The Facebook Empire and Virtual Worlds

"We think that if you can build one worldwide platform where you can just type in anyone's name, find the person you're looking for, and communicate with them. That's a really valuable system to be building."( Zuckerberg).


Mark Zuckerberg built a system that CNN, political campaigns, schools and everybody uses in every country around the world. Today, Facebook has more than 400 million users. According to blog post by Tony Bradley, "the market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185 percent last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9 percent during the same time frame."

In the following chart we can see how Facebook’s market visits increased while Goggle’s market visits remains like a plateau.




The difference between Facebook and Google is that Facebook is a social network. All Facebook users are connected by the network most of the time. Investors and business noticed that people spends more time in Facebook than in Google and prefer to put their adds in Facebook.

Another reason why people spend so much time in Facebook is the virtual worlds or games that Facebook applications offer. Virtual worlds are games created to make people spend more time online and to get profit. These games are among the strategies that Facebook and other businesses use to grow financially. The businesses increase their profit and the Facebook empire gets stronger and surpasses their opponents.

There are many virtual worlds or games that Facebook users can play. For example, YoVille is a virtual world created by Zynga. The game is a free application that can be used in Facebook. Many people spend many hours in Facebook playing and sending invitations to play YoVille.




In fact, when people play the game, they can become addicted to it and spend many hours online. When people use the application, they become yovilleans. The game lets them create an avatar that looks like them, provides them with an apartment and coins. Yovillians can chat with other yovillians, decorate their homes, buy different kinds of houses, send gifts, send messages, dance with their friends, and attend live events. For example, parties, sales, etc.

Facebook users can add other people that play YoVille to their Facebook friends to get more coins and friends. That is how the network of YoVille grows. There are some groups in Facebook with the only purpose to add YoVille friends. Some groups try to convince you to fill surveys to get virtual money (yocash) to play YoVille. There are thousands of people that join that kinds of groups that are asking “add me, crew me, etc” to the contact list of other Facebook users that play YoVille.

FarmVille is another virtual world created by Zynga. It is another free application that can be used in Facebook. The game lets people build their own farm. They can buy cows, chickens, horses, seeds, etc. In this game people can have plantations and grow all kind of crops. Facebook friends that have the application can help fertilizing crops, feeding chickens or sending gifts.

PetVille is another virtual world application that people play in Facebook. In this game, people can create a virtual world for their pet. They can clean it, feed it and dress it. They can add their friends as neighbors and visit their pets. They can send gifts and invitations to all their Facebook friends.

These are some of the games that people play most of the time when they are in Facebook. Messages and gifts can be shared and posted in their profile’s wall. Game invitations are private and only the users that receive the invitations can see them. All the games are free and people can get coins by working in a factory or by visiting other yovillians.

However, some things in YoVille can only be purchased with (cash) yocash. People can only get yocash by buying it with a credit car or by buying trials in Netflix, Bestbuy, etc. If people want to get the latest stuff, they have to buy it with Yocash. If people don’t have yocash, they can only buy things that are sold in coins. The YoVille bank will only exchange Yocash for coins and not the other way around. That is the way Zynga gets money and can make the games better, fun and even more addictive for Facebook users.