Social Game Developer Zynga Acquires MyMiniLife

Social game developer Zynga keeps on growing and has announced the acquisition of MyMiniLife, a virtual world and social networking site that allows its users to build and decorate homes and other environments. The MyMiniLife team and technology will be assimilated by the game developer as it builds an even bigger portfolio of games. Zynga is now the largest social game developer in the world, claiming a collective 68 million monthly active users.

“We’re constantly looking for the highest quality talent and technology to help us build our business,” Mark Skaggs, VP and GM of Social RTS at Zynga, said. “The MyMiniLife technology and team is a perfect complement to the top notch teams here at Zynga.”

Zynga has become the biggest developer of social games in the world, attracting close to 70 million monthly users (depending on the source) on Facebook, double the traffic of its closest competitor. It has built a very solid collection of games, with many of its releases having become big hits on the platform. One of its latest successes is FarmVille, which now gets about 6 million unique users every day and is one of the top apps on Facebook.

MyMiniLife boasts 4 million registered users to the site and also has a Facebook app that only gets about 2,000 monthly active users though, with Zynga behind the project, that is sure to change soon. The company has a history of investing in smaller game developers and has an interesting approach. It “invests” early on in promising projects by providing them with traffic and, if the game picks up, it then acquires the team altogether, a sure way of guaranteeing the quality of the developers.

“We’re very excited to join Zynga and help grow the business in any way we can,” Sizhao Yang, CEO of MyMiniLife, said. “We’re looking forward to being an integral part of Zynga’s leadership and growth moving forward, and are happy to have supported FarmVille’s amazing success with MyMiniLife’s technology.”
(By http://news.softpedia.com)
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PayPal Is Now Supported by Xbox Live

The Xbox 360 is a very popular gaming device, largely due to the fact that its Xbox Live service is one of the best online features in any current generation console, offering a wide amount of content, downloads and getting new aspects everyday.

One of these is the fact that Xbox 360 users can now use the popular Internet service PayPal as a method of payment on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Don't think that you will be able to pay directly with it though, as if you go to the Xbox.com website, you will be able to buy Microsoft Points in order for them to be added to your credit balance.

This is something extremely good, especially since many users weren't really inclined to associate their credit card information to their Xbox Live account. In case you don't have a PayPal account, getting one is quite easy and, in just a few steps, you will be able to tie it with your Xbox Live profile.

First, you have to sign in to the Xbox.com website and go to the account summary page. Then, you need to choose Manage Payment Options, and click the Add a new PayPal account button. All you need to do is introduce your details and you're good to go for buying new MS Points.

Here are some important things that the Xbox 360 community manager, Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, revealed on his blog alongside his announcement of this new feature:

- PayPal is currently supported for Xbox LIVE users in the U.S. only.
- PayPal can only be used to purchase Microsoft Points on Xbox.com.
- PayPal accounts are not available for purchasing Microsoft Points on the Xbox 360 console.
- You can associate multiple Pay Pal accounts with your Xbox LIVE account.

Overall, seeing that PayPal is used by many people all around the world, this new feature was somewhat of a no-brainer, but it's quite nice to see it implemented. Alongside other incoming features like integration with Facebook, Twitter or Last.fm, Xbox Live is getting more and more attractive.
(By http://news.softpedia.com)
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Google Reader Adds Support for PubSubHubbub

It's all about the “real time” now, with every site and service out there adding this type of features, whether they benefit it or not. And, with Twitter taking over as the fastest and most popular way to share stories, some are even quick to declare RSS/Atom feeds dead. But not if Google has anything to say about it, as a new distribution protocol, PubSubHubbub, has now been integrated into Google Reader, the Internet giant's feed reader app.

“Speed is very important at Google, and the Reader team is no exception. One way in which we take speed into account is to try to make consumption of feeds be as efficient as possible. We also want to make it as fast (and as easy) as possible to interact with your Reader data on the rest of the web,” Mihai Parparita, one of the Google software engineers who worked on the project, wrote. “We're therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items.“

PubSubHubbub is a new protocol that won't replace Atom or RSS feeds but will bring them up to date with the “modern” web, and it works as an extension to the current protocols. Users have to subscribe to a new feed just like they always did but after this, if the feed has a “hub” server set up, the reader app doesn't have to constantly ping the source for new content. After setting up a hub server, the publisher just has to “notify” it when new content is available and the hub then does all the work by actively pushing the feed to the subscribers, not having to wait to be pinged. This allows new content to reach subscribers in a matter of seconds.

Google Reader has started adopting the new protocol and the first step is supporting it for “Shared Items,” meaning that any service that implements the protocol can now be notified immediately of the new content. The Google Reader support was a “20% project” of Mihai Parparita, Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick and, for now, the only major service to support PubSubHubbub is FriendFeed. However, the aim is much greater and, as the project picks up traction, it should eventually replace the current feed system to allow it to compete with the much faster Twitter and even FriendFeed.
(By http://news.softpedia.com)
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