• Less than two months after the public launch of its CAPTCHA suite (including in-CAPTCHA rich media advertising), NuCaptcha has introduced a cross-platform mobile extension to allow clients to adopt and optimize security (and CAPTCHA marketing!) across all their online and mobile properties.

• Video ad network AdoTube is leaping into the creative game by opening up A2O Productions, it’s new video production arm. Samples of its first project — Malibu Rum’s Station Invasion Tour featuring DJ Skribble, Ciara and Taoi Cruz – as well as a demonstration of AdoTube’s Polite Pre-Roll unit can be found here.

• Multi-channel analytics provider Webtrends has launched Hoverstats, an analytics overlay on brands’ Facebook pages that reveals the Post Strength Indicator. This new metric scores individual page posts based on total reach achieved through fan engagement.

• Mobile ad network Jumptap reports in its latest MobileSTAT report that 56% of tablet traffic on its network comes from outside the U.S., compared to 28% of all mobile traffic on its network. In addition, 91% of that global traffic was over wifi. iOS was the most used tablet operating system with 75% market share, followed by Android at 20% and WebOS at 4%.

• Has your site traffic dropped in the last week? Blame it on Panda! Update 2.5 of Google’s algorithmic refining appeared last week and, according to Searchmetrics, The Next Web, Technorati and PRNewswire were among those initially spanked. On the other side, video sites (including {gasp!} YouTube and Metacafe) along with numerous traditional-based publications fared pretty well, but as we’ve seen in the past, winners and losers can easily shift as the algorithm updates get settled in. Check out the list of victims and beneficiaries at the Searchmetrics blog.

• According to a new Buddy Media and Booz & Company study surveying 100 top brands, 90% of respondents said the biggest benefit of social media was “brand building,” 89% said “interactivity,” 88% said “buzz building” and 81% said “consumer insights.” The whole report is embedded on the Buddy Media blog.

• Social targeting platform 33Across added Sachin Devand as vice president of Platform Products and Carine Roman as vice president of operations, while promoting Pedro Mejia to vice president of finance. Previously Devand was vice president of advertising services at LucidMedia and was integral in launching the company’s DSP; Roman was last seen at Ziff Davis Enterprise, serving as senior vice president of digital media.

• MRM London (part of MRM Worldwide, which is part of McCann Worldgroup) is merging with Meteorite to form a combined agency specializing in direct-response and interactive marketing.

The volatility in the stock market hasn’t helped. All of a sudden the path to liquidity doesn’t look as clear. Several companies have managed to exit, but some of the ones that seemed all but assured just a month or two ago look less certain, namely Groupon, Zynga — even Facebook.

It’s not as though all of the companies are going to go out of business. LinkedIn, now public, isn’t going anywhere, but just maybe there is a collective concern over the ultimate upside.

Of all the companies that seemed certain for success in the public market, one of them now seems less certain — Groupon. From leaked memos to forward-looking statements, the company has recently been referred to as the poster child for “how not to go public.”

In some ways, it is probably hard to be Groupon. While they no doubt have executed like champions, their success came fast — arguably too fast. In some respects, they didn’t experience the type of failures and setbacks that others do. Theirs has been a rocketship fueled by almost limitless capital. Color.com’s $40 million of funding pre-product and revenue is a lot, but Groupon’s $1 billion is hard to top. You might think they were a biotech company not a digital marketing, direct selling machine.

One of the biggest questions facing Groupon is their cash position. The company is losing money. What that really means is harder to understand. Companies seem to lose money all the time but stay in business. Amazon and Priceline managed to lose a kajillion dollars but ultimately succeed, so doesn’t that mean Groupon could too?

I wish I were financially astute enough to read between the lines in their public filing document to guess one way or another. With so many people so concerned, though, it seems we must start to consider the fact that perhaps this revenue machine needs a major overhaul to stay road worthy.

Working at Groupon and being involved with the company from early on must be a little bit like having been involved in Webvan, one of the dot com one’s biggest implosions. Ironically enough, we could compare it to Webvan, which was like Groupon was Online to Offline — people ordered from the web but had an offline experience. While not a perfect analogy, Webvan also had the benefit of seemingly unlimited funding, having blown through $830 million.

None of that could prevent the message that was spread early July 2001, namely that, ”The company has no plans to resume operations, and it will pursue an orderly wind-down of its operations and sale of its assets and business.”

