11–20 of 121 posts
Farmville is evil; Zynga makes Farmville; Google invested in Zynga. Q.E.D. ;-)
"Okay, we need the new chewy coco grove coconut tree special item out by next Monday. So that means everyone's coming in on saturday."
But how can you argue with 85 million users and a billion in revenue? Google sure can't.
Can you imagine working on Farmville? I mean, it would be like going into work every day to refine the equivilent of the Fisher Price moo farm toy [1] except a) for adults and b) relatively juvenile. Imagine the meetings, mostly run by marketing idiots. "Okay, we need the new chewy coco grove coconut tree special item out by next Monday. So that means everyone's coming in on saturday." But how can you argue with 85 m…
Does this mean we can finally abandon the idea that Google's mission is "to organize the world's information"?
I don't quite understand how this fits into the grand scheme of Google. Now I think Google is just buying stuff to buy stuff. Though I could see acquiring user-interaction data being useful, especially in the casual space.
This data is important for search, but critical for ads.
Does this mean we can finally abandon the idea that Google's mission is "to organize the world's information"?
Not if the article's argument is correct and this is really about the social graph.
And to the extent that it's about "the social graph", it's about making money off the social graph. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but as Google becomes increasingly involved with owning, controlling, and/or providing content, as opposed to just "organizing" it (indexing the web, organizing email, etc.), their mission statement becomes more PR fluff than truth.
With Search and Gmail, their ability to obtain user data at least hinged upon Google's superior ability to index web and email information and make it "universally accessible and useful." Obtaining social graph data through an existing social games developer isn't like that at all.