1）网络安全公司Symantec近日发布报告称，社交网络垃圾信息和诈骗行为仍在不断增加，53%的社交恶意插件来自美国的僵尸网络，但却只有2.8%的电子邮件垃圾信息来自美国。

social network spam trend(from readwriteweb)

social malware chart(from readwriteweb)

社交垃圾信息的平均寿命是15至30天，Facebook遭遇了40%的社交垃圾信息，Twitter的同一比例为37%，YouTube则是23%。

social network spam volume(from readwriteweb)

网络安全分析师及博客主Chester Wisniewski指出，垃圾信息在Facebook和Twitter的转播和逗留周期非常不同，Twitter经常遭遇大规模的垃圾信息侵袭，该公司也会立即采取行动扼制这种现象；而Facebook却常遇到大量各种类型且在该网站长存一段时间的垃圾信息。

2）社交游戏开发商Zynga在日前的首次公开募股文件中指出，截止2011年3月，公司游戏的每月独立访问用户（MUU）是1.48亿，远低于外界之前的预期。Facebook应用追踪服务AppData最近显示，Zynga游戏在过去数月的用户总数已接近2.8亿，但这种测算并未排除那些重复体验Zynga多款游戏的玩家。而Zynga自己最近公布的MUU虽然已经区分出重叠型玩家，但也并未排除同时在Facebook和iOS平台体验游戏的用户。

Zynga's first quarter MUU(from insidesocialgames)

Zynga所计算的MUU在2009年9月是6300万，2010年3月则是1.24亿，去年底下跌至1.11亿。今年第一季度，Zynga游戏MUU增长至1.46亿（游戏邦注：主要是因为《CityVille》在1月份时用户超过1亿，目前该游戏的MAU仍有8700万。）。

3）据知情人透露，Blue Fang Games公司正准备“遣散所有的开发团队成员”，“约有15名员工将被辞退”。该公司成立于1998年，代表作包括《Zoo Tyconn》系列游戏，在最近几年转向了社交游戏开发领域，并推出《Zoo Kingdom》和《The Oregon Trail》、《Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?》等Facebook游戏。

AppData数据显示，《The Oregon Trail》当前DAU约2万，《Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?》则不足3千。该公司最近还打算针对iOS平台推出游戏，并向Kindle发布反棋游戏。

Oregon Trail(from insidesocialgames)

Blue Fang首席执行官Hank Howie则回应媒体称，公司已裁掉10名曾参与《The Oregon Trail》、《Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?》项目（游戏邦注：这两款游戏是Blue Fang与The Learning Company的合作项目）的开发者，公司目前还剩下约20名成员，并将继续与The Learning Company合作推出新游戏。但知情人反驳称与The Learning Company的合作项目失败后，该公司早在数周前就已辞退数人，他们在最近总共将裁员25人，而且也并没有任何开发者或高级职员在接手新游戏项目。

4）今年7月份，在Facebook前25名社交游戏榜单前列的仍是《CityVille》，《FarmVille》和《FrontierVille》等人们所熟知的Zynga游戏，但Zynga上个月的新作《Empires & Allies》表现尤为抢眼，目前的DAU和MAU均居于第三位。与上个月的排行情况相比较可以发现，在这25款游戏中，只有少数游戏曾流失MAU或DAU，这一点的原因可能与暑假来临，大量玩家重返游戏世界有关。

Top 25 Facebook Games by DAU(from insidesocialgames)

从DAU来看，该榜单的新面孔是位于第23名的泰国宠物类游戏《แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม》，以及排在第25名的多人模式经典街机游戏《Tetris Battle》。

Top 25 Facebook Games by MAU(from insidesocialgames)

在MAU榜单上，《Empires & Allies》在6月1日强势力发布，目前MAU已达4523万，超过了《FarmVille》的3836万；Gaia Online旗下的《Monster Galaxy》超越了Playdom的《Gardens of Time》，成功跻身前五名。游戏门户网站MindJolt Games本月位居榜尾，其竞争对手GSN则是第13名。