During the same time, Chief Executive Officer Robert Swan said that while the company “made significant progress” in cutting operating losses and reducing its burn rate, order volume in the quarter just ended “declined considerably,” accelerating the need for new capital, which they ultimately couldn’t obtain. The company was public at the time but unable to meet the minimum threshold for staying listed on the Nasdaq.

Groupon has roughly the same headcount as Webvan when it went under, and had the markets not turned drastically south, Webvan might have received the funding they needed to stay afloat. Reading over past stories of the final days of Webvan, we see that Groupon is nowhere near where Webvan was, but at the same time, seeing that such a high-flying and large company as Webvan could not only fail but fail relatively fast, must give us pause.

A domino effect could sneak up on a company like Groupon – merchants pulling back, consumers buying less, and the capital markets drying up. A few staff reductions and the company continuing to chase profits that aren’t quite enough to cover overall costs, and almost before we know it, they decide to simply close up shop because no one else has the money or desire to keep it going. Hard to imagine such a scenario, but we would have said the same about Webvan.

Not that there was a question, but the answer might be hubris. When things are good and momentum is strong, a company can seemingly do no wrong. But very few companies get so lucky as to never face challenges, and it is times like those when you want to see a greater level of awareness and a business maturity.

The last thing you want to see is defiance and fueling the fire of a cocksure attitude. A teenager must become an adult, sometimes faster than they might like, but they must. A company is not a rock star or other diva personality who can simply do what they want and have the world adapt to them.

Hopefully, we’ll see the rebellious outbursts lessen in our teenage superstar, Groupon. Otherwise, this business prodigy could end up burning out and become an unfortunate and expensive case study.

Cross-published at the DM Confidential blog.

• Facebook
• Groupon
• LivingSocial
• DropBox
• Zynga

Many of these are companies that, in a world without Sarbanes-Oxley, could already be public. That would probably be good for investors; if average people could have gotten Facebook stock at the same $500 million valuation their Series C had, it would have been a spectacular investment, indeed.

Or would it have been? Counterfactuals are notoriously tricky, but it still seems that most of the companies listed above are incredibly ambitious. Whereas today’s mid-tier dot-coms are all fairly boring. Stamps.com, Ancestry.com, and Quinstreet are all pretty good businesses, but they’re also pretty boring. Good, boring businesses are great at hitting their quarterly numbers, but they’re not so great at providing an incredible user experience or transforming an entire market.

When companies are restricted to accredited investors—and big accredited investors, at that—they think differently. They care less about the next quarter, and more about getting a 10X return for their early backers, or a 3X return for funds providing growth capital. Illiquidity isn’t a net positive, but it does force investors to think about the bigger picture, which also forces entrepreneurs to think that way.

This trickles down to consumers, too. Publicly traded Internet companies innovate much more slowly, at least as far as users can see. (Public companies that invest heavily in R&D — Microsoft, IBM, Google and the like — also tend to invest disproportionately in the “research” side. It pays off, but over a very long time.) Projects like the News Feed and Groupon Now are harder to imagine from a public company.

Sarbox has also dampened acquisitions by removing the public market as a competing bidder. The biggest effect here might be that investment banks have less of an incentive to build relationships with early-stage startups in the hope that they can take those startups public years later.

This gives startups less access to acquisition offers and less negotiating leverage. All that might lead to more total acquisitions (since acquisitions are a good substitute for an IPO when someone really wants to cash out), but fewer exits.

Sarbox was bad for entrepreneurs. But it was bad for entrepreneurs in a way that’s good for consumers and late-stage investors: it forced founders of great companies to double-down on world domination instead of settling for life as a boring public company or a subsidiary of Microsoft.

And now it’s finally paying off. We’re getting a new crop of actively fascinating Internet IPOs—the first time we’ve had so many since the last bubble.

(Mark Suster has related thoughts on VCs responded to public markets. Naturally, this piece about VCs responding to a down market was published the morning of a 5% rally.)

Cross-published at Digital Due Diligence’s website.

With 90% of Americans carrying Internet-enabled phones and more than 150 million connected through social media, FOMO should be a marketers’ dream. Living an always-on life doesn’t necessarily translate to always paying attention though.

