January 15, 2008 ADVERTISING More Than Games, a Net to Snare Social Networkers

By BRAD STONE

FRIENDSHIP means being able to sink each other’s battleships.

That is the thinking of Mark Pincus, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has built several Internet start-ups, including Support.com and the early social network Tribe.net. On Tuesday, Mr. Pincus is pulling the wraps off the Game Network, a company devoted to developing online games that work on the pages of popular sites like and MySpace.

Zynga, which has 27 employees, has spent the last few months quietly reinventing card games like poker and blackjack and classic games like Risk, Boggle and Battleship. Users of social networks can add the games to their profile pages and play with their friends online.

The games, particularly Zynga’s version of Texas hold ’em poker, have already amassed hundreds of thousands of regular users. The company and others like it share a belief that Internet ventures can be created on the backs of the rapidly growing social networks. Last year, these networks invited entrepreneurs to take advantage of their big crowds of users and to keep the revenue they generate from advertising.

Whether this approach can generate big profits over the long term is not clear, but plenty of people are giving it a try. More than 7,000 applications have been introduced on Facebook since the company opened to outside programmers in May, and more than 80 percent of its users have added at least one application. Seasoned companies and small start-ups alike are rapidly developing add-ons for Facebook and other sites, including MySpace, which has promised to open its service to developers early this year.

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Zynga is also tapping into the current enthusiasm for so-called casual games, which have a short learning curve and generally appeal to people who have never heard of games like Halo and spend limited amounts of time playing games.

“People already love to play casual games,” said , a partner at the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, which led a $10 million round of financing in Zynga. “But when you take a casual game and stick it inside a social network, it becomes way more exciting. This is like pouring gasoline on fire.”

Mr. Pincus is yet another seasoned entrepreneur who is putting great stock in Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook, and his conception of the “social graph.” The idea is that applications like games are even more appealing, and