An Amazing Opportunity

With Zynga and Facebook fighting away, there is an amazing opportunity for many companies including Yahoo and Google. Yahoo spent nearly $75M - $100M last year on its marketing campaign. Google is trying really really hard to contain Facebook. It tried "Google Buzz". Yahoo is trying to buy Foursquare for 100M-125M.

I believe "The Giants" should try to rope in Zynga on favorable terms to Zynga by pledging decent promised revenue. 10M-20M or maybe more is not much of a money for google and it should make things like virtual game currency up to certain level free if the game is played on their websites. Also, another way of bringing users to their platform would be give good virtual money if you play game on these websites and have newly connected friends out here like for every 10 friends you connect here on this new platform, you get virtual game currency.

Its a win - win situation for all the entities involved:

Zynga: Zynga on its terms one of them being user can play the game on any website be it Yoville, Yahoo, Google. It can partner with these websites and be promised of decent revenue. Also, Zynga should start its own social networking version. But gaming should be its own focus to begin with.

Google/Yahoo: Social Networking currently is in a stage where its all about your connections. If many of your friends are active on other network, you will be forced to move to other network. The advantage the giants have is their already huge user base. The positive they get out by partnering with Zynga is they can promote their own network and reduce the clout that Facebook is trying to achieve.

The biggest looser because of the fallout will be Facebook. Its trying to bully the users and is already getting negative publicity for its privacy settings. Secondly by bullying its biggest partner it might scare away the other partners. Because of its size this might not be significant in the long run and odds are still in favor of Facebook, but this is a good time for rivals to give a shot.

The weakness that Facebook has which pretty much every other social network has currently is every where its all about users connections and their updates and their generated content. If a social network against it nature makes itself about users own content in addition to the social content, users would be hard pressed not to leave even if they want to. Because even if one of the friend gets on another network but all the user generated content is on this current network and user likes to see it in one or the other form he would be forced to stay on this network. Same with all of his connections and their connections... virally it becomes tough for anyone to leave the network. This is still not an issue. I used Orkut then myspace then facebook. I can move to next one pretty soon. Thats why we see twitter becoming so huge even after Facebook came along. The question here is what is user content... I think thats the next big thing industry should be moving to.