Big news out of Zynga HQ today. The company is launching what it calls a “social lobby” for all players to meet and play across all social networks and platforms, broadly called the “Zynga With Friends” network. Key features include activity feeds, a new chat interface, multiplayer (which Kim-Mai has covered more here), leaderboards, and a variety of other additions designed to unify the company’s titles.
This appears to mean that you’ll be able to play with people from iOS devices while you’re on Facebook, for example, sharing all of your user data back and forth so you can see things like who won the last game — although we’re trying to confirm the exact implementation. At least, the Zynga With Friends profiles will carry across all of its games.
Meanwhile, the social stream of gaming activity, which already appears on Zynga.com, will now appear across its games. So will chat, including group chat — and a multiplayer interface in some games that will let more than two people play at once.
Other developers, like Kabam, have pursued cross-platform strategies as well — and indeed it’s been a Holy Grail for the industry over the half-decade it’s been around. But this is by far the biggest implementation of such an effort to date.
Zynga also has some other stats to share. Its version of the news feed has already created 100 million connections between people, for 250 million clicks per day.
Meanwhile, new third-party developers on Zynga.com include Majesco, 50 Cubes and Portalarium.