Tech Confidential had an interesting conversation Wednesday with Mark Pincus, the Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur who founded the Zynga Game Network. Zynga brings players together via Facebook and other social networks and boasts several popular titles, including a version of the trendy poker game Texas Hold 'Em and a Scrabble knockoff called Scramble, each with about half a million people playing daily. The startup recently won a $10 million Series A round, led by Union Square Ventures and including Avalon Ventures, Foundry Group and power angels Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and Clarium Capital managing partner Peter Thiel. We asked Pincus about how Facebook Inc.'s opening up its application programming interface, or API, is changing today's online applications, including games. 

Tech Confidential: How important is Facebook as a platform for developers?

Mark Pincus: Let me first say that, as an early investor in Facebook, I'm incredibly biased. I mean I definitely drank the Kool-Aid. You are talking to an extreme believer in Facebook. With that as a preface, I believe in the opportunity to put your software out there as a decentralized service that no longer requires someone to come to your Web site and think to interact with you. Now they find you in the flow of things they're already doing.

TC: Is Facebook the new Windows?

Pincus: Yes. It's very similar. Windows integrated the stack for you. Apple's OS and Windows both did it, but Windows did it in a way that had API calls that anybody could call into. The new stack is part technology, but the technology part is a smaller and smaller part. The bigger part is the social stack. It's getting all the people. The Web infrastructure at the user level has to happen before someone can install a new application. Do you have a profile created? Do you have a verified email address? Are you on the same network?

One difference is distribution. After you built for Windows, you still had to find distribution. In the case of Facebook, the distribution is part of the stack.

TC: How does social networking enhance the online game experience?

Pincus: The first thing you get is proximity. You don't have to think to go to our site. Even if there were nothing better than that, gaming would do well because gaming does well on every portal, like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN.

The second thing is that social networking will enable gaming to be more of a mass market experience. In the evolution of computer gaming, it began as a time waster, and the only people who really spent time on it had massive amounts of time to waste. Then when games moved online, they were more interesting, and you could waste time with other people.

Now social gaming is in a position to penetrate the mass market. It emulates and copies your behavior offline. These are games that you actually play with your friends and family -- like board games and newer games like Trivial Pursuit. When 60 Minutes asked Mark Zuckerberg what's cool about Facebook, his answer was a couple of open games of Scramble that he was playing with his grandparents.

Note:  Facebook Inc. has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble, according to the BBC. It's not clear whether or not Zynga has received a similar request about Scramble from Hasbro and Mattel. A spokesperson for Zynga says the company has no comment at this time. -- Mary Kathleen Flynn

See Jan. 15 post from Tech Confidential
See Jan. 15 post from Fred Wilson's blog
See Sept. 2007 story on Facebook from Tech Confidential