5）在本周的新晋Facebook游戏榜单上，PS3游戏《inFamous 2》的连襟游戏《inFamous Anarchy》居于榜单之首，目前MAU已逼近100万大关，但目前仍不可预测它是否会摆脱此类游戏的迷圈——另一款连襟游戏典型《龙腾世纪：传奇》从来没突破100万MAU。

Top Gainers This Week-Games(from AppData)

这份榜单含多种游戏类型和开发商作品，最近刚融资340万的Social Point旗下的《Mahjong Zen》和《Super Billares》也登陆了该榜单。

6）据路透社报道，在线网络广告公司DoubleClick首席执行官Kevin Ryan日前预测，Facebook今年将通过社交游戏创收10亿美元，其中多数多益来自广告业务，还有一部分是Facebook Credits的贡献。（游戏邦注：Ryan的兄弟Sean Ryan在2011年初担任Facebook游戏合作业务主管，两者有可能共享相关可靠消息，Facebook拒绝对此作出回应。）

Facebook至今仍属私营企业，所以无需公开财务信息，该公司或于2012年第一季度上市，其IPO估值非常惊人，预计将达1000亿美元。

7）据MyCube信息图表显示，2010年Facebook从用户创造内容（UGC）中创收18.6亿美元，超过了YouTube和其他社交网络的总和。

YouTube在2010年的UGC收益是9.45亿美元，Myspace是2.88亿美元，LinkedIn则是2.43亿美元。

2010年Facebook用户上传或欣赏的UGC内容（包括链接、贴子、照片等）共达3600亿次。

Facebook UGC(from MyCube)

8）社交游戏开发商Zynga终于在日前向美国证券交易委员会（SEC）提交S-1号文件，准备上市并融资10亿美元。该文件资料表明，Zynga运营情况十分乐观，在2010年总营收达5.97亿美元，净收益为9060万美元，公司库存现金达9.95亿美元。

据Pocketgamer报道，Zynga上市支持者包括摩根士丹利、高盛、摩根大通、美国银行、巴克莱银行等。据Zynga所称其游戏在全世界166个国家和地区共有2.32亿MAU（游戏邦注：但Namesake的信息图表称Zynga游戏MAU已超2.79亿），用户每日游戏时间累积超过20亿分钟（下图是Namesake所推出的Zynga信息图表）。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Zynga's path to IPO(from Namesake)

1）In case you hadn’t noticed, spam and phishing attacks through the social networks has been on the rise. Security company Symantec released a report yesterday detailing socially-engineered attacks to determine where they are coming from and what techniques malware criminals are using to lure victims into their traps.

Symantec says that 53% of social malware is being launched from botnets in the United States. This is an interesting find in comparison with the overall amount of spam that is sent worldwide, with only 2.8% of email spam coming out of the U.S., according to a 3 Comments released earlier this week.

The average lifespan of social spam is between 15 and 20 days, according to Symantec. Of that, Facebook sees the lion’s share with 40% of all social network spam, compared with 37% for Twitter and 23% for YouTube. Yet, there are differences in how spam is relayed on Facebook than Twitter. Twitter tends to see large-scale spam attacks that are shutdown by the company relatively quickly, while Facebook sees multiple types of spam threads running through the ecosystem on a persistent basis, according to a recent conversation I had with Sophos security analyst and blogger Chester Wisniewski.（source:readwriteweb）

2）Zynga IPO Reveals Count Of 148M Unique Players

by Kyle Orland

Papers filed for Zynga’s initial public stock offering today reveal the company had 148 million unique monthly players across its games as of March 31, much lower than previous counts which tallied players of multiple Zynga games multiple times.

Facebook app measurement service AppData currently shows just under 280 million players across all Zynga games in the past month. But that count simply adds publicly available usage data for each Zynga title, without taking into account users who are double counted by playing multiple Zynga games.

Zynga’s newly revealed monthly unique user (MUU) number (via InsideSocialGames) separates out these multi-game players, though it still doubly counts users who play Zynga games on both Facebook and iOS.

