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…

Peer to peer technologies have a pretty bad name. The immediate association is with BitTorrent and pirated movies and ISP throttling but step back from that and you’ll discover that there are some interesting products turning up that take the old idea of the network being the computer and putting it to good use.

Probably one of the first peer to peer applications to get traction was SETI@Home which parceled out data from the Arecibo radio telescope for users to analyze in the hope of finding repeated patterns. They may still be searching for intelligent life in the universe, but the idea spread and a number of similar @Home projects developed their own architectures but all on the underlying premise – by getting users to donate CPU cycles they could contribute to the project – be it searching for aliens, a cure for cancer or the largest prime number.

Over time a number of these projects realized that having different runtimes and communications infrastructures was inefficient and didn’t help optimize the network effects of a peer to peer community and eventually BOINC evolved as an open source grid computing platform that in turn supported SETI@Home, Folding@Home, ClimatePrediction.Net and many others.

But searching for aliens isn’t the end of the platforms taking advantage of the power of peer to peer processing. There are two other platforms that have recently launched that are challenging the established thinking.

Search

Search itself has traditionally been the remit of the companies with the big pockets. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and others dedicate millions of dollars to building and running the server farms that crawl the web, build the indexes and serve up the queries to their visitors and unless you’re pretty sure of your business model that’s going to be a scary market to break into. Unless your business model doesn’t need you to deploy all those servers or storage because your uses will.

Faroo, a German start-up, have exactly that model. Users run a small, lightweight application on their machine which serves three functions. The first is that it runs using idle CPU and network bandwidth to crawl the web building up an index and distributing it around other connected peers for optimal search performance. The second function is that responds to search queries – both yours and, if suitably configured, other users to give results from your local cache, the distributed index and various 3rd party search solutions. The third function is that it monitors where users are going on the web and uses that to prioritize the search indexing, which enables it to react very quickly to trending topics while still maintaining the ongoing drive to build a bigger network.

While Faroo are not yet making revenue off their search engine they have a plan that will allow them to share the revenue with both the users who are contributing most to the network and a number of charitable causes. It will be interesting to see if this will scale and be able to remain relevant – ReadWriteWeb asked this question and others, but they, and much of the commentary seem quite positive on the ability for Faroo to do well.

Storage

The other technology that requires a fairly high investment in infrastructure is remote storage. Services like Microsoft’s SkyDrive obviously provide robust and reliable storage but at a cost that most startups would find hard to compete against. Wuala (another strange name, and from Switzerland this time) have taken the same concepts of peer to peer networking that underlie the storage requirements of Faroo and similar projects and use it to launch a scalable file storage and sharing platform in a way that enables them to minimize their bandwidth and storage costs. They do provide a copy of the data on their servers but by default they serve it from the peer network first and only refer back to their infrastructure if there isn’t a viable instance available.

To leverage the network effect best Wuala reward active, online participants who contribute storage to the pool (with a reliable, high availability connection earning you a higher reward) with additional storage options. Their business model doesn’t rely on serving advertisements (which seems to be the de facto Web 2.0 pitch) but allows users to also buy additional guaranteed availability storage without having to provide capacity to the network in return. In the short time since they launched they’ve gained quite an active user base.

Broadcast

While BitTorrent may be the first thing to spring to mind when you talk about p2p and video today, that not may be true in the future if the new LiveStation platform takes off (and having used it for a while I can see why it should!)

Using technology licensed from Microsoft Research, and Silverlight to deliver the user experience LiveStation uses a peer to peer network to deliver a scalable live video broadcast platform. In a traditional experience the more users viewing the content the more infrastructure was required (either for the broadcaster or the content distribution network) but with LiveStation the opposite is true – the more users the better the platform is able to distribute the loan between peers giving a better end user experience without having to worry about scalability of the backend solution. As long as there’s enough infrastructure to seed the network they should be able to cope with any number of viewers – and use their dedicated infrastructure to insert adverts or manage other aspects of ensuring the service is commercially viable.

Is Peer to Peer the answer?

It’s hard to know at the moment how well any of these services will take off.

BOINC and it’s predecessors appealed heavily to the more technical end of the spectrum so installing and configuring a download wasn’t too much of a barrier to entry (though as it becomes more mainstream and they continue to not evolve the user experience to that audience I wonder if that will harm their growth). Both Faroo and Wuala are aiming firmly at the typical end user though so they’re going to have to overcome trust issues to get their engine running on as many machines as possible as quickly as possible, and they’ll have to make the experience so easy that after the initial installation the nodes work as effectively as possible.

At first glance Faroo has done a good job of making a fairly simple installation experience with sensible defaults to provide maximum benefit to the user and the network without too much downside (as it’s developed in .Net on a Windows machine there’s no need for additional overhead such as the Java runtime) but the Wuala experience has a little way to go – not only does it require Java the configuration process and usage isn’t as intuitive – but both of these are in beta so I’d expect them to improve and evolve over the coming releases.

LiveStation seems to have a great platform and user experience but needs more varied content to make it a viable long term winner – partnerships with more networks and perhaps providers such as Netflix or Blockbuster would make them a winner.

I think in the  foreseeable future the traditional model of centrally hosted and managed solutions are going to continue apace but the viability of peer to peer solutions is going to allow more new competitors to enter the landscape and scale quickly and reliably. Perhaps we’ll even see a generic platform like BOINC evolve to provide a common services layer that handles the communication and security (and the initial install issue) and subsequent solutions simply deploy as add-ins with their own user interface, secure storage and networking / CPU asks of the user…

What those solutions look like… online time – and imagination – will tell…

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 :)

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.

I am at Defrag in Denver for the next couple of days. Because I'm taking notes on paper and not live blogging (I hate this portable keyboard. must get a better solution before my next trip) I'll link to Phil Windley who is doing a great job.

There are some really amazing speakers and conversations going on. I'm really glad to be here. I hope to gather my thoughts later in the week... 

When I remember I Twitter. I'm not very reliable or consistent in my posting (and I'm more likely to use it from the web than SMS that maybe cuts down the spontaneity (must get a cellphone plan with including texting).

Just like updating my Facebook status or changing my Messenger status I'm not really sure that it adds much to the communications with my friends (though I get enough complaints when I go quiet for a week that maybe it is).

I've finally found an explanation for maybe why it is worth updating these status messages - this exhaust data confirms that the network is alive and well and it just performs a comforting action. I even found out there is a term for this sort of small talk - Phatic communication.

So no, Twitter isn't just noise... it provides social reassurance, confirmation that the network is working and... an opportunity to learn random titbits.

To the right you will notice a series of monsters.

They all have something in common.

Can you guess what it is?

They represent the various email addresses that I've used on a regular basis over the last decade using a new authentication / anti-spoofing technique called MonsterID that has been implemented in a number of programming languages to make it easy to adopt.

The idea is pretty simple.

If you're presented with a login form and you know what certain input should generate graphically then it's hard for a fake site to spoof that input (for instance you enter your userid and as well as your password you then have to select the correct critter from a page of randomly generated ones. Obviously to make a site secure the seeding and images would have to be unique to that site to avoid simple spoofing from the common set of images.

The system can also be used to automatically generate cute alternative icons for a system such as Gravatar. In that case a common consistent set of images would be handy to help you recognize "friends" across different networks.

It looks like the latter form of MonsterID may well make it into my new blog platform of choice which will certainly liven the themes up a little.

The folks behind BlogEngine.net are certainly taking securing the platform against robot form fillers, comment and trackback spammers quite seriously and if MonsterIDs somehow add another level of protection I'll be glad to see them make an appearance in an upcoming release ;)