Word: facebooks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Zynga's tactic of gaming Facebook's architecture was critical to its takeoff. It flooded Facebook with ads. It exploited the social network's distribution engine to pepper players' friends with updates and invitations. To release games quickly, it used a roll-up strategy, buying YoVille, licensing Texas HoldEm (which it renamed zyngapoker) and imitating rivals. Playfish's Restaurant City was around before Cafe World, and FishVille is reminiscent of Crowdstar's Happy Aquarium. Even FarmVille rips off Happy Farm, a hugely popular online game in China (richly ironic, given China's disregard for intellectual property). Once it had collected...
...this, the company needed money and had to prove to investors that offering free games on Facebook was a sound proposition. Zynga attracted $39 million in start-up money and got a second wave of $15 million this month. Ads and virtual goods bring in most of the revenue. But because people who play free games on the Internet like the free part, Zynga needed a third income stream--product come...
Zynga did not create the sketchy offers, which are outsourced, but neither did it have a handle on them. "We have always policed offers for content," says Pincus. "But there's thousands of offers and hundreds of new ones every week." Facebook and MySpace tightened their guidelines after getting complaints. Then a tech blogger confronted the CEO of a company that creates offers. She answered his accusations unwisely ("S___, double s___ and bulls___"), and it blew up online. Also on the Internet: footage of Pincus speaking at a University of California, Berkeley, event about how he funded his start...
...worst in some critics, drawing sexist insults (an opponent once called her a Spice Girl, she writes) and snooty dismissals (which only boost her outsider image). She has a knack for sound bites, as when she inflamed the health care debate with two words, death panels, on Facebook...
Still, a public figure could get used to the freelance life. Through her book (and Facebook), Palin gets to control her story. The interviews don't involve pop quizzes. And at a reported $5 million for Going Rogue, the paydays are lush. November 2012 is three years off, an eternity in the evolution of a reality-TV star. For now, there's no business like rogue business...