In fact, the dirty little secret of digital advertising has been a diminished share-of-voice and, in an effort to combat the issue, an escalation of nearly meaningless impressions as a result. An arms race of 4 trillion online display ads last year has done little to move budget dollars from traditional broadcast because most of display is woefully ineffective.

However, there are three things that marketers can do to get their message seen and their story embraced.

Find the Pause Moments

Each day, tens of millions of American social media users hit a wall:  More specifically, a pay wall. They might be trying to read an article, watch a video, play a game or connect with the Internet while in a venue that charges for WiFi access. These are “pause moments” – when consumers have to either stop living their lives or start paying.

Zynga, and other social gaming companies, have so brilliantly mastered the art of creating pause moments that they account for the majority of time spent on social networks such as Facebook. These moments, and the applications they are instrumental to, provide marketers with a powerful new tool: the ability to satisfy consumers’ immediate need for gratification.

In the simplest of terms, engage with the brand and the pay wall will be removed. Watch a trailer for Disney’s Cars2 movie and earn virtual cash for Farmville. View Stoli’s new commercial and get more music from Pandora. Learn about small business products from Intuit and get free airport WiFi.

In all these examples, the consumer is initiating the brand interaction at a time that suits them and giving the experience 100% share of voice. In fact, a study of more than 100 campaigns that take advantage of “pause moments” showed that the average consumer engaged with the advertiser’s message for 63 seconds.

Employ True Targeting

In a world where Congress is considering outlawing cookies and pixel tracking, and consumers are more concerned about their privacy than ever before, pause moments give brands the perfect opportunity to employ true targeting. Because the consumer is opting in, and appreciative of the value exchange they are receiving, most are willing to let you know more about them.

True targeting is asking the consumer to provide anonymous data in an environment where they actually have no incentive to do so (and yet, they are so motivated by the value-exchange that they take the whole process seriously). If the consumer is lucky enough to be getting free access to premium content they normally are required to pay for, they want to be given such an opportunity again in the future; so they answer brief questions openly and honestly.

Are you in the market for a car? Have you ever taken a cruise? Do you own a cat?

Toyota, Celebrity Cruises, and Mars Petcare are all benefiting from true-targeting media spends by having their messages engaged only by the consumers they most desire (and on that note, zero waste means a lossless media buy). Even better, these consumers are spending time with messages that resonate with them — during pause moment when they have the time to focus and absorb the information.

Empower Consumer Sharing

We all know that there is nothing more powerful than an endorsement or recommendation from a friend. Social media’s allure to marketers is centered on how quickly and vastly a person can share information, a story, a brand message. By creating “pause moment engagements” that allow for personalization, consumers have a reason to share the message with their friends on Facebook and Twitter.

For example, the sweetener Truvia asked consumers to upload a picture of their sweetest moment, and were rewarded when thousands responded. Disney, in an engagement for Toy Story 3, asked users to name their favorite childhood toy. By encouraging participation and appealing to consumers’ emotional connections, share rates skyrocket.

A political engagement campaign that ran last month and was fully interactive resulted in an astonishing 39% of people posting it to their Facebook feed. Each posting of the engagement then reached an average of 130 friends. In turn, 30% of those friends opened the engagement and interacted with the campaign.

By employing all three tools — pause moments, true targeting and sharing — the earned media of the campaign was several orders of magnitude greater than the purchased media.

A whole generation of consumers has never known life without mobile phones or a day without social media. The all-to-real anxiety of FOMO presents marketers with brief moments when consumers are ready, willing and able to engage with their favorite brands. Failure to jump in and take advantage of those moments is guaranteed to result in career-impacting FOMO for many a CMO.

The same was said as a reason for LinkedIn’s major opening day surge. People really wanted to own Facebook, but a business social network was the next best thing. The fevered interest in private companies is no different.

While we don’t have the empirical evidence in front of us, were we to look at angel and Series A rounds over the past three years, it would almost certainly show pre-money valuations at a high and time to fund at its lows. In other words, companies are getting money quicker than during anytime over the past several years while not having to give up as much for it.

This exuberance and competition to own/fund tech companies differs drastically from the broader economic climate. A new poll conducted by CBS and The New York Times finds that 39% of Americans believe the U.S. economy has entered permanent decline, but arguably more important, 63% believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.

