There have been a bunch of rumors about Zynga leaving the Facebook Platform over the past week. The story has been watched closely by developers who are also feeling the tightening grip of Facebook, however no source has painted such a dramatic picture as Fox News. In an article this morning, Fox states, “Sources at Facebook described Zynga as a bad actor, which is putting profits before its users, and suggested that if the situation persisted it would be best if Zynga’s games left Facebook altogether.” Really?

Sources at Facebook suggested that Zynga leaves the Platform? That just doesn’t make sense. While Facebook has an immense amount of control over Zynga, I seriously doubt that the company would hope Zynga just goes away. The primary reason is that more than 24 million people come to Farmville alone, every single day. That’s approximately a tenth of the daily users on Facebook all together.

While I’m sure that there could be significant tension between the two companies, it sounds as though the source that Fox News used probably wasn’t that high up. Additionally, Fox News describes FarmVille as “a cartoonish simulation that melds ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and ‘Green Acres’”. I have no idea how they came up with that description!

I’ve never referenced Fox News as a legitimate news source however it’s pretty entertaining to see the company get in on the Zynga rumor mill action.

While Michael Jackson continues to reign as the most popular person on Facebook, FarmVille now has the largest fan base on the site. While the application was already the largest Facebook Platform application with almost 74 million monthly active users, it only recently surpassed Michael Jackson as the largest Page on Facebook with over 11 million fans. It’s not exactly a surprising metric considering the massive promotional vehicle the company has.

In comparison to other applications though, FarmVille has a relatively high ratio of fans to active users. This is not by accident. As Facebook prepares to deprecate their notifications developers have been focused on driving users to other promotional channels. Over the past month there has been an increased focus on getting users to bookmark applications in addition to becoming fans.

While feed stories don’t typically reach a large percentage of fans, FarmVille only needs to reach a fraction of active users to have a large impact. The company’s new FarmVille podcast obtained over 220,000 views, which is incredible considering it was only posted via the application’s fan Page. Whether you are a celebrity, popular brand, or a large application, Facebook Pages are a great way to engage your fans, customers, or users.

Zynga has been focused on engaging their application users in multiple ways, something many other application developers fail to successfully execute.

Zynga’s most popular game, Farmville, doesn’t appear to be slowing in growth, recently surpassing 70 million monthly active users. Just two weeks Zynga announced that the company had surpassed 100 million monthly unique visitors, of which Farmville accounted for the majority of those users (approximately 66 percent according to our own statistics).

While numerous users have been complaining about the application experiencing widespread downtime over the past few days, the number of users visiting the application daily has also surged in recent weeks. With over 28.4 million daily users, Farmville is clearly in a league of its own. There is simply no other application that is comparable to Farmville.

The application is so popular that we’ve even received calls from users who are having issues with the game. In other words Farmville has become a global phenomenon, and Zynga, the developer behind Farmville, is basically larger than MySpace in terms of traffic and revenues at this point. That says a lot about the potential of the Facebook Platform.

That MySpace is trying to distance itself from the Facebook comparison makes a lot of sense since traffic continues to plummet along with revenues. MySpace is now working quickly to try to redefine themselves as recent reports suggest that the company has lost its coolness factor among younger users.

For Zynga, the future looks bright. While Facebook is preparing to roll out significant changes to the platform over the coming weeks, it will be difficult to knock Zynga from their dominant position.

It’s a good month for Zynga. The company has one game which continues to thrive as the largest Facebook application ever and has a second application, Café World, which has raced up the charts in just a couple weeks. Playfish, now the second largest developer, also has had a great month with close to 20 percent growth, however it hasn’t been able to match Zynga who is simply dominating the Facebook platform.

As I wrote last week, while covering the explosive growth of Café World, the Facebook platform has essentially become a large gaming platform. While there are other community applications which continue to thrive, there is no comparison between games and the other applications. Facebook gaming has ballooned into a massive industry with virtual goods driving much of the revenue growth.

FarmVille has become an icon on the platform as no other application has come close to matching its massive user base. It has almost doubled the second largest application, Causes, in terms of monthly active users and has tripled the Facebook iPhone application in terms of daily active users. The second most popular, non-Facebook developed, application based on daily active users happens to be Café World which has just under 7 million daily active users.

The results have been nothing short of astonishing. If Zynga keeps at this pace, the company could soon come close to matching Facebook’s own revenue, at least until Facebook releases their payment platform and opens the gift shop to developers. Playfish has also proven to be a stellar company which not only creates top tier games but also has a great revenue model.

At the Social Ad Summit in New York City two weeks ago, Sebastien De Halleux, COO and Co-Founder of Playfish, emphasized the company’s focus on maintaining an amazing user experience. This means that rather than placing distracting banner advertisements, they have focused on production-heavy advertising. Comparable to television advertisement production costs, many advertisers have yet to venture into this area, leaving virtual goods sales to pick up the slack.

While the advertising revenue may not be at the levels Zynga, Playfish, and other companies would like, virtual goods are doing a great job of filling the void. As I wrote last week, virtual good sales are expected to surpass $1 billion in the U.S. alone this year. Much of those transactions will be taking place on the Facebook platform. Not surprisingly, Zynga will account for the vast majority of those transactions.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 6 to 12 months as the growth in this space continues to be phenomenal.

I’ve just found a bug on farmville that will give you an unlimited amount of experience points.. but i suggest you hurry as as soon as zynga realise they’ll fix it!.. just click on a friends icon and click ‘visit/help friends farm’ then when your friends farm has loaded it will ask you to click [...]