Today Zynga launched Hidden Chronicles, a new Facebook game all about discovering hidden objects in an abandoned estate. It's sort of like "Where's Waldo?" in that users click on an image still over and over again until they finally find the objects within. Perhaps not-too-surprisingly, Hidden Chronicles is Zynga's first foray into the world of hidden-object games, and it's strikingly similar to Playdom's Gardens of Time, which was the number one Facebook game in 2011 based on both number of users and highest recommendations.
Zynga is trying to win the top five Facebook apps, especially the first one. So it's no wonder that Hidden Chronicles and Gardens of Time look and feel so similar. Both games begin in the same way: You arrive in another world and are asked to uncover hidden objects. The only real difference is that Hidden Chronicles has more of a Beauty and the Beast feel to it - you end up in your deceased Uncle Geoffrey's mysterious estate, and an assistant helps guide you through object-finding. In Gardens of Time, there's a bigger task at hand: You must travel through time to find objects that have been misplaced. In both hidden-object games, should you complete your mission, the society will be at peace.
Facebook has announced that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. Now everyone will see which games their friends are playing the most. Every week the news feed is becoming increasingly cluttered, prompting Facebook engineers to tweak the news feed algorithm. The fact that games will show up in the mobile news feed seems like great news for gamers, but what about everyone else?
New data from Hitwise shows that Facebook is the top-searched term in the U.S. for the third year in a row. It accounted for 3.1% of all searches, up 46% from last year. Four variations on "Facebook" were also among the top 10 terms, accounting for 4.42% of all searches. "Facebook login" was the third most-searched term of 2011, followed by "craigslist" and "facebook.com." The search term "www.facebook.com" came in eighth place after "yahoo" and "ebay."
Yesterday Facebook released its list of top games for 2011. Only four of those games were Zynga-owned. The number one and number two slots were filled by Disney Playdom's Garden of Time, a game about locating hidden objects through time travel and EA's The Sims Social, which is most similar the "real-world" virtual game Second Life. Zynga's CityVille, a game all about building "the city of your dreams," came in third. In the top casino games of 2011 category, Zynga took first place with Zynga Poker. Right now, 95% of Zynga's gaming strategy relies on Facebook, and just last week Zynga went public. What does this mean for Zynga?
Today Facebook launched a brand new page to explain just how its advertising works. The social network makes most of its money through ads.
This comes right after yesterday's announcement that sponsored stories will start popping up in the Facebook news feed. Sponsored stories are already appearing in the news ticker.
Today Digg and Facebook are getting close. Real close. Digg is unleashing its new social reader on Facebook. When users turn on social sharing from their Digg accounts, all the stories they read will be frictionlessly shared to their news feed, Timeline and their friends' news tickers.
This new feature smooshes together your Facebook social graph and your Digg social graph, two social sets that might not really have much in common. This is yet another attempt at making Digg more social, following on the heels of Digg's real-time newswire and social newsrooms, which function like topical channels curated by users. Will this new feature help Digg get back into social news?
Facebook has confirmed that in early 2012 users will start seeing sponsored stories in the news feed. A Facebook spokesperson tells us that these sponsored stories, which are essentially ads that a company or organization pays to feature, will roll out slowly. It hopes to show users no more than one clearly labeled sponsored story in the news feed per day.
Facebook recently added sponsored stories to its news ticker, the sometimes-useful though mostly annoying constant stream of news in the upper right-hand corner of the user's homepage.
Just days ago, Barack Obama officially announced the end of the Iraq War. Today Facebook launched its social media guide for military families, which outlines how family members can connect with loved ones who are stationed far away. To find it on Facebook, go here. This guide provides tips for staying in touching via Facebook, detailed information about uploading photos, status updates, sending messages, groups and pages and using chat and video chat.
Military personnel and their families must be extra careful of the types of information they share. The social media guide outlines ways to maintain operational security (OpSec), which is essential for all service members and their families.
AppData.com revealed that daily average use on Facebook for Android has, for the first time ever, surpassed Facebook for iPhone. The Android Facebook app now has 58.8 million daily average users, while Facebook for iPhone has only 57.6 million daily average users. This new data also coincides with the worldwide rollout of Facebook Timeline, which finally happened on December 15, 2011.
New research from Nielsen's NM Incite reveals that knowing someone in real-life is the number one reason people friend them on Facebook. Of the 1,865 adult social media users surveyed, 82% reported that they friend people they know in real life and 41% cite "don't know well" as the top reason for Facebook unfriending people. How does this data size up against Facebook's purported purpose of "helping build closer ties among friends"?