People are still out of work in almost record amounts. Data collected by The Misery Index, which aggregates Department of Labor Statistics, shows that the unemployment rate has reached and continues to remain at a level not seen since 1982 and 1983 when unemployment reached 9.7 percent. And, if the 1980’s are any guide, we could be looking at three more years of elevated unemployment where the rates hover at a better but uninspiring 7%+. What separates these past several years from any other in the last 60 years is the dramatic jump in unemployment that happened during the heart of the financial crisis, namely from 2008 to 2009.

Consumers and businesses are still spending. Just look at Apple’s record sales year after year. While they have corporate clients, unlike Microsoft, it’s the average consumer who drives their revenues. Other companies too have done quite well over the past year and a half including Google who, like Apple, has quite substantial cash reserves. Google at least has shown a willingness to spend some of its money, from its failed bid to purchase Groupon to its most recent acquisition of Admeld for $400 million.

Another company doing phenomenally well from consumer spending is social game developer Zynga, who will soon join the list of internet companies going public raising a mind-blowing $2 billion. Their growth is in no small thanks to Facebook who doesn’t earn all that much more than Zynga but whose current valuation hovers north of $75 billion.

Whether we are actually in a bubble, despite being in a repressed economic environment, is up for debate and depends on the definition being used. We just go by feel and our unofficial sentiment polling that comes from day-to-day interactions. Things feel tepid. All of this consumer spending just seems so fragile given the general lack of jobs and prospects for economic growth/expansion.

Part of the world is seemingly on fire but somewhere that should correlate with the larger part of the world that continues to grow uneasy with what the future holds. If the latter finally reigns in the former, then we should see a pull back. It won’t be a total collapse like the dot com crash. But it seems only natural that a world in which those who “graduate” from a certain startup incubator automatically qualify for $150,000 in funding from the fund of a Russian billionaire is not sustainable.

In the past, the bursting of the internet bubble has bode well for performance-based marketers. The original dot com collapse saw the rise of companies like LowerMyBills while this recession helped fuel the boom in for-profit education. Both benefited from weak inventory pricing and a growing audience of eligible consumers. The same, though, cannot be said for today. There isn’t a clear winner from a vertical/channel perspective if the underlying malaise was to become the predominant feeling.

Brand spending is also different than before. Their dollars are on a mandate to figure out social. They have completely changed the way they engage with the web. It means pushing consumers towards Facebook and the follow/share culture. This is not something that seems in danger of going away over night the way that paid clicks on lotto sites did.

To us, it feels like many aspects of the tech world are either unsustainable (valuations for example) and/or overpriced. Speed and pricing should come under some pressure. Consumers are stressed and still under tremendous pressure. Their actions haven’t really hurt the tech community though as they still buy Apple products and shell out money for Facebook credits. That too should slow.

Brands are also spending, but they are still early in their spending. Brands, though, tend to be a lagging indicator and don’t pull back as quickly as others. Outside of Facebook, many of the growth stories are those finding new ways to unlock consumer spending, be it through savings like Groupon or through gaming like Zynga and Rovio.

Taken together what does it all mean? We think there are too many startups and there is too little ultimate money. We should see many close and employment consolidation with them going to Google, Facebook, Zynga, etc. but without these, companies have to acqui-hire them. These companies will grow but more slowly than today. Consumers will come around while the investment dollars lag (having rushed hard to fund today). And, it’s during this period where performance marketers will once again shine — just not immediately.

Reprinted with permission from DM Confidential’s blog.

Publishers no doubt want to get a piece of Google’s new +1 button — as a launch partner of the social widget, Clearspring’s AddThis is making it damn simple for the 9 million sites in its social sharing network to get their own button.

According to comScore, Apple’s iOS finally leaped ahead of RIM’s Blackberry in terms of percentage of U.S. smartphone subscribers, but at 26% it’s still way behind Google Android’s rising market share (36.4% in April).

As rumors circle that Microsoft will buy Nokia phone business, Bloomberg reports that a broken-down Nokia could be worth 52% more to investors.

Steve Kovach at Business Insider thinks Twitter’s updated search tool is a stinker, but I think along with the AdGrok acquisition it’s setting the stage for better advertising products.

Bloomberg’s anonymous sources say social gaming magnate Zynga is talking to Goldman Sachs both about leading its IPO and ponying up a $1 billion+ credit line to help with more acquisition.

