Mafia Wars is a Social Game?

I've been playing a little Mafia Wars lately on Facebook and on the iPod. Zynga classifies both versions as "Social Games" but I don't think the iPod version is social at all.

First of all, it's not integrated with the Facebook version at all. You can't easily recruit new members to your mob except to send emails to people in the address book on your iPod. It's not integrated with Twitter either so neither social graph is used in the game.

Secondly, you don't interact with the members of your mob at all. There's no shared stakes, no strategic coordination, no shared resources. The only way that the iPod version of the game is "social" is that you're encouraged to spam your friends in order to get them to to download it and play and thus maybe buy Reward Points and make some money for Zynga.

The Facebook version actually does take advantage of the Facebook platform and lets you send items to your mob members and you can ask for help with objectives. I just never log into Facebook anymore so I don't think to play it.

What do you think? Should the iPod version of Mafia Wars count as a "Social Game"?

Flickr Creator calls user "A Dick"... PR Problem? Not for Flickr...

Saw this link via @courtenaybird and had too much to say about it to fit in a tweet...

http://gawker.com/5288759/flickr-founder-calls-nuked-user-a-dick

Butterfield doesn't work for Yahoo of Flickr anymore. This isn't a "PR" or "messaging" problem for those companies. It's a "PR" problem for him personally if at all...


Also, I don't really think he's too far off base with his assessment. This user was trying to get his message out, which he has the right to do. The problem is that he went about it in the wrong way. Assaulting the system with volumes of messages is only going to lead to trouble.


Furthermore, why is the burden on Flickr/Yahoo to restore the images? Shouldn't the user have his own backup? If those images are so important, make extra copies, use JungleDisk, Cloudsurance, Blank DVDs... something!