zynga

Facebook rolls out its new privacy changes live during our show! How nice of them. In a nutshell, near as we can tell, everything is going to be simpler and Facebook is really sorry that they really mean it about the whole privacy thing. And we get that, but we need some time to get over it, you know? Also, the DOJ may be looking into Apple's iTunes monopoly and we have a big discussion about the future of American space shuttle. Get your emails ready now.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new privacy features for the site on Wednesday. The controls are simpler but not private by default. You still have to seek out privacy settings and change them if you care about controlling who sees what.

But this does seem to be an improvement.  Here is a short

You can now control who can see and interact with each and every thing that you post on a day-to-day basis. Facebook is calling this Granular Data Permission. There is also just one setting that turns off access to your information by third party sites … Read more

Yahoo once again has pride in its company, said CEO Carol Bartz Wednesday, just after outlining the dozens of ways in which the company needs to improve.

Investors and their Wall Street representatives are gathered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Wednesday for an investor day that was closed to the press, but available via Webcast. Yahoo's stock has gone on quite the roller-coaster ride over the past 12 months but as of Wednesday, it's almost exactly where it was a year ago. So how is Yahoo going to fix that issue?

By modernizing its technology and improving the amount of … Read more

The indignities start with problem in the New York studio that keep Molly from being visible on today's show, and then end with the realization that all those browser preferences are basically a trackable fingerprint that's further eroding any illusion of online privacy you might have ever had. Also, Google's getting into the phone business. Again.

The mood over at Farmville is less "Animal Farm" and more "Charlotte's Web"--or that's what the big tech companies involved would like us all to think.

In what may be the culmination of one of the past year's silliest Silicon Valley high-stakes playground games--or, perhaps more appropriately, barnyard games--social gaming giant Zynga and social network Facebook have put out a press release to announce that they are not, in fact, feuding. Actually, they've reached an agreement! For five whole years! In the name of all that is good and right in … Read more

At a gala charity event Saturday night featuring "Avatar" director James Cameron, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and a who's who of tech industry luminaries, the X Prize Foundation laid out its vision for the next five years.

Already in 2004, the foundation has paid out $10 million in prize money for the winner of the Ansari X Prize, which in 2004 went to the first non-governmental team to launch a vehicle into space twice in two weeks. The prize winners were Burt Rutan and the Paul Allen-backed team that built SpaceShipOne.

The foundation offers … Read more

It may owe its fortunes to Facebook, but the word is that social-gaming giant Zynga is getting ready to launch its own site in a bid to wean itself from its dependency on the popular social network.

According to TechCrunch, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus hosted a company meeting Thursday afternoon in which he asserted that hit games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World and others might soon appear on their own social games site called Zynga Live.

"'Pincus announced at a 5 p.m. meeting yesterday at Zynga that Zynga was going to launch a social game network called Zynga Live,'" TechCrunch wrote, quoting from an anonymous insider e-mail.

The theory here is that Zynga and Facebook are clashing over the percentage that the social gaming giant might have to pay to use Facebook Credits, the social network's nascent currency platform.

"'Facebook and Zynga [have] been negotiating on Facebook Credits and the talks turned for the worst,'" TechCrunch quoted the e-mail as saying. "'In the negotiation process, Facebook shut off Zynga's feeds and threatened to shut down games. Zynga, in the process, threatened to completely leave Facebook and prepared to do so in the previous upcoming weeks."… Read more

Virtual meat hooks, flame throwers, and propane bombs are OK, but attack dogs are not: social-gaming behemoth Zynga has removed pit bulls from its roster of virtual weaponry in the Mafia Wars game after a complaint last month on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA's reasoning is that promoting a domestic animal as a weapon will only encourage misunderstanding and abuse of pit bulls, which have been routinely used in illegal dog-fighting activities and are often subject to horrific conditions as their owners attempt to toughen them up. The breed of dog has gotten bad … Read more

New data from PlaySpan, a provider of payment and monetization solutions for online games and virtual worlds, shows that digital and virtual goods purchases are going global, and that revenues can be tracked to better ascertain the size of the market.

It's estimated that virtual goods will generate $1.6 billion in the U.S. in 2010. Some predict that sales of digital goods will account for 20 percent of gaming revenue by 2011.

As part of analyzing which players and geographies drive the most revenue, PlaySpan has settled on a metric of average revenue per paying user (ARPPU), … Read more