Zynga is the publisher of Farmville, a social game available on Facebook which has become so powerful that the game’s parent company is rumoured to have raised $500m, of which Google is said to have contributed some $100m in the latest round.
The Google investment in Zynga, therefore, made me think of Russian dolls – "babushka", nested wooden dolls where a larger doll hides a series of smaller dolls.
One reason for Google’s reported investment in Zynga might be that games are good products for pay-per-use, where Google has other growing interests. But perhaps another is that games are potentially fertile ground for advertising.
Google’s main business, of course, is advertising. To see how serious this Facebook versus RoW schism is already, let me give you some parochial examples.
Wandering on Sunday morning along the Thames, I saw an advertisement for a major new film release promoted on a roadside poster. Further information was offered not by a reference to a website but to a Facebook location.
Then, further down the road as I passed a pub, its roadside chalkboard invited regulars not to view its website but to "friend" the pub.
One key strategy for many companies with a web presence has been to have a Facebook presence too. But these two advertisers, a major film studio and my local pub, appear to think a Facebook "f-URL" is enough.
Facebook’s plan to embrace and extend the existing web content from within Facebook via the iLike programme, drawing many websites into its navigational (and ad serving and micropayment) platform appears to be working well.
So how does Google prevent itself from fitting into the Facebook mother, which could result in lost revenue via its own web platform for discovery and monetisation?
Well, how about by investing in a smaller doll and fitting neatly inside Facebook? Zynga’s Farmville is now so popular it would be hard for Facebook to boot it out.
And who will handle the ad inventory generated in Zynga games, let alone any potential pay-per-play revenues? Consider this from two perspectives: that of the advertiser and that of the user.
From the advertiser perspective, Farmville within Facebook might present a locallyoptimised advertising yield, although Farmville inventory inside Facebook may not produce optimal yields when taken overall across all Zynga users.
For the web user, however, as the web fragments into doll-shaped silos, who can provide an overall look across the content and present a single view to the user? Was that not after all the point in indexing everything? So it seems the current trend may not help either user or advertiser.
Two trends are likely to proliferate Babushka marketing strategies: first, the move to apps and away from websites and, second, the growth of social networks. The growth of social networking leads to sharing of private data online with subsets of users.
The old problems of enterprise search, which the web partly solved, are now being faced by individual consumers.
Disconnected silos of information stored behind logins and paywalls with no common search or discovery mechanism are everywhere as each attempts to "own the user".
This is getting serious: Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for professional contacts, Amazon for purchases, Twitter for breaking news, Gmail for email.
Except for the latter, the information most valuable to you is no longer easily accessible through Google alone. And even with Gmail you still need to search in two different places if you want to see your email along with web search results.
As ever, technology solves the problems technology creates. Amir Nathoo from UK/US start-up WebMynd* (www.webmynd.com) is working on search technology to let you access all your data silos in one place with one "view": it is aware of your preferences and identity without compromising your privacy.
Better yet, it does this on Google, Bing or your favourite search engine, so you don’t need to change behaviour or search differently to reassemble the Russian-doll silos into a contiguous information resource. MySpace, Forbes and Digg.com have gone live with a WebMynd implementation.
Rapportive*, another start-up, by contrast, fits inside Gmail and makes the product even richer. Both add to existing infrastructure, improving user experience rather than competing.
This is going to be a hot space. So as we watch for expected future developments, the key question will no doubt be: who then is stuffing whom?
*Taysom has investments in Rapportive and WebMynd