"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.
Why would you make this claim about this deal? It's completely unfounded and the obvious explanation of "their engineers are awesome" seems perfectly adequate.
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.
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.
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.
People are obsessed with those games! My sister would wake in middle of night to water her crops. If they integrate some features in browser - those people will love it.
But you never know what they are up to. Could be next plan of Zynga for World Domination!
I don't think Farmville needs Facebook to exist - it just needs a way to stay constantly connected with the player to continue the "social loop." With Facebook out of the picture they'd have much more freedom to interact with their hard core users.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd say that this acquisition might be more related to that question than you think. Zynga games will probably be accessible through Facebook for a long time to come, but the Flock acquisition may be the start of them looking for other ways to reach customers.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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. :)
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.