will be able to try it out for themselves, though it’s limited to Mafia Wars only for now. It’s a feature that’s going to be good news to the game’s millions of addicts and also represents a very important strategic move for the company. Because it’s one more thing that Zynga won’t have to rely on Facebook for. 
Zynga’s ties with Facebook run deep. They now share some of the same investors, including Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies which has poured as much as $400 million into Facebook and just led a $180 million round in Zynga. Zynga is rumored to be Facebook’s largest advertiser. And Facebook’s viral features have played a huge role in helping Zynga rise to prominence. But despite all of this, it’s in Zynga’s best interest to keep as much control over its own games as possible.The reason why became very obvious last October, when Facebook announced it would soon no longer let developers push updates to a user’s Facebook Notifications. This is a big blow to all developers, as the notification channel is one of the best ways to keep users engaged over a long stretch of time. Zynga in particular has become particularly adept at using the channel to keep users coming back for more. Their tactics haven’t always been Kosher and sometimes border on downright spammy, but they work. Now that Facebook is killing off this channel, Zynga needs to find another way to connect with its users.
Developers are going to start getting access to Facebook users’ Email boxes, so that’s a start. But Emails don’t generally instill the urgency as a Facebook Notification. SMS messages do, and then some. Zynga will have to convince users to hand over their phone numbers of course, but they’ll get a strong hold on anyone that does. For now messages will only be able to provide notifications, but in the future users will actually be able to respond to them to execute in-game actions while they’re away from their computer.
Read more at crunchpad
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