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…

Every listing on eBay or Craigslist has one thing in common – if the seller is serious they’ll include pictures. Sometimes the pictures will be pretty low res cameraphone, other times they will be hi-res dSLR photos taken with proper lighting.

No matter how good the photo though, or the slideshow viewer they’re presented in they’re just like the images everyone is used to seeing.

Now Photosynth has a Silverlight powered viewer there’s no reason not to take advantage of the capabilities to link to a synth or embed it in your listing.

As you can see from the synth above it’s not just a case of throwing a few photos into the tool and hoping for the best – that gets you a pretty choppy result – but even so it’s possible to navigate around the image and even have a look inside. The site has a video that explains the simple steps to create a good synth.

Do you know any examples of people using Photosynth to spice up their listings – and did it help?

With the current economic climate a lot of folks have been wondering about the future of ad supported content on the web - from services like Hulu to blogs like TechCrunch.

It was always a touch challenge even in the boom times when I worked at rushTV to ensure that you could raise enough money from ad inventory to make a living.

For content creators models like sponsorship and advertorial only go so far - sure you can get a better, or more predictable return from them but it's a very fine line to walk especially if you have a sponsor who wants to influence the content you deliver.

The other balance is how much advertising do you run. If a site gives up 30-45% of it's real estate to flashing, rotating, expanding adverts how much of the actual content will users be able to consume.

Sophisticated users are getting more aggressive using Ad Blocking scripts or proxies to shield themselves from advertising all together which means the content providers lose out.

Some sites supplement or replace advertising with paid membership or premium content - ranging from reputable news sites to porn the model works if you're providing consistent value to the user and they're willing to pay for an ad-free experience (I do that for my Hotmail Plus service for instance).

Many blogs and smaller sites today don't have enough of a draw to charge users even a few bucks a year to visit, and there isn't a practical micropayment solution out there yet. While I use Hotmail every day so the $20/yr works out at a nickel a day but while I might pay a few bucks a year for Engadget I visit Valleywag so rarely that I wouldn't want to commit any upfront money to it.

That leads me to an opportunity for the ad serving companies.

They already have an infrastructure in place, they track users, they have the network.

If I could go to (for example) DoubleClick and pay them $20/yr to never see one of their adverts (or a pre-determined low impact ad threshold - no interstitial, no animation, text only placement out of the main content experience etc) and the ad network shares a portion of that up-front fee with the sites in their network based on eyeballs then everyone wins (including the network who can invest and earn interest on the upfront fee of course).

It even creates a new market for a single aggregation point that does deals with all the advertisers. Just like I don't want to pay each site individually I don't want to have to pay DoubleClick and MSN and AdMob and Burst etc

The ad funded web isn't going to die any time soon, but the business models will need to change and adapt over time to provide a better experience and less volatile model.

I’m never organized enough to clip coupons (or even remember to collect them from the supermarket) so Cellfire seems like an ideal solution.

It’s a small application that runs on your Windows Mobile phone (or can be accessed via a web browser interface) which downloads available local offers (you tell it your postcode) and you can search and redeem them in stores.

The offers range from half price coffee to free slices of pizza, video rental or music downloads and many others, frequently updated and offered at no cost to you (beyond data costs if you download updates over the air)

I love the idea, but I think there are some ways it could improve to make it a much more useful.

• Searching and filtering offers is a bit rudimentary, I’d like to see more granularity so I can quickly see if there’s something relevant to my current needs, but at the same time it’s important for their business model to have the serendipity of discovering new stores so a general browse mode is still needed. I’d like to be able to specify things I’m not interested in (diapers or all-you-can-eat Seafood Diners for instance) and raise the priorities of things I am (eg non-chain coffee shops, organic produce, independent music stores).
• Location appropriate offers. I’m not going to drive 20 miles for a half price latte so it’s not worth showing those to me when I look for coffeeshops, but by talking to the GPS on my phone (or maybe integrating with something like Navizon for users without GPS) the offers can be much better targeted to where I am right now. A neat, but slightly freaky, extension would be to look ahead in my calendar to see what locations I’ve entered and find offers in those areas as well.
• Smart sorting. Similar to the location appropriate offers it makes sense to show me the closest offers first as I’m more likely to use them, but it would be good to have options to also sort based on other factors such as value of offer or loyalty to a specific store.
• Mapping integration. Don’t just give me the address give me a hot link to Windows Live Search for Mobile or (if not available) to Live Maps so I can get directions. Also with map integration you could plot offers and let me optimize my shopping trips ;)

