This week two of the largest social gaming developers, Playfish and Playdom, announced that they are opening offices in San Francisco. Is this part of the massive Silicon Valley “revival” that the BBC described yesterday? I doubt it but it’s clear that no matter where the social gaming companies are hiring from, San Francisco and the bay area in general, are important for any growing internet startup.

At an event in Washington, D.C. today, Shervin Pishevar of Social Gaming Network explained to an audience of entrepreneurs and government decision makers how he had built a network of developers from around…

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Zynga, the largest social gaming network on Facebook, appears to be testing a new offers platform on their largest applications. Farmville is by far the largest Facebook application ever and it continues to grow with over 43 million users. So how does the most popular application ever generate revenue? Right now the company is using Offerpal as the primary offers monetization platform but as one inquisitive user noticed, the company appears to be testing out a service by a company never heard of before: “DoubleDing”.

My initial thoughts were that Zynga just cut out the middle man and built their…

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Last month I wrote about the fast growing Brain Buddies game which was a remix of “Who Has the Biggest Brain?”, one of Playfish’s top games. Today the developer behind Brain Buddies, wooga, announced that they received funding from none other than Holtzbrinck Ventures, one of the primary investors in StudiVZ, a German Facebook copycat (which was previously sued by Facebook).

I’ve been trying to get information about the size of the investment but the companies are releasing any information. My guess is this is between $500k and the low seven figures given the quality of the company’s first game.…

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Zynga has been expanding the gap between them and competing developers now with over 60 million monthly active users when adding up the users across all their games. Playfish, the second largest application developer, has 35 million monthly active users, an impressive number however it’s still far from 60 million. So how does Zynga have such a dominant position on the platform?

The primary reason Zynga has such a dominant position is that they have 34 games, the top three of which add up to almost 40 million monthly active users alone. Not surprisingly, the company’s fastest growing game is…

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