Well said. I think it's just the nature of companies like Zynga that tend to bother me - companies that care nothing about customers or innovation, and only care about numbers and stuffing their pockets. It's interesting though where the market is now with indie games - small developers actually do stand a chance against the big companies BECAUSE they still believe in innovation and their customers.

This statement is contradictory in nature, especially when it comes to Zynga, a company known to build games based on numbers and statistics. Those numbers and statistics come directly from the customer and are directly related to whether or not the good numbers go up and the bad numbers go down. People seem to forget that these companies rely on customers to make them popular, it's far to easy for the pundits to say "well it's just marketing" as though customers are just deer caught in the headlights. I don't mean to underplay the role marketing has, it's huge, but lets be real, Zynga has released some awful games and they died, quickly. The ones that hang around have appeal to someone and they're tuned for what works for those people. that's business, because without customers, you have no business.

I'd mod you up but I've already posted on the thread. You've hit the nail on the head but it's going to fly over the /. crowd. This is the detail in the suit zynga brought against Verdu - Verdu was caught lifting assets from Zynga. There are other poker games on the Facebook market despite Zynga having the first one on there.. and some look remarkable like Zynga's poker, but they remain, because concept/game mechanic is not protected like that, for damned good reason. If it was, we'd have very few games in the world. It would be like if only one car company could make cars...

Tiny Towers was far from original IP but that's ok because Nimblebit is not Zynga.. and ./ loves to hate on the big guy. It's one thing to actually take assets from a game and another to simply put out a competing game in the same genre/game mechanic. Yes they look similar BECAUSE THEY ARE THE SAME TYPE OF GAME and that's perfectly ok. The consumer should win here.. It's like the claims that Zynga's Bingo was copied.. well, good luck making a Bingo game that doesn't look like all Bingo games. And if you poke around, you'll find that portions of games (huds, friend bars, power up assets) are scooped and shared ALL AROUND. Are you going to blast Words with Friends for being Scrabble next.. maybe no one should ever be able make a scrabble type game again.

Who wants to come up with the next great innovation, when you know damn well that the second you do, some big player with more resources is just going to swoop in and steal it?

Stealing something doesn't make it good. Nimblebit made the tower genre good by improving on previous tower games (sim towers, etc). Zynga is attempting to make Dream Heights/Towers (whatever it's called) better than Tiny Towers. Nimblebit should spend less time throwing stones at Zynga and more time seeing what's working for Dream Heights and improving their own game. Make a better mouse trap.

Partnership with chilling effects...this is somewhat ironic.

I smirked just a little when I thought: wouldn't it be funny if her heart kicked it while she was "analyzing" the source code... I'm no lawyer (in fact I'm a software engineer) but I'd be getting that thing in my body pretty quickly if I needed it to survive.

MOST democratic.

"I don't let advertising dictate to me what I do and don't want. If there is something I need, I go looking for it. If there is something I need to accomplish, I go looking for ways to do it."

What a ridiculous statement.. I'm literally laughing out loud at this. Would you be surprised that companies experience gains when advertising?? How do you think those gains occur? Do you think that people are dictated by advertising and just graze their sheepish way to the store like zombies, entranced in consumer glory. Advertising is about getting something into the minds of people. It's not always about what they "need" but rather what they may "want", and no, I don't always know what I want until I see an advertisement for it. People don't just collectively realize that the latest Call Of Duty game is out.. they hear from their friends, see it in the store, OR SEE AN ADVERTISEMENT. Don't be such a basement nerd as to think you're not influenced by something so engrained in our culture, you probably don't even recognize when you've absorbed some information from an advertisement.

Unless you believe competition is good for the consumer. If so, then this is exactly what is needed.

"Oh, and for the record: If you personally like ads, I think you're retarded."
There have been occasions where advertisements have actually alerted me to products I wasn't aware of and had interest in. While these occasions are rare they do happen, and in fact, that is their intention: exposure. If I had to choose between targeted adverts or random I'd chose targeted - I'm not including "no adverts" in the choice because, well, Facebook needs to pay their employees and bills like every other company.

It's completely free, and yes, because I don't pay them in dollars I believe that it's completely free. The service is about providing data of yourself to share to other people. Yes, Facebook can and does leverage this data to bring in real money, good on them, that allows the service to remain FREE (FREE AS IN COSTS NO DOLLARS!). It'd be another story if you had to complete some seemingly random surveys or go off to some CPA enrolment and sign up for some oddball thing before using the site.. but nope, the data you provide is completely at your (and possibly your friends) discretion and it's up to you whether it's beneficial to your experience on the site.

Free service puts some ads up, next story at 11. I predict yhis submission still gets 5000 comments with the obligatory "that's why I have never had a Facebook account" and "Facebook is selling your info to nazis". Slashdot loves to hate.

The argument seems to be that these kind of questions help to identify problem solvers and people capable of taking on problems that they're (presumably) unfamiliar with. The company I work for uses them and I just can't help thinking we've lost some great potential hires and gained some awful hires due to the reliance on them. I feel like if you're going to use them you need to make sure they're not the pivotal piece in the interview process - too often these questions are the make or break tool for a hire and I think that this is the actual problem. Interviewing is hard for both sides, engagement is key, there are no magic bullets.

Because if carrier lock down is not permitted for subsidized phones then that market will end very quickly. As such it would not be something I would want to come to the US. One of the reasons for the explosion in smart phone popularity other than marketing is that buyers never had to pay for the phone up front.

Carriers could provide phone subsidizing even with unlocked phones - they just need to provide attractive service packages to entice customers to use them and not their competitors, something I think would be a good step forward. If a user purchases a subsidized phone they are generally locked into a contract with the carrier for some period of time. It doesn't really matter if the phone works on other carrier networks since the user must pay their monthly bill for the contract length.

I definitely applaud this direction and hope to see this come to North America.

I can understand the desire to move away from Facebook for communications between activists but trying to create a new social network is just not going to work. Like it or not, everyone is on Facebook and twitter. Want your cause to be picked up and spread around then you need to get it on the social net with all the people.

Giving a young student a device they can play games will result in young students playing games. The ipad seems like the wrong tool for the job with young students. Also, taking notes on a iPad???