You can’t say that on television — that being “Facebook” or “Twitter” and television being of the French variety, radio too. Why? Well, according to French regulators, mentions of the social-networks-that-cannot-be-named are a form of “clandestine advertising” for them as commercial brands. Yup, apparently government officials are a lot like the French knights in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Speaking of governments meddling in social media, a dream team of Internet frenemies (including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga) celebrated as a social networking privacy billed blew its second and last chance to get passed by the California Senate. The bill threatened to force social networking sites to set personal information sharing defaults to private.

British online baby goods supplier Kiddicare has named performance marketing network Affiliate Window its sole affiliate marketing outlet.

Through deals with Peanut Labs and ad network TrialPay, Facebook jumped back into the offer marketing realm last month, with app users and game players completing brand interactions — polls, surveys, subscriptions, etc. — for Facebook Credits (or Zuck Bucks, as I like to call them). Thanks to some developer policy changes, Facebook Credits, which gives the social network a 30% cut, will be the one and only virtual currency allowed in the Facebook ecosystem come July 1.

Now when you’re playing/using one of 350 ad-supported games or apps on the Facebook platform, you’ll have the opportunity to earn Facebook Credits simply by watching video advertisements. TrialPay will manage the new “DealPlay” platform, which will also include video ads from ShareThrough, EpicSocial, Supersonic Ads and SocialVibe.

SocialVibe, which is the exclusive brand engagement platform for social gaming kingpin Zynga and is integrated into eight of the top 10 apps on Facebook, commented that advertisers will be able to enter a variety of activities onto a microsite served within the ad –polls, games and and the ability to share the “brand experience” in some fashion with their acquaintances. They forwarded me a couple of interesting demos.

Of course, offer marketing with Facebook credits gets considerably interesting as the revamped Facebook Deals group-buying platform offers the ability to use Facebook Credits to buy real-world services and products. Yes, you’d actually be getting paid a viable (not just virtual!) currency to watch commercials — or “engage with brands,” as the marketing people like to put it.

However, Mashable reports that initially the average reward for a video ad viewing is a single Facebook Credit, the equivalent of a dime. Thirty seconds of my attention is worth more than that! Who will give me a quarter for watching a video ad?

Because these highly valued companies remain private, action on the secondary market — where current private stockholders such as venture investors and employees can trade shares — has drawn the attention of the media for driving up valuations. The market has also drawn some chin-scratching from the Securities Exchange Commission, though it wasn’t exchange operators like SharesPost and SecondMarket that were being scrutinized but company-specific funds that were pooling smaller, nonprofessional investors and giving private companies a loophole out of the Exchange Act registration and regulatory scrutiny.

A new controversy developed last week as Wall Street Journal would-be muckraker Dennis Berman misrepresented the truth (that is, lied) in registering his long-departed grandmother as an accredited investor on SharesPost. The SEC deems accredited investors as having minimal financial assets of $1 million or annual family income of $300,000.

Scandalous, huh? Well, SharesPost CEO Dave Weir sent out an angry email on Friday night explaining that Berman actually proved how well the private exchange’s qualification system worked.

“Our broker and electronic systems detected his fraud and barred him from our platform within six hours of submitting his fraudulent information and long before he would have been able to execute trades,” Weir wrote. “Somehow that fact was treated as a mere footnote to the story, leaving readers largely misinformed and our company unfairly maligned.”

Berman, on the other hand, suggested in his story that he spent “a few days loitering, testing and playing in these private markets.”

But the point of Berman’s deception was not to portray the secondary markets as amateur or crooked operation — yes, he was able to fool the sentries at the gate for a little while and get a look at the inside workings of the secondary market, but he didn’t actually do anything. Buying shares on these exchanges is pretty difficult, he wrote — it’s not Amazon with one-click buying.

Berman did, however, achieve in shedding doubt on whether private markets can scale. His “insider” perspective showed that the exchanges not as big as media hype might make you believe. There are a few huge companies — ahem, Facebook, Twitter, yada yada — drawing attention, but a limited pool of investors (though whether some of these investors aren’t pools in themselves has yet to be answered). In essence, his piece is meant to quell the super paranoid who think the end is near for the public markets and question how much more the secondary markets can swell.

It’s also another sign that if there is a social tech bubble expanding — you know you ponder that question every time Facebook’s valuation jumps another $10 billion — it’s a private bubble and the fallout from it popping will be minimal.

