Sure, none of it’s real. But the overwhelming popularity of so-called social gaming — simple games that let people play with their friends on networking sites such as Facebook — is changing the face of video games, experts say.

And as the maker of popular titles like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, San Francisco, California-based Zynga has ridden the games’ skyrocketing popularity to the top of that emerging market.

For Zynga founder Mark Pincus, the formula for gaming success on Facebook, MySpace and other sites was as simple as it might seem counterintuitive: create simple games that people like but can easily set aside.

“We built the games so they could be played in a tab on your browser while you’re on a conference call,” said Pincus, a veteran Web entrepreneur who created Zynga in 2007.

Of course, they’ve been helped by the massive growth of Facebook, where the games are so popular they’ve spawned “fan” pages devoted to complaining about having to watch friends play them.

Facebook, with its 400 million users, is where the vast majority of people play FarmVille and Mafia Wars along with other Zynga titles like FishVille, Vampires, Café World, YoVille and Zynga Poker.

In all, more than 65 million people play Zynga games every day, according to media tracking company Developer Analytics.

Zynga’s top title, FarmVille, is played by an estimated 75 million people each month — roughly equal to the number who have played the classic arcade and desktop game Tetris during its entire existence.

The massive growth was satisfying but not altogether surprising to Pincus, whose previous startups had included Freeloader, a Web-based information-gathering service; tech-support company SupportSoft; and Tribe.net, an early social networking site from 2003.

He said that starting the game company, which he named after his late English bulldog, was an effort to fill what he considered a surprising void in most people’s daily Internet use.

“I thought in 2007 that something had gone oddly wrong with the whole Internet experience,” Pincus said. “I would have thought games would have been one of the top two or three experiences people had on the Internet.”

What Pincus got right, according to gaming expert Scott Steinberg, was a sort of return to the “golden era” of games like Pac-man and Super Mario Bros.

“Video games actually appealed to a huge cross-section. They appealed to everybody,” said Steinberg, publisher of DigitalTrends.com. “What happened is, as we went through the mid-’80s to the mid-2000s, you started to see gaming become more incestuous in terms of 18- to 34-year-old males making games for people just like them.”

By contrast, three of Zynga’s top five games — FarmVille, Café World and FishVille — have mostly female players, with many players outside the traditional 18- to 34-year-old range.

Those games all operate on the same basic premise. Starting with a simple farm, fish tank or restaurant, the player works to make it bigger and fancier, sharing items with friends and helping each other along the way.

Some of Zynga’s early titles simply mirrored existing board and card games. It was Mafia Wars — in which players team up to whack other gangs – that first exhibited what would become the hallmarks of social gaming: simple, single-player action that’s enhanced by teamwork.

With FarmVille, that formula would become complete.

Players plant virtual crops that can be harvested hours, or days, later. Along the way, they invite online friends to become their neighbors and help each other by sending gifts or helping with the farming. There’s no way to “win,” but players take satisfaction in building big, fancy farms that they can showcase to their friends.

“A farm is something that is internationally understood and known. It’s cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-age,” Pincus said. “A great social game should be like a great cocktail party. If you want it to appeal to absolutely everyone you invite, it has to be broad in its content so that everyone gets it.”

Not that Zynga’s success has come without criticism.

With hundreds of smaller companies vying for a piece of the social gaming market, some rivals have accused Zynga of using its hefty venture capital to crowd out less-financed competitors.

Many of its most popular games, including FarmVille, are similar to pre-existing games from smaller companies, a fact Pincus dismisses by noting that video games have always fallen into genres with similar titles from competing companies.

Psycho Monkey LLC, the makers of Mob Wars, filed a lawsuit claiming that Mafia Wars ripped them off. Zynga settled that case in August, said a spokeswoman for the company.

Zynga also was hit with complaints and lawsuits over its original business model, which let players earn in-game rewards for things like signing up for a credit card or video-rental membership.

Critics said some of the offers amounted to scams, leading players to download unwanted software or unwittingly sign up for memberships that appeared stealthily on their phone bills.

Pincus has acknowledged not being vigilant enough with the automated ads that appeared on Zynga games during the company’s early days.

“We were playing whack-a-mole,” Pincus said. “Every time we found one of these or got a complaint, we would take them down. Eventually … we realized we had to take a much more aggressive stance than a normal Web site.”

In November, Zynga removed all “lead-generating” ads, relying for revenue instead on the roughly 1 to 3 percent of the player base that pays for in-game items, such as a barn in FarmVille. It has since been putting the advertisements back in, with a new system that lets it more closely monitor what kind of ads show up, Pincus said.

“We’ll see where this goes for the entire industry,” Pincus said. “It was really important to us to maintain a trusted position with our users. We wanted to do the right thing, and I think we did.”

Pincus offers a ray of hope for another vocal group of critics: the social-media users who say they’re tired of seeing all of their friends’ updates about Zynga and other social games.

On Facebook, a group called “I dont care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!” had more than 5.2 million members recently.

“Please. No more of this stuff,” wrote one member. “I’ve had all I can take. About to hang up FACEBOOK. Just want a nice cozy place to talk with my friends!”

Pincus said he hopes that messages from games can eventually be targeted to a more select audience.

“We have to evolve,” Pincus said “I think it’s heading to a place that’s more narrow-casting. I think you’ll get to a place where Facebook will be better about showing feeds to people who have a registered interest in them.”

For example, he said, there might eventually be a way to send game notifications only to people who play social games themselves.

“It’s not just games. It’s going to be true for music, for pictures, for status updates,” Pincus said. “I think, over time, these networks are going to start to shape more to … your [registered interests].”

Meanwhile, Zynga will be among the developers continuing to change how people look at video gaming. It’s a change that Steinberg, the gaming guru, says will be for the better.

While heavyweights like Electronic Arts and the popular Civilization series are making inroads into social gaming, Steinberg said, the genre is also opening up opportunities for smaller developers.

“We’re seeing, in many ways, a second renaissance for games,” Steinberg said.

“There’s been an epiphany among the developer community saying, ‘Look at these millions of users that we’ve forgotten to speak to for years.’ This can only be a good thing for the gaming industry in the end.”

While you may not be “beaming” to your next appointment any time soon, researchers are preparing for the first tests of a present-day “transporter.”

And while scientists have long mocked Hollywood’s visions of warp speed and faster-than-light travel as prohibited by Einstein’s laws, a new generation of physicists continues to rewrite the fundamental rules of the universe.

Is there a way around the cosmic speed limit? Maybe … as long as you’re prepared to survive a journey through the ultra-high energies of one of the most violent places in the cosmos – the heart of a twisting, swirling vortex that leads either to strange, new worlds… or certain death. Next stop – the future… arriving today, as this documentary explores the worlds of science fiction and science fact.



The two-week mission saw the virtual completion of the ISS.

The six-member crew of Endeavour installed the Tranquility Node, a spacious addition that includes the “cupola” observation deck.

The commissioning of Tranquility marks the last major component of the space station.

The $100bn project, involving 16 countries, is nearly completed after more than a decade of construction 220 miles (354 km) above the Earth.

As the Endeavour crew parted with colleagues on the ISS on Friday, space station commander Jeffrey Williams congratulated the shuttle astronauts on their successes in installing Tranquility.

“We are really going to enjoy the view. I wish you guys could stay a little longer to partake in that view,” he said.

A further four shuttle missions will occur over the coming seven months, each of which will bring equipment and supplies to the station.

The space shuttle fleet will then be retired.

Mary King, 30, and her husband David, 27, said they knew their son, Xavier, was a fast learner when he started sitting up on his own at just three months old.

But they were astonished when he tottered to his feet and began walking distances of six feet without support in January.

Mrs King, from Cambridge, said of her first child: “Xavier is more advanced than most babies his age. It was just amazing when he got up and started putting one leg in front of the other.

“The only problem now is that I can’t leave him alone so have had to buy a play pen so he doesn’t get into any mischief.”

Xavier, now seven months old, was born in July last year weighing 9lb 1oz.

Child development experts confirmed it was extremely rare for a baby to begin walking at such a young age.

Dr Martin Ward Platt, consultant paediatrician at Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, said: “To be quite so precocious with your walking is extremely uncommon, but with 700,000 babies delivered every in the UK it will happen from time to time.

“For his parents, having to cope with a much more mobile child much earlier than expected simply brings forward the moment you need eyes in the back of your head.”

Work on deciphering a complex set of symbols sent to them is underway, scientists from the country’s Space Research Institute said.

They claim aliens are currently answering 30 questions posed to them.

Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research.

He said the centre’s researchers were analysing 150 crop circles from around the world, which they believe answer the questions.

“Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time,” Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media.

“They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them.”

Mr Filipov said that even the seat of the Catholic church, the Vatican, had agreed that aliens existed.

He said humans were not going to be able to establish contact with the extraterrestrials through radio waves but through the power of thought.

“The human race was certainly going to have direct contact with the aliens in the next 10 to 15 years,” he said.

“Extraterrestrials are critical of the people’s amoral behavior referring to the humans’ interference in nature’s processes.”

The publication of the BAS researchers report concerning communicating with aliens comes in the midst of a controversy over the role, feasibility, and reform of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Last week it lead to a heated debate between Bulgaria’s Finance Minister, Simeon Djankov, and President Georgi Parvanov.

The low-bandwidth site is aimed at people viewing Facebook on their mobile and will launch “in the coming weeks”.

The social network recently said that more than 100 million people now access Facebook from their phone.

Analysts at CCS Insight said that the new site could help operators free-up critical bandwidth on their networks.

Data from industry body the GSM Association recently revealed that Facebook accounts for nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their phones.

The data showed that people in the UK spent around 2.2bn minutes browsing the social network during December alone.

Facebook said the new site “omits data intensive applications like photos”.

“We are discussing it… as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile internet usage,” said a spokesperson for the firm.

Facebook already offers a slimmed down version of the version of its site – called Facebook Lite – for people with slow or poor internet connections. It is aimed at users in the developing world.

The site was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which runs from 15-18 February.

Google has admitted to BBC News that testing of its controversial social network Buzz was insufficient.

The firm has had to make a series of changes to the service after a ferocious backlash from users concerned about intrusions of privacy.

The BBC understands that Buzz was only tested internally and bypassed more extensive trials with external testers – used for many other Google services.

Google said that it was now working “extremely hard” to fix the problems.

“We’re very early in this space. This was one of our first big attempts,” Todd Jackson, Buzz product manager, told BBC News.

“We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild.”

Many of the firm’s new services are tested by the so-called Google Trusted Tester program, a network of friends and family of Google employees who are given confidential access to products before they launch.

Buzz was not tested by this program.

The firm has now set up a “war room” at Google HQ to bring together engineers and product managers to make decisions about what changes need to be made to Buzz.

“If it becomes clear that people don’t think we’ve done enough, we’ll make more changes,” said Mr Jackson.

He acknowledged that many of the networks “tens of millions” of users were “rightfully upset” and that the firm was “very, very sorry”.

“We know we need to improve things.”

Privacy priorities

Buzz was launched on 9 February. The service, which is integrated with Gmail, allows users to post status updates, share content and read and comment on friends’ posts.

One problem that immediately caused concern was Google’s decision to automatically give users a ready-made circle of friends based on the people they most frequently e-mailed.

The launch was widely seen as a challenge to Facebook

Unless users changed settings in their profile, this list could automatically be made public, allowing anyone to see who a user corresponded with most frequently.

Mr Jackson told BBC News that the decision to create these automatic lists was borne out of the idea that Google “wanted to provide a great user experience straight out of the box”.

But privacy experts immediately pointed out this could cause problems for journalists, businesses or even people having an illicit affair.

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger who looks at the political implications of the internet, also raised concerns.

“If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government,” he wrote

As a result of complaints, Google said Buzz would now only suggest people who a user might want to be friends with.

The company has also announced steps to make it easier to disable Buzz altogether and to ensure that people’s accounts do not automatically connect with online Picasa photo albums and items that people may store in their Google Reader accounts.

The changes were in part thrashed out at a company-wide meeting on 12 February at Google headquarters.

“We realize that we didn’t get things quite right – we’re working extremely hard to fix this,” said Mr Jackson.

He said that “transparency and control” were “top priorities” and that users would “continue to see improvements”.

Code challenge

Other possible changes include a better “preferences menu” that will allow users to better tailor what appears in their inbox, and a more prominent “mute” option to switch the service off.

Another idea, said Mr Jackson, was to create a separate service that was not part of Gmail.

“We think that integration with Gmail was absolutely the right way to go – we wanted to make Buzz easily accessible to people,” he said.

“We also want to give people who don’t use Gmail the ability to use Buzz, so we’re exploring the idea of offering a separate destination site.”

The most recently announced changes would go live “this week”, he added.

“We worked around the clock to make the code changes for these improvements; now we’re putting them through a full testing process to identify any bugs and translating them into 53 languages so they reach all Gmail users.”

Asked if the Google founders – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – or any of the executive team would issue an apology for breaching their user’s trust, a Google spokesperson said: “Google has apologised – we’re very sorry for the concern we caused.”