Facebook didn't know how successful Zynga would be.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
People don't want to leave Facebook to play games - Zynga's phenomenal success is proof of that.
I think one thing that may have happened with both Facebook and Zynga is that they may have waited too long to go public. They got particularly cute on that front.
Zynga made social gaming and play a worldwide phenomenon, and we remain the industry leader.
The big success stories - Facebook, Zynga and Twitter - are leading to investing in ideas on a napkin, because no one wants to miss out on the next big thing.
I actually think Facebook made it their business to be close with all of the app developers. They couldn't have done more.
Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that's right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that's better than television in terms of social connectivity.
Companies with aspirations to be larger publishers - Kabam, Kixeye, even Zynga - are moving aggressively off the Facebook platform to mobile and the open Web. Publishers aren't convinced that the costs of being on Facebook are worth it.
In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Zuckerberg turned them all down.
As with Google, Facebook was a place that just concentrated a lot of top talent. It's just sort of natural that those people would go on and continue to be successful.
Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.