Different corners of the space were mocked up as Zynga games — opposite a game of horseshoes outside a cardboard Zynga saloon from FrontierVille was a hanging vegetable garden a la FarmVille that boasted shelves holding iPads, giving attendees the chance to plant some virtual crops of their own. Indeed, Apple devices loaded with Zynga games appeared to be in abundance. Also in the FarmVille corner was a “farmer’s” cheese and bread stand, and the nearby bar boasted a thematic veggie-puree shooter, which I didn’t have the stones to try out (pulpy green drinks scare me).

A walk across the streets of CityVille — complete with a real… mailbox… — brought you to a card table where Zynga offered hands of virtual poker. There is something sort of surreal about people using a poker table to play the game via hooked-up laptops. On the other side of the party, several guests ignored their drinks and hunched over iPads, completely absorbed by Scrabble-esque Words With Friends — a game Zynga picked up with the acquisition of Newtoy in December.

Up a staircase drenched with fake money sacks, mafioso types in slick suits (well, classic mafioso types — I live in a neighborhood with mob presence and they don’t dress so nice anymore) leered at partygoers wandering to the bar to order drinks from local caterer Cuffs & Buttons that were inspired by Mafia Wars. I tried a Real McCoy — a surprisingly strong and tasty cocktail with gin, vodka and bitters — felt a little giddy, and concluded that I am a lightweight; only Fake McCoys for me in the future.

Across from charming framed portraits of characters from the game, I chatted with Mafia Wars general manager Bill Mooney about brand-sponsored campaigns within Zynga games. In particular, crime films like “Public Enemies” and the recently released “Green Hornet” have had quite successful tie-ins with Mafia Wars.

For brands looking to be innovative in their marketing, sponsored social gaming campaigns can be mutually beneficial to both advertisers and gamekeepers, Mooney said, citing the FarmVille campaign with Cascadian Farms. The key to truly engaging the consumers is to make sure the campaign “stays in the fiction,” he said — that is, the brand tie-in is completely integrated into gameplay.

While the company’s success with major brands such as McDonalds have encouraged Zynga to keep looking up the brand ladder, Mooney mentioned that it had played around with sponsorship efforts from smaller brands.

Sponsored campaigns are a bit different for Mafia Wars as many brands are understandably wary of being associated with organized crime, but celebrities, on the other hand, are really into it. Take Snoop Dogg, who is kind of a huge brand in himself — 2 million users streamed the Doggfather blowing up a four-ton armored truck in the desert to mark Mafia Wars: Las Vegas reaching 10 million players.

“Half the fun of these games is playing other people,” he said, using the example of challenging friends to video games at an arcade. “Knowing the people that you’re playing makes it much more engaging.”

Finally, I stopped at RewardVille, Zynga’s loyalty program it launched last week at the South by Southwest digital conference. Users can earn Zynga points and coins across Zynga’s network of games that can be traded in for exclusive virtual goods for all its games. Players are also able to give these as gifts to other Zynga users. In addition, users can unlock secret levels and other easter eggs.

The representatives were quick to note that they are nothing like Facebook Credits and players will not be able to buy them. For one night only, RewardVille was actually giving out real gifts — I brought home some FarmVille-inspired orange marmalade.

Though its games are primarily played through Facebook, Zynga’s own social ecosystem seems to be thriving, and a loyalty program RewardVille will no doubt fuel its growth. Still a private company, Zynga’s valuation on the secondary markets goes as high as $10 billion — an IPO is rumored for 2012. Certainly last night’s soiree showed why Zynga is at the forefront of the social gaming sector — and also why brands should consider social gaming as a digital channel.

Oh yeah — you guys want some pics, right? Sorry about the quality — I only had my iPhone on me last night.

Yes, that's me in the coonskin hat, scared of a virtual bear.

Their advice to upstart mobile game developers is to begin with the Android platform as there are less barriers to entry. In addition, game developers want to get their feet wet in Asia but are unsure how — perhaps they should take a second and learn one of those Nokia operating systems.

Also at the conference, Deborah Liu, manager of product marketing for Facebook Credits and Games, was (appropriately) met with derisive laughter when she commented, “Every single day we know developers get to choose between our platforms and another platform.”

While Facebook may be the biggest game in town, alienated developers are likely keeping a lookout for a suitable contender — one without such a tyrannical leader. Whatever happened to that Zynga-Google social gaming network?