

Zynga buys Flock - dshankar
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/05/zynga-to-acquire-flock-the-social-browser-that-you-never-used/

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ojbyrne
Sometimes VCs force rising companies to buy declining companies in their
portfolio.

Though I don't see common investors in their crunchbase profile, the
incestuousness of Silicon Valley cannot be underestimated.

e.g. Redhat bought the wreck of Ars Digita.

~~~
dotBen
"Sometimes".. maybe so. I don't see anything here that suggests that is the
case.

A more likely explanation is Flock ran out of money/gave up in competition
with RockMelt - and Zynga bought up the assets instead so that everyone got
something as a return, however small, rather than see the company wound up.

~~~
ojbyrne
Isn't that the exact same thing?

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tlrobinson
No way anyone made much money on this deal with $30M funding raised. Except
lawyers, perhaps.

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dtran
Interesting - why would Zynga want a social browser? Are we going to start
seeing gamification in the browser? Open ten tabs to get $ in Farmville!
Otherwise, this is a really expensive talent acquisition.

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paul
I don't see a price mentioned anywhere.

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drusenko
Agreed, just because they raised $30M doesn't mean they have to be sold for
more than that. Many investors would likely be happy with getting some of
their money back at this point.

~~~
petegrif
not a great signal for Rockmelt then, is it?

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elvirs
Many people will say rockmelt is different in so many ways that this will has
nothing to do with them blah blah blah but yes, as you said, not great signal
for rockmelt.

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ja27
Barely related, but at what point does Zynga ask themselves why they need
Facebook?

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cookiecaper
Zynga needs Facebook. My wife would have never started playing any of Zynga's
games if there were not on Facebook, and neither would most of those whom I
know play these games (my mom, sisters, etc.). In fact, I expect almost all of
them would _stop_ playing these games if they were taken off of Facebook.

Online games much, much better than Farmville and Cityville existed for a long
time before Zynga came around and none of these people played online games.
Now, since it's integrated with Facebook (meaning it's easy to get to and play
constantly, and has a good introduction vector) and since you can do nice
little things like help your friends, Facebook denziens eat it up. It's weird.

~~~
fookyong
Zynga needs Facebook _today_ , yes.

I think the parent question was more thinking long term, at what point will
the opportunity costs of focusing so heavily on Facebook outweigh the benefits
to Zynga?

I can think of a few situations where this is possible:

1) End of World scenario where Facebook ceases to engage users

2) Zynga has collected a critical mass of email addresses and could
successfully drive them into a proprietary wholly-owned portal if they wanted
to

3) Facebook creates a conflict of interest e.g. Facebook-branded games, that
are awesome

4) Slowly, revenue from non-Facebook channels outgrows that from Facebook or
non-Facebook customer acquisition becomes far more cost-effective etc.

Any one of these scenarios could play out. As could dozens of others - it's
going to be interesting to see if the Facebook/Zynga partnership lasts or if
Zynga makes a grab for independence at some point, and why.

~~~
cookiecaper
The only scenario that seems realistic to me is that somehow Facebook gets
offlined or seriously depleted. It might be hard to think of ways that could
happen, but it could happen.

I find it really unlikely that Zynga will be able to replicate its success on
Facebook with a Zynga-controlled Facebook clone (maybe possible in case
Facebook dissolves, as above) or a mailing list. Such tactics do not generally
succeed for others who try them, and especially those that exploit email
addresses are despised and ignored. My family would ignore any spam message to
come play a Flash game, and I would probably advise them to do so. But they
don't ignore games integrated into Facebook.

Facebook Games may aggravate Zynga, but I really don't think they could do
anything about it. Without Facebook, they would lose most of their US-based
users.

I suppose something could come that would surpass Facebook in terms of lead
generation, but I have a hard time thinking of anything that would
realistically do so in anything resembling the near future.

Facebook is different from MySpace, LiveJournal, et al. It's lock-in and reach
is much more pervasive. Did your parents and grandparents have LiveJournal or
MySpace accounts? Facebook has accessed and locked in an audience much more
extensive than any of the internet social networking fad sites before it. And,
as we see with Microsoft, once you reach a certain level of pervasiveness
among a certain market, it is almost impossible to break that lock-in.

I have tried to understand (and annoyed my wife significantly in doing so) why
people, women in particular, are so much more apt to try things if they are
framed with Facebook's layout and have some superficial integration, like
sharing an item with a friend, than if they were just normal games out there
on the web. I have tried to understand why these people would stop playing
Farmville just because it disappeared from Facebook and moved to another web
site. I can't really understand it. These people act like there is no internet
outside of Facebook.

~~~
fookyong
I'm merely hypothesising.

Here's another one:

5) Facebook's terms and conditions have adverse effects on Zynga, enough to
turn them away from the platform.

Zynga is only going to stick around if there's money to be made. If there's 1
billion users but only marginal profit to be harvested, Facebook's lock-in and
reach means squat to Zynga.

It's entirely possible that Facebook's terms and conditions will evolve to
somehow disrupt Zynga's revenue stream (e.g. no forms of game currency other
than Facebook credits).

There's so many ways it could happen it would be prudent for Zynga to have a
plan B at the ready. I'm sure they have one.

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noahlt
I guess this is a great example of founders never giving up. I had forgotten
that Flock existed, and would have assumed that they'd called it quits, but
here they are with what appears to be a successful exit. Kudos to them!

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joshu
The founders left a long time ago. Bart went on to do Tapulous, and Geoffrey
went to Bessemer to be an EIR, then to DanceJam, and then back to Bessemer, I
think?

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noahlt
Ah, then my earlier comment is invalid. Thanks for the correction.

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chrisaycock
And who will buy RockMelt? RockYou?

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veb
I tried RockMelt and I throughly enjoyed it, but I love my simplicity of
Chrome.

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petegrif
IMHO rockmelt (like flock before it) is an elaborately engineered answer to
the wrong question - how do we deeply integrate social with browsing? It does
indeed so integrate social media aggregation with browsing but the problem is
that the implementation is so heavy on the social media that it constitutes
noise whilst browsing and is therefore detrimental to the user experience.

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cap4life
Why do you believe that this is the wrong question? Are you pointing to the
fact that RockMelt, Flock, etc. are products for which there is no real
market? If so, then I agree with you.

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petegrif
That is what I mean. All products answer a question. Unsuccessful ones answer
the wrong question. The question may make intellectual sense, it may be
tempting - it's just wrong. So you end up with a product without a market. :)

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abraham
I find it fascinating that Twitter was bidding on Flock.

