Social Media Ecology

(3/11/2013) Remember Farmville on Facebook? The company, Zynga, struggled recently to maintain a sustainable revenue (a scandal of copying game ideas from competitors) after this once an everybody-play game on Facebook lost its ability to catch eyeballs. Facebook is a big fertile land for application developers to harvest but only if Facebook is consistent in supporting their apps. It looks like Facebook is so big that it does not care little app developers. Will this karma eventually come back and give Facebook some lessons in the future? Time will tell.

(4/21/2013) This is a news talking about the gloomy future of gaming on social media (e.g., Facebook). I am not a gamer of farmville when it was popular on facebook and I don't understand why people play games on social media. This news provides several insights for the gaming on social media hype. Three days later, this news says Zynga lost 21% of its daily gamers. Wow, gaming industry is as tough as movie studios: one day sunshine, another day blizzard storm.

You Have To Use Google+

(1/3/2013) Google provides a lot of free applications to users -- free. With some successes (gmail, calendar...) and some failures (like google buzz), google is pretty much just let users to determine each application's future. However, the potential of social network seems to be too good to let go, google is pushing its users to connect through google+ while you want to reach its other free services.