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…

Blogging has been great for a lot of folks as residual income from Amazon or ads at least covers the hosting and beer money.

As more people move to micro-blogging with services like Twitter the question has turned to how people (including Twitter themselves) can make money on these services.

Ad.ly like to think that they have an answer with sponsored tweets – though delivering one every couple of days at a buck a tweet (and a $50 minimum payout) it’s probably going to be a while before they see their first millionaire!

I thought I’d give it a try just to see how it compares to the other click-through stuff I have hosted here…

Back before graphical user interfaces on PCs and the rise of Web 2.0 and the Rich Internet Application you could tell a power user by their mastery of the command line.

It may have been typing ls in a Unix shell or dir at a DOS prompt but these guys knew how to get things done in the leanest, most efficient way. No redundant mouse clicks, no waiting for the translucency animation to rotate your menu options into view. Bang! and move on to the next thing.

Part of the beauty of Twitter is that it goes back to those days of terse interaction and great power.

When it started it was just a simple way to display your status and post messages to your friends (publicly with @ and privately with "d {username}") but it's started to become a lot more.

My first discovery was that I could pipe things to twitter - so I didn't have to do anything to publicize a new blog post but automatically pull from the sites RSS feed to twitter. I use twitterfeed for that.

Then I discovered there were other robots out there that I could send messages to and have things happen. Sandy (sadly now closed down) was an ever helpful personal assistant, gtFtr tracks my exercise stats, Kvetch lets me vent and my most recent discovery is TrackThis which lets me get updates on any FedEx, UPS, USPS or DHL package I have in transit just by sending them a message with the tracking number.

Twitter is also reducing the amount of time I spend in email, IMing and blogging. Rather than clutter up my inbox with one line emails I can use Twitter. I can use Twitter when I don't want to be distracted by the constant ping of Messenger. Rather than try and turn a 2 line blog post into something interesting I can tweet it. if I can't express myself in 140 characters then maybe I need to think more about the post.

In the same way that the command prompt made you more productive if you were willing to learn a few tricks (such as idiosyncratic syntax) Twitter is filling that space in the interconnected internet world... and it's allowing me to do it from everywhere - at my desk, on any web enabled PC or via my phone - it's bringing consistency of experience and incremental benefit to learning those tricks.

So how do you use Twitter as the command prompt for Web 2.0?

Do you Tweet?

Do you have a Windows Mobile phone?

I do and I love TinyTwitter. It's the best mobile client for twitter bar none (try it and see) and it's now even better.

How could it get better you ask (because you already use it.... right... if not.... try it now!)

It's better in two ways...

• Picture uploads: append a picture to any tweet and it gets posted to TwitPic. You don't need to do anything, magic just happens. Click to see what I've uploaded.
• Geolocation: if you have a GPS you can tell everyone where you are. It takes the boring latitude and longitude numbers your GPS returns (built in or bluetooth connected) and can do a reverse address lookup to tell you where you are near (not close enough for stalkers to find you!) and posts it to your timeline along with a Live Maps link so people can see where you are on a map as well.

So if you want to try out the (new) goodness go to TinyTwitter.com on your PC or direct to m.ttwt.at if you are viewing this on a phone.

Oh, and there is a J2ME/Blackberry version available as well if you're not a Windows Mobile user.

Oh, and on the PC I still like Digsby for updating Twitter and checking Hotmail and Gmail...

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 :)

Mike Butcher thinks that Twitter is moving away from a status update tool and becoming more of a conversation starter.

I think I agree with him at the moment, but I'm not sure how I'm going to end up using Twitter longer term.

When I first started with it I did use it as a status update thing (once I got over the "why bother" hump). I tweeted when I was waiting for a bus or cleaning my teeth. I used it in the same way I treat the status box in Windows Live Messenger - to share some information about what I'm doing now (usually what song I'm listening to) with my contacts.

Then I started to discover the value as a conversational tool - less immediate (but often more pervasive) than IM but at the same time more robust, especially when you didn't need the relative overkill of email for a one-liner.

I've also noticed that the one line venting has reduced the number of blog posts I have written - there's something about the 140 character vent that often takes away the need for a full blown post.

Tweets are not like ephemeral IMs or status updates in WLM - they have a timeline and permanence which changes the nature somewhat.

I don't think Twitter is 100% there yet though. For my needs Direct Messages are not handled elegantly enough - I'd like a "Whisper" mode where I can send a private tweet to one (or more) people that appears in their timeline if they're viewing it (authenticated) but not in public view (perhaps ~offbeatmammal to whisper, like we have @offbeatmammal for a public reply or # for hashtags to collate tweets on a subject).

I think Twitter has changed the way a lot of people communicate - mostly for the better. There are some who are a lot of noise to signal but you get that in any communications channel. Some I like having the conversation with (and watching their conversations unfold), others I value the status updates.

I wonder what's next for communications...

Despite the fact my phone has a very average camera in it sometimes it's handy to be able to take a quick snap and share it with folks.

I can upload it to Spaces with the in-built functionality, but it doesn't make it easy to Twitter it or send it to Flickr.

Until, that is, I discovered a new (still in beta so be gentle) service called MobyPicture.

They do one thing, and they do it really well.

You take a snapshot on your camera phone and then send it either as an MMS message or as an attachment to an email and they recognize who it's being sent to and perform what magic you've asked them to do.

You can either just store it on their site. A good starting point because you can always reference it manually from a blog or point someone to your moblog but it doesn't end there.

By adding your Twitter credentials they can post a message pointing folks to the phone.

By giving your Flickr account they can upload the photo to Flickr with some pre-defined tags

In fact there's quite a list of places you can send to (and you can send to none, one or all if you so choose). As well as the ones above MobyPicture also supports:

• Distribution to Hyves
• Distribution to Tumblr
• Distribution to Blogger
• Distribution to Wordpress
• Distribution to Jaiku
• Distribution to Kyte.tv
• Distribution to Splashcast
• and more to come... (hopefully Facebook and Spaces)

Now all they need is a native Windows Mobile app (like TinyTwitter) that can grab the photo, let me rotate and crop if needed and then send it and I'll be really happy ;)

As a fairly frequent twitterer (and follower of more than a couple smart folks) I decided that even though it's only a few cents a Twit it all adds up after a while, so I've been using my unlimited data plan and Pocket IE on my iMate K-Jam (aka HTC Wizard / T-Mobile MDA) to access the mobile Twitter interface

A couple of days ago I saw a Tweet from FrankArr pointing me to TinyTwitter - a native application that runs on Windows Mobile (PocketPC/Professional or Smartphone formats), as well as any Java enabled device (including the Crackberry).

It's a perfect accompaniment to Twitter - it has all the goodness of the very lightweight mobile platform but opens up other API related stuff so you get pictures and the option to follow just one users posts in an uncluttered list etc.

When I set up a new phone this will be one of the first apps I stick on it.