Zynga Launches zFriends Social Service for is users
Zynga held an event today at their company headquarters in San Fransisco, California where they announced the launch of a new social service called “Zynga with Friends” or zFriends as most people adopted to this short snappy name. With this new service the company is looking to bind all their gamers across several social networking sites under one giant canvas. zFriends will feature its own ranking system, a profile that shows all your achievement from all your games and most importantly the ability to add other gamers as friends.
This new service will also support cross platform functionality which means now you can challenge a friend playing Texas Holdem Poker on Google+ from your iOS Device. Zynga also said that other elements of a community such as chat, activity feed etc. will also be added. Currently there are some features like social stream that can be found on the company’s main website but it is not so popular amongst their users.
With zFriends the goal remains the same “To Connect users through gaming”. It seems Zynga is finally taking bold steps to detach themselves from the Facebook authority and create an independent platform where they determine how things work. Zynga Stocks took a deep plunge in the last few months but after the announcement it seems to rise again. Another major announcement made by them is brand new API’s for partner program. Other gaming companies can use their API for their individual games. As of now the partner program is limited to some well-known publishing studios such as Majesco, 50 Cubes and Portalarium
It will be interesting to see how users respond to the zFriends platform. This is not the first time a gaming company is trying to build their own social elements. Popular iOS and Android Game Studios Gameloft also introduced their in-house social network detaching themselves from Apple’s Game Center. With Zynga though the stakes are higher as they currently have over 50 Million Active users using their games on a daily basis.
ZFriends Chat Service
The company CEO, Mark Pincus told everyone,” In the past minute 64,000 words have been played in the game. Zynga game players have drawn 43,000 pictures, played 38,000 hands of poker, opened 250,000 gifts from friends, played 140,000 turns of games together, and have sent more than 5,000 chats. Zynga releases 100 updates across its games each day, adding up to over 1,000 updates per week.”
Please let us know what you think about zFriends and add me in your profile so that we can play together.
