Over the last 3 years we have seen some amazing life changing innovations. Facebook has reordered the web using the social graph. Apple opened up the mobile flood gates with iphone. These two trends are changing how we live and spend our time.
Just five years ago we all thought Google owned the web and no one can take it away from them. Now they are playing catch up to Facebook and Apple in social web and mobile web respectively. It is funny how quickly things can change.
Entertainment is being reshaped by these two trends. The next frontier in entertainment is Social Gaming. And it is just getting started.
Facebook has 500M active users and is still growing strong. Fifty percent of FB users play games. Nearly half the time spent on social networks is spent on playing social games. American spend more time on games than email.
But we are only in the stone ages of social games. For gods sake, farmville is the state of the art in social games today.
NYT recently asked: Is Zynga the new Google? Let me put it this way. Remember Altavista?
We will see tremendous innovation in social gaming both on the web and mobile. We ain’t seen nothin yet!
In a couple years we will look back at farmville, fishville, frontierville etc. and will have a good laugh. There will be some new players making it big in the space.
Facebook now controls the social gaming platform on the web as does Apple on the mobile with its iphone & appstore.
Google has android to counter Apple. How about its counter for facebook? Google is working on a gaming social network competitor to Facebook named Google Me (they need to come up with a better name for starters).
They assigned Vic Gundothra (their former mobile head) to lead Google Me. They bought slide and made Max Levchin, a VP of Engineering. Today Google bought an obscure startup called Angstro, mainly to bring in respected web technologist Rohit Khare.
I think Google should stop messing around and acquire Hi5, a gaming focused social network and use it as a base to build Google Me. Oh, keep the name Hi5 (it is much better than google me).
It should be interesting to watch the social gaming space over the next 2 to 3 years. Strap on your seat belts. It is going to be a wild ride!