According to this BBC report Facebook, eBay, Google and Amazon have joined a new lobbying group that will push issues they deem important in Washington. The new lobbying group is called The Internet Association, and will open up shop in Washington D.C. in September. They will handle political and regulatory issues in the capital.

In an interesting interview with CNBC, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello says that the company's recent decline in its stock price isn't due to the business, but to a lack of understanding in how the business works on the part of investors. For starters industry's focus on NPD's packaged game sales numbers is "misguided," and ignores the current strong shift towards digital sales - which NPD doesn't have a handle on yet. He points to their success with games on Apple's platforms as well as on Facebook.

Zynga is loaning several of its developers to create a social charity game on Facebook. Development on a "social action" game based on the book Half the Sky by Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn is well underway according to GamesBeat.

The book is about "turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide." The game will be released on Facebook on November 13.

In the grand tradition of FarmVille, YoVille, FishVille, CityVille, and CastleVille, social game development company Zynga has released a new game in the “Ville” series titled simply: The Ville.

You just rolled your eyes, didn’t you?

Electronic Arts co-founder Trip Hawkins announced via his official blog that he will step down from the role of CEO at mobile games company Digital Chocolate. Hawkins says that he will take an advisory role with the company he helped found.

"I am transitioning now into a consulting and advisory relationship with Digital Chocolate. For its next stage of growth, Digital Chocolate is narrowing its focus and it made sense to get more streamlined."

The world's largest social network has set the price per share of its initial public offering at $38 a share. The stock is listed on NASDAQ today and there are 421.2 million shares available (180 million in new stock, and the rest with existing stockholders). If Facebook sells all of those shares at that price, the company could raise an estimated $16 billion and have a valuation of $104 billion.

Fox News has an interesting story on one developer who is not afraid to go head-to-head with Blizzard's Diablo III - in fact their game features the ultimate demon fighter (sans the actual fighting with demons). While Blizzard was launching one of the biggest games of the year, Christian software developer Lightside Games was launching a new Facebook game featuring Jesus called Journey of Jesus: The Calling.

Facebook is beginning to drum up interest among the investor class for its initial public offering, which could raise raise between $9.4 billion and $11.8 billion for the company. But because of its public support for CISPA one high profile investor says that he is not going to touch Facebook's stock: Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. 

In an interview with CNN, Ohanian said that he plans to hold off on any investment in Facebook due to its support of CISPA. He did concede that he understood the “business value of what Facebook is doing.”

A new service by research firm PrivacyChoice rates the privacy and tracking policies of various Facebook apps. The service, launched this weekend with ratings on over 200 Facebook productivity, sharing and game apps. The top score an app can get is a 100.

That score can be diminished by an app doing certain things to its user like failing to respect a user's deletion request, sharing data with a large amount of partners, storing consumer data for long periods of time, and more.

A California mother is suing Facebook claiming that the company is allowing minors to make purchases via in-game micro-transactions and that allowing this to happen without parental consent violates California's consumer protection laws.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin shared his "growing concern" with UK newspaper The Guardian over what he calls "very powerful forces" trying to restrict freedom on the internet. In an interview with the newspaper, Brin said that the efforts by governments and companies such as Facebook and Apple to control online activity are "scary."

Streaming video game service Gaikai has launched a beta trial of its new Facebook app, allowing users to play demos while logged into the popular social network. For now users can play demos on Facebook including Saints Row - The Third (USA), Dead Rising 2 - Off the Record (USA), Magicka (USA & Europe), Sniper - Ghost Warrior (USA & Europe), The Witcher 2 - Assassins of Kings (USA & Europe), Orcs Must Die! (USA & Europe) and Farming Simulator 2011 (USA & Europe).

According to VentureBeat, