Zynga has snapped up another company in its quest for world domination, making this the eighth acquisition for the social gaming giant in the past year. In December, the FarmVille creator purchased Newtoy, developer of the popular Scrabble-like game, Words With Friends. Zynga also added XPD, Challenge Games, Unoh Games, Conduit Labs, Dextrose AG, and Bonfire Studios to its roster earlier in 2010.
The newest acquisition, Flock, is a social web browser incorporates Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status updates in a sidebar that also includes a link-sharing features and a social search that will show was friends are saying about a specific search query. If you’ve never heard of it before — you’re not alone. The browser launched in 2005 and never reached critical mass. Which leads one to wonder — why is this low-profile browser suddenly such a hot commodity? Considering that Google and Twitter were also in the running to buy this company, we have to guess there’s some kind of patent at play and/or fantastic engineering talent behind the scenes.
Where does any kind of social browsing know-how fit into Zynga’s future? Nothing formal has been announced yet, but Flock CEO Shawn Hardin wrote the following on the company’s blog.
“Our team will help Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime – on any platform.”
This also fits in with Zynga CEO Marc Pincus’ recent talk about creating a ‘dog-activated world,’ where you’ll be able to access FarmVille and other social games on every single platform out there. It’d also be interesting to see if this will be tied into Zynga’s rumored social network Zynga Live. I haven’t heard much about the Zynga-specific network since May 2010, but inside sources have hinted that it’s still going full steam ahead.