The internal count of MUUs nearly doubled from 63 million in September 2009 to 124 million in March of 2010, before dropping to 111 million by the end of last year.

The rise to 146 million MUUs in the first quarter of 2011 is likely due to the late 2010 launch of CityVille, which peaked at over 100 million monthly active users in January and is still the most popular game on Facebook with 87 million monthly active users.

Social gaming companies usually closely guard there actual user counts across games, though Zynga’s decision to issue public stock has opened the company up to more transparency about its operations and potential risk factors.（source:gamasutra）

3）Report: Zoo Tycoon Dev Blue Fang Lays Off Development Staff

by Kris Graft

Waltham, MA-based developer Blue Fang Games is laying off “the entirety of its development staff,” a source close to the studio told Gamasutra on Friday.

Blue Fang Games, founded in 1998, is the studio that created the Zoo Tycoon series, and has over the last few years transitioned into a social network game development with Facebook games such as Zoo Kingdom, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and The Oregon Trail.

The layoffs affect “around 15 people,” the source said. “The company is still attempting to procure new work, but that isn’t likely. All laid off developers have been told it is more prudent to find new positions.”

According to metrics tracker AppData, The Oregon Trail currently attracts around 20,000 daily active users, while Carmen Sandiego attracts under 3,000.

The studio had also released games for iOS platforms, as well as a reversi game for Kindle.

Gamasutra has contacted the studio for official confirmation.

[UPDATE: Blue Fang CEO Hank Howie told Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner that the studio cut around 10 developers who were working on games with The Learning Company, which partnered on The Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego.

According to Kirsner’s report, the partnership is now over, but the CEO claimed that the studio will continue to develop games despite the severed ties with The Learning Company. Around 20 people are left at the company, according to the CEO.

However, Gamasutra’s source rebutted Howie’s statement. The source claims that several workers were in fact laid off weeks ago after additional project funding from the Learning Company failed, as the CEO suggested, but the 15 layoffs reported today are in addition to those previous layoffs (about 25 in total in recent weeks). The source said there are no developers nor senior staff on hand to actively develop new games in-house, contrary to the CEO’s statement.

A separate source told Gamasutra that he was contacted by a number of ex-Blue Fang workers this week who were looking for work.（source:gamasutra）

4）The Top 25 Facebook Games for July 2011 Welcomes Empires & Allies

By AJ Glasser

Kicking off our top 25 Facebook games for July are the usual Zynga titles CityVille, FarmVille, FrontierVille, Texas HoldEm Poker, and Mafia Wars — but the real story is Zynga newcomer Empires & Allies, which debuts in the top three across both monthly active users and daily active users. As compared to last month’s rankings, it looks like fewer than half our top 25 games experienced losses in MAU or DAU — which could indicate that though summer vacation kicked off in early to mid-June, plenty of players are back in front of their computers as of July 1.

Empires & Allies is a war-themed hybrid city-builder/strategy game where players construct military and civilian structures to generate individual army units that can be led into asynchronous battles against other artificial intelligence controlled opponents. Because the game shares many mechanics with CityVille and because it launched in 12 languages worldwide, Empires & Allies got off to a strong start after its June 1 launch, eclipsing Zynga sibling FarmVille in a little over three weeks. Even so, it’s got a long way to go to top CityVille in MAU or DAU.

We begin the rankings this month with DAU, which is a measure of a game’s overall retention when compared to MAU. Two notable newcomers to the list are แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม — a Thai-language game about taking care of a pig — and Tetris Battle, a multiplayer version of the classic arcade game that we recently reviewed.

As for the top 25 games by MAU on Facebook, we see Gaia Online’s Monster Galaxy muscling its way into the top 5 after Playdom’s Gardens of Time apparently loses momentum. Games portal MindJolt Games also squeezes in right at the end, though its rival, GSN’s Games portal, is still well ahead of it at number 13 this month. We recently spoke with GSN about its long term growth plan as compared to competitors King.com (whose standalone title, Bubble Saga, still sits in the top 25 by MAU and DAU for a second month running) and MindJolt.（source:insidesocialgames）

5）inFamous Anarchy Tops This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

By AJ Glasser

Good things come to those who wait on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games as recorded by our traffic tracking service, AppData. At the top of the crop is inFamous Anarchy, a tie-in game for PlayStation 3 game inFamous 2, that nearly missed its launch window thanks to a outage of the PlayStation Network.

