Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

Facebook is taking steps to reduce certain things that make Apps on its platform a huge success. We reported one of them earlier as the social network rolled out new rules for Popup on Feed Forms. All this as said previously, will have its toll on the app traffics and I bet larger app developers are going to look for alternative ways to promote themselves and send notifications across as many channels as they can. Welcome Zynga that has been hugely popular with its winner app: Farmville and is now taking the steps for the same.

The social gaming developer today tested SMS notification to users. Meaning that users are being sent notifications from the social network right to their mobile devices. This has been rolled out primarily for the Mafia Wars and all this sums up to be a very good strategy from Zynga, which means it has to rely even less on Facebook. This is quite a bit of a break given that both Zynga and Facebook have been doing a lot for each other, not to mention that they have a common investor, Russian firm DST which has invested heavily in both Zynga (worth $180 Million) and Facebook lately. To be honest, this helps Zynga to be more independent on its own instead of relying so heavily on Facebook for all the promotion via notifications across the social network’s platform, etc.

The trouble had actually initiated when Facebook talked about putting a halt to updates via Facebook Notifications which I consider to be quite a blow to all the developers. Mainly because it kills the chances of these developers leveraging the power of the social network. But I find the step quite positive, the only reason being those updates are very sickening given how they spam you with notifications and it becomes quite tiring to clean your account of those.

So why has Zynga actually gone to test this with Mafia Wars? The reason is obviously that it is Text based unlike Farmville which has quite a lot of images, Flash. Other than that it has got a lot of loyal following to make the test quite informative to see if SMS notifications will actually be favorable. The only sad part here is that only 10% of users will actually have the privilege to test it out.

Before I end this one up, I seriously hope Zynga gives some serious thoughts to its spamming policy. I think the developer leaves no slot empty to get user attention and flooding ones feeds with notifications is just one example of it.