Playfish focuses on the quality of their games with a consistent design aesthetic and compelling game design. While this might mean fewer games and higher cost per game it ensures their mission statement of creating the best games they can stays true.

Zynga focuses on making money. They either acquire games or fast follow/emulate other games and pump money into the space to drown out the competition in marketing and customer acquisition.

Zynga makes alot of money. Playfish does as well. And both companies have a lot of users playing their games. But at the end of the day is it the quality of the customer (repeat player, organic word of mouth, user turned ambassador) versus the number of customers (one time players, subversive acquisition, lead gen tactics) that really matters to potential acquirers?

It will also be interesting to see what will happen when the changes to the Facebook platform take effect in the new year in regards to notification spamming, customer acquisition flow, and direct messaging.

Read the Silicon Alley Insider article here

Facebook announced last week 19 new items on their development roadmap to be implemented in the last two months of the year and into 2010. Of the 19 items some, if utilized correctly, will help social games become more mainstream and accepted. Others will bury a lot of the existing game models that have allowed the mafia type games to take off.

Inside Social Gaming wrote a great summary of the changes and the effects they will have on developers here. The biggest changes that will affect social games are changes to the News Feed and Notifications:

- 45% of all stream posts come from games and almost the same amount from quizzes. One of the big changes is that notifications and invites are going away closing the News Feed from application activity. Apps that rely on this spam blasting of the news feed will loose their virality.

- Applications will now be able to directly ask for users email address for communication. Developers will get valuable direct access to users but will have to be even more careful not to inundate with mafia-esque messages. People are more protective of their email inbox than news feed.

- The News feed will be the only one-to-many communication method. As mentioned applications will use email to communicate with users but user-to-user will solely be conducted via the FB inbox. This is another step in the direction of cleaning up the News Feed to be more like a Twitter stream with Inbox messages analogous to Twitter DMs.

These updates are for the greater good of the platform and end user experience. It will take sometime for developers to adapt their methodology for developing games and applications to go viral but users will have a cleaner experience and more control over their experience.

See Inside Social Gaming’s article here.

Direct from the source: Facebook developer writes about the changes here.

One subtle but very nice feature they are implementing is the ability to tweak your notifications to selectively broadcast. Users can send messages to all friends, to all friends in a geographic vicinity (i.e. friends within a .5 mile radius) or only to specific friends. Stalqer also allows users to create custom lists and select which lists to broadcast to. This could be your co-workers for after work happy hour, to friends if you are out on the town, or to family if you are shopping for the Thanksgiving turkey.

It is interesting that they did not include a social gaming/reputation system to encourage users to achieve… This is something that Foursquare does well. Who doesn’t like to show off that “Bender” badge after 4 nights in a row of bodily abuse.

Add this to Loopt, Gowalla, Booyah Society and a new comer Rummble and we got ourselves a rummmmble in the social location junnnnngle. Booyah!

see more about Stalqing via Techcrunch here