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Farmville: The best and worst of Facebook

March 16, 2010 By 2 Comments

FarmVille 'Takes the Cake'.

Social games like FarmVille are serious business. With more than 84 million active users and 30 million daily active users, FarmVille remains the top game on Facebook — and the top nuisance for nongamers.

FarmVille, a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, allows Facebook members to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, trees, and raising livestock. Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook. Over 20% of Facebook users  (over 1% of the population of the world) is active in FarmVille.

FarmVille is unavoidable for Facebook members — whether they choose to participate or not.  If you’re Facebook friends are playing it, you’ll be asked to get involved.  FarmVille leverages the social networking aspects of Facebook:

  • Along with their own farm, players can invite their friends to join and be neighbors.
  • Acquiring neighbors has benefits. With eight or more neighbors, a player can expand their farm and own more acreage.
  • Gifts (crops, animals, and decorations) can be sent to both confirmed neighbors and any other Facebook friends even if they do not use the application.
  • The Gifts received from neighbors usually have relatively expensive buy prices in the market, so getting gifts from friends is one of the best ways to get expensive items.
  • Many of the items available to gift to friends can’t be bought in the FarmVille market.

According to Inside Social Games, the market for virtual goods generated more than one billion dollars in revenue in 2009 — and could hit 1.6 billion in 2010.   About 80 percent of the virtual goods revenue on Facebook is being generated by third-party application vendors such as Zynga. The popular online game uses two units of in-game currency: ‘farm cash’ and ‘farm coins,’ — which can be purchased with a credit card,  PayPal, or Facebook Credits (Facebook’s virtual currency).

By integrating ‘Facebook credits’ into FarmVille in March, 2010, Zynga has helped ensure their viability.

Cleanup the Farm

Is your Facebook stream cluttered by the games people play (Farmville, Mafia Wars, and the like)? You can cleanup your Facebook stream by disabling or hiding unwanted applications in Facebook. This prevents notices from the application from crowding your facebook homepage.

To drop updates from an unwanted application or game in your facebook homepage, hover the mouse over any application update in your Facebook stream. When a dropdown menu appears to the right, click on ‘Hide [application name].’

Credits: Cake photo is by Anita Jamal. (It’s the kind of FarmVille I can really sink my teeth into.)

Welcome to Farmville

Further Reading:

Filed Under: Facebook, Misc T Tagged With: , , ,
About Troy Janisch

Troy Janisch, Publisher of Social Meteor, is a digital marketing professional and social media beatnik. He is a contributor to SmartBrief on Social Media. Troy leads the marketing team at Sentry Insurance, but don’t let that scare you. He rarely talks about insurance in mixed company [grin]. Like a good social media program, SocialMeteor.com is all about content. It’s not a consulting company or marketing agency.