The other thing I’d like to see is better integration with supermarket coupons – I’d be willing to pair my QFC Club Card to my Cellfire account in order to have relevant offers/coupons made available electronically (and it would be great if I could scan them at the quick checkout and not need to queue at the counter – similar to what we showed at Advance08). It would greatly enhance the value of the application and make more more likely to take advantage of some of the promotions offered. In fact if managed well it could be a real loyalty bonus as you’d have a constant reminder of the value of your continued patronage.

One new feature Cellfire could accommodate would be Club Card membership. Rather than me need to carry around the barcodes for QFC, Blockbuster and Borders I could enter the information (either in the app or via their website) and have the card image delivered to my phone so I can scan that and dump the plastic chits. It’s a much simpler solution and even more practical than some other solutions I’ve seen.

Just like the Zune commercial no-one has ever seen when I see things like this I wonder why Microsoft are not smarter with their advertising.

Sync has made a good start but to start fighting back, and maybe there’s more of a move in the right direction.

The search engine wars are heating up with shopping a prime mover … why advertise or try to get your search results higher if you don’t want to promote something after all.

Apart from helping us find things search hasn’t traditionally been a very “giving” process. The search engine providers, advertisers and folks creating pages to serve us click-through's are the ones making all the money.

Now that’s set to change with the introduction of Live Search CashBack. The idea is simple… you look for something you’re interested in and… you have the option of buying it from someone who will put money back into your pocket (via PayPal, bank transfer or check) just for shopping with them. Everyone gets part of the reward, advertisers get more customers, users get value, Live gets more search and everyone is happy.

The service was announced at Advance08 and has already received some positive reactions.

I had a quick play for the first time today… sign-up is quick and simple, and the process fairly straight forward. Give it a try…

I recently bought a Zune and I’m surprised how pleased I am with it. I guess I shouldn’t be, but after being an iPod user for some years and listening to the haters it was easy to pick on the flaws.

Then I got one and now I don’t think I’ll go back. It works really well, the audio quality is great and I prefer the Zune Marketplace and ZunePass to the alternatives.

I found this advert for the Zune (the original from Digital Kitchen is here, but requires QuickTime)… Most of the Microsoft adverts on TV don’t move me (and don’t get me started on the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads) but if we could get Digital Kitchen to cook up some more like this I’d be a fan!

In the last few days I seem to have visited an inordinate number of sites that instead of engaging with me in the 2 seconds they have to get my attention they've shown me a Flash plug in that sits there going "Loading" and has a percentage bar crawling across the screen.

These sites had all sent me email inviting me to come and learn about a wonderful seasonal opportunity or great offer. They'd managed to engage me enough to click the link in the email (note - this isn't an invite for Spam. Even if you get through Spamcop and the other blocks I've got in the way I'm not likely to click unless you've managed to target me accurately with something I actually care about).

Then they blow it by assuming I want to watch a progress bar for 2 minutes simply to watch an ad.

Now, the smart ones feature a prominent "skip intro" button I can click and get to the main course. Others actually optimize their Flash experience so that they do display something useful within a couple of seconds that I can interact with and continue my journey (while they finish loading stuff in the background).

The dumb ones (and sadly they seem to be in the majority) suffer the unintended consequence of totally disengaging me (and put me off returning because I assume I'll get the same gatekeeper).

Oh, and I'll add news sites that show me an interstitial advert before I can even get engaged with their homepage. It's just my daily reading workload down!

Now Microsoft have unleashed Silverlight on the web and so we can expect to see a new wave of creative, imaginative splash pages. Even if the creators of those don't do anything totally earth shattering they will make the web a better place if they think about the first 2-5 seconds of engagement.

And maybe just use Silverlight to spice up a page rather than force me to do everything in a RIA where I can't deep-link to content or navigate with the keyboard.

In the meantime... I'll keep clicking [close] - I wonder how many analytics packages report that sort of behavior and flag it as something site owners need to correct....

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.