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…

Not long ago I realized I was getting a little heavier and slower (and yes, older) so to help motivate myself (there’s nothing like walking past an expensive piece of equipment every day) I got an elliptical.

It was great. I started to lose weight (and thanks to the pushups and situps I felt able to do get into slightly better shape). Of course motivation remains an issue (it’s always easy to find excuses).

Pounding away for half hours at a time (especially just before Christmas when the girls were away) gave me some thinking time… how to combine the aspects of motivation with the social networking tools that we have today – Facebook and Twitter for instance.

Twitter seemed like an obvious choice. Nice short messages that force clarity, and a really approachable API so that even I – now coming up to 18 months since I actually wrote code for a living – could get to grips with.

You may have noticed the occasional Twitter message from me (and a few other folks now) that reads like “@gtFtr Elliptical Lvl 7.5 30 mins 2.2 miles cal 318 77 watts 4.4 mph HR 152” – well those are sharing the stats from my latest workout with my pet project.

The trackers (different exercises) are all outlined on the blog, and it’s fairly easy to add new ones if you don’t see something you need. It is very much a part time project and there’s quite a to do list… assuming I ever get the time to do any of it (open to suggestions from folks with more skill, more time, or a good plan).

Feel free to check it out, suggest some new trackers or just laugh at my progress…

On February 3^rd this year, Australian PM Kevin Rudd announced that the Government would be convening a summit called “Australia2020” in Canberra to help shape a long term strategy for Australia’s future. In the announcement, the Government said the summit would have these objectives:

· To harness the best ideas across the nation

· To apply those ideas to the 10 core challenges that the Government has identified for Australia – to secure our long-term future through to 2020

· To provide a forum for free and open public debate in which there are no predetermined right or wrong answers

· For each of the Summit’s 10 areas to produce following the Summit options for consideration by government

· For the Government to produce a public response to these options papers by the end of 2008 with a view to shaping the nation’s long-term direction from 2009 and beyond.

Almost 8000 Australians applied to join this summit, both at home and overseas. 1000 were selected and will convene on April 19-20^th.

For those who were not selected there is now an unofficial forum for them to discuss these issues online at http://www.australia2020.net and I encourage you to let any Aussie friends or family know about this as well.

As a relatively new Aussie (I’ve been a citizen for about 2 years and ironically now living abroad) I hope this initiative will help to produce a country that I want to go back to.

Thanks to a tweet from FrankArr I’ve been playing with Digsby, a fairly new combined IM, Email and Social Networking client.

So what does that all mean?

Essentially it provides a replacement to the Windows Live Messenger and GTalk clients I usually have running on my dekstop. In that role it’s much like Pidgin or AdiumX for Mac users and does the job at least as well as they do. It still needs a bit more polish to get it on par with more developed clients for things like smileys but it does what it says on the tin (and I get tabbed chat which I love!)

The it adds on a notified for Social Networking tools like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to let you see messages, alerts, status changes and what have you. It saves me many a wasted moment in the browser checking these things. You can even respond to some things directly, or get taken straight to the relevant item to manipulate it however you want.

Finally it acts as a mail poller for Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, POP3 and IMAP accounts – letting you read, manage and reply to email.

If it continue to evolve and deliver a stable, reliable, light footprint (resources and screen real estate) client I think it’s going to be a keeper.

It’s not going to replace Outlook (or Communicator for Exchange based IM and phone control) any time soon, and it doesn’t support Skype or MagicJack to manage all my communications … but who knows what the next build will bring :)

If you don’t know who Gary Vaynerchuk is you should check out his blog and for those who like the occasional tipple Wine Library TV is a great source of knowledge.

Gary is a passionate, articulate communicator who, like Loren Feldman, really shines on camera. While I prefer to consume my content as words and pictures there are some folks I take time to sit and watch,

Gary’s latest post is really worth taking time to watch. It’s a new take on the 80/20 rule and how you should apply it every day to get 110% out of everything you do.

I like to think I try to do this with my partners every day (inspired by the Blue Monster) but Gary has a great reminder that you need to do more than think about it.

At little late with the news (but Michael's posting prompted me to follow up) - it looks like Facebook have made another one of their leaps to keep the other Social Networks wondering what they need to do to keep up.

Last year Facebook opened up their platform. It gave app developers the chance to write and deploy viral apps that any Facebook user could add to their profile and interact with. Sadly that has resulted in an increase in Facebook spam (hint: I don't want to battle your virtual vampire or send you a pixilated pina colada) but over time hopefully ranking of apps and increased user awareness (just like for any other sort of spam) we'll start to see some really useful apps turning up on the platform.

Well, they've now taken it a step further. They have opened up a JavaScript driven API that allows anyone with an HTML page to embed a Facebook app on their site.

Essentially it means that as a site developer you now have access to the Facebook infrastructure to build your own niche social network - saving you time and effort, giving you a robust, scalable platform, and giving Facebook potential new users as people sign up to take advantage of your network.

TechCrunch call it a clever move. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for the first really cool use of this extension to the platform.

Looks like I was right when I said that I guessed it was just an unintended consequence when Facebook implemented the beacon that accidental data leakage count occur.

The process has now been tweaked and looks like it's working just how I'd expect it to - keeping me in control of my personal information.

Good on you Facebook for listening and doing the right thing.

I'm a fan of Facebook and the concept of social networking and their particular slant on things. I'm also really intrigued what's going to happen as their platform continues to evolve over time.

One thing I'm a little wary of however is invasive advertising and accidental leakage of personal data.

I was initially quite surprised when I logged into my wifes Blockbuster account today and had it offer to send my data to my Facebook profile.

Luckily I managed to hit the "no thanks" button before it did (not that I have any credibility in my taste in movies, but my daughters SpongeBob wish list wouldn't help!)

I did a little bit of searching on the web to see what was going on and discovered I was behind the curve on the outrage that had accompanied this which meant I was able to look at it with less vehemence than some had visited upon Facebook and their partners.

My biggest concern I guess it having Blockbuster and others sharing data without giving me obvious and timely control over the process, especially when the data it's about to share is wrong!

I elect to share my twitter posts, or Last.FM data publicly because there's nothing private and personal. But I do consider my movie and TV viewing or Amazon purchases to be private - not just because I don't see value in sharing them simply to help someone (be it Facebook, Google or Amazon) track data about me but also because I don't like the potential inferences they may make because they don't have context surrounding the decisions. I don't watch SpongeBob, my daughter does. I didn't rent Forever Young with Mel Gibson, my wife did. I didn't buy a book on Renaissance painters for me, it was a gift for my Mum.

If I can control what is shared and when (so I can give it context or filter the irrelevant) then I'd be happy to share data with them. If Blockbuster or Amazon included something like the MadKast "ShareThis" widget or AdaptiveBlue Smartlinks on every line (ideally with a multi-select option for my Blockbuster queue).

If it makes the advertising and personalization more appropriate, just in the same way I love the idea of fine-tuned TV advertising, I'd be happy to share.

For now though, I've added a new AD Blocker filter rule to IE7Pro - all calls to *.facebook.com/beacon/* get blocked ... when I get a bit more granular control I'll be happy to turn the rule off again.

FWIW I don't think Facebook did it to be sneaky or "evil", they simply didn't look at it quite as carefully as they could have and think about the unintended consequences.