Even with that early set back, it looks like inFamous Anarchy is well on its way to classing out of our emerging list by breaking the 1 million monthly active user mark. The game’s real test will then come from how long it can continue to grow relative to other recent tie-in games’ life cycles — most notably, Dragon Age Legends, which never did quite break 1 million MAU.

The rest of this week’s list sees a mix of genres and developers ranging from fighting games like Shadow Fight to arcade games like Bouncing Balls (a Snood clone). We observe Social Point’s continuing growth efforts, seen here in Mahjong Zen and Super Billares. The developer recently scored a round of funding totally approximately $3.4 million from Nauta Capital.（source:insidesocialgames）

6）Facebook to make $1 billion from social gaming this year

By Emil Protalinski

Facebook will generate an estimated $1 billion in revenue from social gaming this year. The majority of this revenue will come from advertising, but some will come from Facebook Credits, the social network’s currency for purchasing content on the site. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is declining to comment.

Kevin Ryan, a leading Internet entrepreneur and former chief executive of online advertising giant DoubleClick, made the prediction in an interview with Reuters this week. Ryan’s brother, Sean Ryan, became director of gaming partnerships at Facebook in early 2011, and the two likely share information on a regular basis.

Facebook is a private company and so it doesn’t have to disclose financial information. The company is going public next year, possibly as soon as Q1 2012. The website’s initial public offering (IPO) could be very high, given that its valuation has been predicted to top $100 billion.

Zynga, the dominant developer of social games on Facebook, just filed for an IPO today, and the number is (coincidentally?) $1 billion. Zynga reported that its 2010 revenue was $597 million, compared to $121 million for 2009, and 19 million for 2008.（source:zdnet）

7）INFOGRAPHIC: Facebook Made $1.86B On Users’ Content

Jackie Cohen

Facebook earned an estimated $1.86 billion from user-generated content in 2010, more than YouTube and all other social media sites combined made from it that year.

That gem of a statistic comes from an infographic put together by MyCube. Let us know what you think of the graphical rendering you see below by posting in the comments section beneath this post.（source:allfacebook）

8）Zynga has filed for its much-anticipated IPO. The San Francisco social gaming powerhouse, maker of the hit games FarmVille and CityVille, filed its S-1 with the SEC this morning, indicating that it intends to raise as much as $1 billion. The filing also reveal that the company is profitable, posting $597 million in revenue in 2010 and $90.6 million in net income.

The company reports that it has 60 million daily active users and about $995 million cash on hand. For more details on the filing, check out TechCrunch’s coverage here. The company recently opened a satellite office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square in an effort to attract local tech talent.（source:techflash）

Social gaming star Zynga files for $1 billion IPO

by Keith Andrew

As rumoured towards the end of May, Zynga has taken the first step towards going public by filing an initial public offering (IPO) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The filing states Zynga is looking to raise $1 billion from the offering, with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs serving as the lead bankers for the move.

Also playing a part will be Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Barclays Capital.

Future planning

“Our strategy from the beginning has been to build the biggest macro bet on social gaming to provide our players with the most accessible, social and fun games,” reads founder and CEO Mark Pincus in the S-1 form.

“Despite our rapid growth, we have been careful to build for the long term.”

Also in amongst the filing are a bevy of statistics casting light on the position the social gaming giant is enjoying today, with Zynga claiming to have 232 million monthly active users (MAUs) across 166 different countries on board.

Said players create and store more than 38,000 virtual items every day, in the process of clocking up a total of 2 billion minutes of playtime daily.

Money matters

On the financial front, the company posted revenues of $597 million in 2011, and recorded a further $235 million in the first quarter of 2011.

The business is also profitable, posting $90.6 million in net income last year. （source: pocketgamer）