Tag: FARMVILLE

Here at Switched, we try our best to refrain from taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. But, when said misfortune involves a game as odious as 'Mafia Wars,' we really can't help ourselves. This is Zynga, after all, the same game producer that unleashed the pestilence of 'FarmVille' upon the world -- and made untold millions in the process. Forgive us, then, if we couldn't hold back a smile ...

Updated: Well it looks like the tale of our sassy quitter may be too good to be true. Peter Kafka at All Things Digital did some homework and uncovered that the guys behind theCHIVE (the site that broke the Jenny story) were also behind a prank piece about Donald Trump leaving a $10,000 tip that tricked The New York Post and Fox News. Leo Resig, one of the site's founders refused to confirm or ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2010/08/04/the-farmville-ruse-how-zyngas-creation-ruins-gaming-and-stea/'; FarmVille is a very smart game. It was developed by Zynga, the company founded by serial entrepreneur Mark Pincus, which is on track to pull in $500-million dollars in revenue this year. As of July, FarmVille was hosting the digital homesteads of 61 million users. But you probably ...

Share In a security report, Cisco claims that employees are breaking company policies by playing social networking games, and, by doing so, could be opening up networks to outside attacks. Cisco's 2010 Midyear Report found that 7-percent of those who admitted to using Facebook at work also fessed up to spending an average of 68 minutes each day playing 'FarmVille.' FarmVille isn't the only ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... As part of an ongoing (and often ridiculous) modernization movement, the British Monarchy has created an impressive Flickr account featuring both current and historic snapshots. [From: Reuters and Flickr] The Cellular Telephone Industries Association (CTIA) is attacking San Francisco's "overzealous" cell phone radiation labels ...

Whether you love or hate 'FarmVille' and its Facebook-game brethren, you can't deny their reach or their influence on how we play today. Enter video game designer and critic Ian Bogost and his new Facebook app 'Cow Clicker,' a meta-game that pares down social networking lifestyle entertainments to the root of their essential mechanics. According to Bogost, "You get a cow. You can click on it. In ...

In the biggest digital migration since folks moved down on the farm, millions of "pioneers" have hitched their covered wagons and moved West in search of new online lives. According to USA Today, since its June 9th launch, 20 million gamers have played 'FrontierVille.' Now, that number pales in comparison to Zynga's other most popular social-networking game -- 'FarmVille,' with its 62 million ...

As far as agriculture goes, FarmVille's pretty environmentally friendly. After all, everything "grown" on a computer screen is about as local as it gets. And the only thing a user could possibly waste, besides money, is an entire social life. Soon, however, the game's agrarian community will have a whole new way to raise pretend plants... and hemorrhage even more cash. As the New York Times ...

Share Readers, our passion is the Internet. In fact, we're probably online -- posting, commenting, tweeting, Facebooking -- more than you. And yet, despite our deft Web skillz, we still can't really wrap our minds around the concept of virtual currency and goods. Paying hard-earned, real-life dollars to send your friend a tiny digital duck just makes no sense to us -- and yet, it's been quite a ...

If, a year or two ago, you'd asked us what FarmVille was, we'd have said we were pretty sure that it was a small college town in southwest Indiana. We would, of course, have been wrong, but we sort of wish that we would've been right. 'FarmVille,' after all, has managed to dominate our Facebook feeds, telling us of our friends and family who trade cyber-cattle for cyber-corn, build e-barns and ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... The White House apparently harbors numerous, and already devoted, fans of the iPad, including Vice President Biden, economic adviser Larry Summers and several members of the press staff. They also all seem to be serious procrastinators, as 'Scrabble,' 'Lost' and 'Vanity Fair' rank among the assorted downloads. 'Vanity Fail?' ...

Among the less-notable announcements made at this year's WWDC, Steve Jobs and a handful of developers debuted three key apps that are sure to bring in massive amounts of iTunes Store revenue and cause millions of iPhone users to never leave home or see loved ones again. ...

Putting together a list of the best or worst of anything is always an arduous task. Some will agree, most won't, and many will be downright enraged with your selection. But that's also kind of the point. With this in mind, then, Time recently took it upon itself to put together an unranked list of the 50 worst inventions of all time, ranging "from the zany, to the dangerous, to the just plain ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... Apple relished and celebrated its role as an industry outsider for decades, but recent incidents have inspired significant doubts about its anti-corporate, cool-guy attitude. According to Reuters, Apple has now officially overtaken its archenemy Microsoft as the world's leading tech company in terms of market value. Microsoft does ...

Share Zynga, the social gaming firm and leading procrastination enabler, reportedly plans to provide the denizens of 'FarmVille' and the goodfellas of 'Mafia Wars' with tangible, real-world enticements. The approximately 75 million Farmville laborers already spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a variety of nonexistent virtual goods, a sum that some analysts predict will surpass $2 billion ...