtual trinkets for your electronic pets you could move your balances around, make gifts (virtual purchases or cash balances) and – with Zynga acting as a broker – link into other mechanisms for individual transactions…

Who knows where else they could take their silo busting multi-player game platform…