Thursday, May 27, 2010

Yahoo Makes Content Deal With “Farmville” Developers Zynga For Social Gaming

Sunnyvale, California -- Internet pioneer Yahoo seems to be on a tear has agreed to a deal with Zynga, makers of the monumentaly popular Farvmville and Mafia Wars games on Facebook, the alliance will see Yahoo integrating Zynga games across Yahoo's broad range of sites and service offerings, that includes Yahoo's home page, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messenger, which is a significant indication that Zynga will not need Facebook alone to thrive.

Zynga has just announced a new partnership with Yahoo, a major victory for both companies. A representative for Yahoo quoted by WebProNews, “The partnership integrates Zynga's most popular social games across Yahoo!, empowering users to easily play games and access updates across some of its most popular properties including the Homepage, Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and others. The incorporation is part of Yahoo!'s commitment to provide personally relevant experiences to people, from across the Web.”

“Hold your breathe for some exciting and engaging new titles coming to Yahoo that you can easily play with your friends, family, and fellow gamers and share with your networks across Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga,” wrote Yahoo senior director of developer network and social platforms Cody Simms.

“In addition to the recently endorsed Facebook and Twitter integrations, this relationship is a key part of advancing Yahoo!'s social experience that lets people share updates across Yahoo! and other social platforms,” the rep says. “This will motivate deeper user engagement, and create new opportunities for developers as an extension of Zynga's current platforms.”

“Yahoo is concentrating on delivering compelling, personally relevant experiences and social games are core to this experience,” said Yahoo Americas executive VP Hilary Schneider, in a statement. “Zynga will bring top notch social game experiences to Yahoo, including through our open platforms such as Yahoo Application Platform and Yahoo Updates.”

Zynga is popularly known for versions of its hot social games currently available on Facebook. Their titles are also accessible on MySpace and the iPhone.

Yahoo, though battling a lot in recent years, has one of the biggest audiences -- an estimated 600 million users on the planet. Zynga too, is also a Goliath in its own right, claiming to have over 230 million active users play its titles every month, so this partnership may end up benefiting both companies greatly.

This partnership is amongst the latest in a series of alliances and acquisitions the company has been making to strengthen its social and mobile offerings: Yahoo just days back announced a partnership with Nokia, over mapping and messaging software, just bought the Indonesian mobile social network Koprol, and recently announced partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to bring more of its users online social lives into the Yahoo framework.

Zynga games are expected to roll out across the Yahoo network in the coming months. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

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