Zynga

THE INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT without a search engine, Yahoo has announced a package of products that it hopes will make it more relevant again. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Yahoo showed off a host of products that it claimed would deliver to consumers a more “personally relevant Web experience with new social and local features”. You guessed it, more social networking and more experiences than you can poke a stick at. ...

SharesPost has valued Farmville developer Zynga Game Network at $5.51 billion, according to Business Week. That means it is now estimated to be bigger than console publisher Electronic Arts, which stands at a market cap of $5.16 billion. It still has a long way to go to beat Activision Blizzard, which has a market cap of $13.9 billion. While making such direct comparisons isn’t completely accurate, nor fair, it gives us a snapshot at how quickly social network gaming is growing. Zynga was founded four years ago and already six of the 10 most popular apps on Facebook belong to it, and it has more than 210 million monthly active users. ...

218 million “class members” probably won’t settle for Farmville dollar A suit has been filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of a Minnesota woman charging game maker Zynga with leaking the personal information of 218 million Facebook members in violation of federal law. The suit seeks class action status. The action follows by three days an investigative story by The Wall Street Journal that found a large number of Facebook’s apps – including Zynga games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars – leaked the user IDs of Facebook players and their friends to outside companies. ...

Oh dear — looks like it’s time to add FarmVille to the list of internet addiction scares after a 12-year-old UK boy has amassed £905 in FarmVille debt. About £288 of that came from the boy’s own savings, while £625 was billed to his horrified mother’s credit card. The debt — which is equivalent to about $1400 USD — was racked up in all of about two weeks’ worth of gameplay. In the popular casual Facebook game, players can spend real money to accrue virtual currency and items. It’s a business that’s booming enough to garner the game’s developer Zynga an estimated valuation as high as $5 billion. ...