An excellent interview with Playdom CEO John Pleasants. Playdom offers of Social City and Tiki Farm, amongst others, and is rumored to be in acquisition talks with Disney. Pleasants says:

Social gaming is going to die. That is, the term will become meaningless, as all games will become social. They will be on Facebook and MySpace and on phones and online and everywhere else.

We couldn’t agree more. Though where that leaves us is anybody’s guess.

The whole interview is worth reading.

Zynga, makers of the most popular social games, including new heavyweight FrontierVille, is on top of the world these days. However, usually when the New York Times, master of just-behind-the-curve reporting, anoints you the Google of Games it means your time has come and gone. We don’t think that the case here, but it would still make us sleep a little uneasy.

There is a new game, Cow Clicker. Its a parody of other social games like FarmVille. According to creator Ian Bogost, “you get a cow, you click on it, six hours later you can click on it again.” There is a bit more, but not much, and it seems largely designed to demonstrate his perception of the tedium of “challenge-free” social games.

We think you can have more fun by clicking on this article — or better yet, one of our advertisers — every six hours until boredom sets in. This is better than Cow Clicker as we promise to provide no meta commentary.

If you like shopping, but would like to get rid of the tedious aspects you can play Sugar’s new Retail Therapy social game.

Design and manage a boutique, purchase inventory, grind through 40 levels. Fun! OK, actually sounds like it could be a hit. One thing we liked was that the virtual inventory are replicas of actual products currently on the shelves. We believe this bridging of the real and virtual worlds is more than a trend, and has the potential for creating major socetal change. But we’ll leave that for a later post.

Thanks TechCrunch

Business Insider reports that Zynga (maker of FarmVille, amongst others) has $410 million in the bank.

Zynga investor Fred Wilson reportedly said that Zynga never needed to raise a dime.

So what are they going to do with all that money? Acquisitions? New games? Launch their own distribution platform in to compete with Facebook? Or, perhaps, they just want to buy us a latte or two. We look forward to finding out. We like lattes.

For social games looking for alternatives after Facebook announced that everyone would need to use their new currency while also making notifications much more difficult (and expensive) to come by, Offerpal is launching SocialKast, a platform for notifications.

TechCrunch reports the system will “enable game developers to connect with audiences across social networks and media platforms such as Yahoo and Google, opening the doors to massive distribution of game-related notifications to roughly 1 billion users in over 150 countries.”

While these kinds of infrastructures aren’t necessarily relevant to the average gamer in their specifics, the ability for games to get distribution is critical to the success of individual games and the profitability of their makers. Facebook, of course, completely owns distribution for now, but there is a huge effort to figure out how to break free of their grip. There will be many more attempts in the future.

Recycling a drag? Building a “sustainable” community a little too vague? Now you can have all the self-satisfaction with none of the flies buzzing around your compost bin. Waste Management, which has their very own social network, Greenopolis.

Soon you will be able to play Oceanopolis, an environmentally themed game where you can build a sustainable community, recycle trash, and bask in the warm glow of having done good by appearing good.

Oh, and you can get game points by blogging for Waste Management. Sounds fun.

Chris DeWolfe, a MySpace co-founder recently acquired MindJolt a casual games distribution platform.

According to TechCrunch they are now planning a social gaming roll-up with the help of roll-up kings Austin Ventures

Rather than attempting to build hit games and acquire a large internal team of engineers, the plan is to focus on independent developers, a strategy that worked well for DeWolfe with small bands on MySpace, providing them with virtual goods, tools and distribution.

There is certainly room for long-tail strategies such as this, especially now that everyone and their mothers are building social games. But, in these hard times, if the wolf is at the door, you might just let him in.

Jeremiah Johson and Ben

That makes for 6.3 million cabins, 2.3 million people married, 1.1 million children and 252 million snake clobberings. Oh, and 3.6 million people have scared away a bear. No recession on the frontier it seems.

A generic gamer pic, or is that Jeff Atwood?

They have been building out the software platform to target other verticals — some internally developed such as Server Fault for computer system administrators — and now they have opened up the selection process based on user suggestions.

Their latest is at http://gaming.stackexchange.com, which is really in need of an fun and easy to remember name and url, but we think it should be promising. We plan to lift liberally!

Here is
Fred Wilson’s post for more info.