After Sid Meier announced on Thursday that a new Civilization title called Civilization Network was on its way to Facebook, it had me thinking: what other games could I play until I'm ready to take on Meier's new title next year?
To determine that, I've spent some time with several games on Facebook and narrowed that list down to the titles that are actually worth playing. If you want to have some fun on Facebook, check out these games.
Get your game on
FarmVille At first glance, FarmVille might seem like a lame game that isn't worth playing. But once you give it a few minutes, I think you'll find that it's extremely addictive.
The premise behind FarmVille is simple: build a farm that grows all kinds of fruits and vegetables. When you first start the game, you'll see a few patches of land where you can start planting. From there, you need to ensure that your farm is healthy as you continue to grow the items in your inventory. The game features simple point-and-click controls, making it accessible for any Facebook user.
FarmVille's "neighbors" feature is quite fun. Users can find other "farmers" in their friends list and grow a nice, bountiful farm together. It's a great concept that adds more value to the game. And the best part is, the more people who farm in FarmVille, the more money that will go to Sweet Seeds for Haiti, a charity that gives healthy meals to families in Haiti. Try it out.
FarmVille features some fun, farming goodness.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Mafia Wars If you're as much of a fan of movies like "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas" as I am, you might have some fun with Mafia Wars.
The object of Mafia Wars is simple: become a boss of a mafia family. When you first start playing the game, you'll see several different "jobs" that you can take on. They include (pretty much) any criminal activity you can think of. That said, you won't actually engage in those activities like you would in a Grand Theft Auto game. Instead, you'll simply tell the game that you want to perform a particular job and you will. When complete, you receive more cash and credibility. Think of it as a simple role-playing game.
Like the other games in this roundup, Mafia Wars has a social element to it. Your goal is to recruit members into your own family as you fight for mafia dominance. When that social element comes in, Mafia Wars shows its value. It's a really fun game when you play with friends.
Mafia Wars asks you to perform jobs to become a mafia kingpin.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Civilization Network is coming to Facebook in 2010.
(Credit: Firaxis Games)Famed video game developer Sid Meier, best known for the Civilization franchise, announced on a Civilization Facebook page Thursday that a new title called Civilization Network is on its way to the social network.
According to Meier, he has been "looking at ways of expanding the Civilization gameplay experience to include solo, competitive, and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks." Civilization Network will allow users to join with friends to "create the world's most powerful, richest, smartest, or just plain coolest civilization," Meier said.
Like so many of its predecessors, Civilization Network will welcome users into a life-like world. Players will be able to take on others in battle, share technological innovations, form a government, win elections, manage growing cities, and more. Meier also said that users can "spy on enemies and work with friends to create the great Wonders of the World." He didn't say how users will control elements of the game.
Civilization fans will be happy to know that users can play as often as they'd like in the game's "fully persistent environment" for free.
Meier wrote on the game's Facebook page that he'll be looking for beta testers, once the closed beta is ready. Civilization Network will launch in 2010 on Facebook.
If you want to stay up-to-date on Civilization Network happenings, join its Facebook fan page here.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Twitter made the right decision by not accepting the Facebook deal. It's as simple as that.
Even better news: you can now subscribe to this show. Just add it up right here!
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Silicon Alley Insider on Monday wrote that it believes Twitter could be worth "a billion dollars" in one year as long as it "takes full advantage of (its) messaging platform, user base, and user disposition to lead in the P2P mobile payments space, where, despite years of hype, no one has much of a head start."
After reading through the piece, it had me thinking: what if Twitter isn't worth "billions" in one year and instead, it's worth nothing? Just because it has a huge user base and it may be able to take advantage of its messaging platform, can we simply forget that it's down every single day for extended periods of time? Can we simply forget that important features like "replies" are disabled for days at a time because "Twitter is stressing out"?
Twitter may be a destination for millions of people and a great place for self-indulged "Internet celebrities" to massage their egos as more and more people follow them, but it's a poorly designed site with huge stability issues and enough downtime that people are becoming more and more likely to jump ship and join services like FriendFeed and maybe even Jaiku.
It may be difficult to believe such a popular site could be worth nothing in a year, but the way I see it, it's certainly more likely than Twitter being worth $1 billion in that time.
... Read moreFor quite a while, I was nothing more than a social network hater. To me, social networks seemed like a ploy for those with so-called "notoriety" to massage their egos just a little bit more and provided no real benefit to anyone. After signing up for almost every social network in existence, I can say now that I was dead wrong.
Whether it's Twitter, FriendFeed or even Flickr, I'm extremely surprised by how much value each provides. And although I can't speak for everyone who uses these services, I honestly believe that each is unique and useful enough to justify your time.
Here's why:
... Read more
During this past year, a number of oddities emerged in the world of tech. First, Microsoft was forced to live through an unbridled flop, Apple was enjoying its meteoric rise as the most successful company of the year and social networks gained even more steam. On the back of that, the world's favorite social network, MySpace, quickly gave ground to Facebook and companies like the ill-fated Netscape tried to take on Digg.
And it's that site -- Digg.com -- that emerged this year, not necessarily as the most popular social site (it's tough to call it a full-fledged social networking company in the vein of a Facebook or MySpace), but as the best destination for people surfing the Web.
Don't believe me? Let's take a look at some other social networking sites to see why they couldn't make the cut.
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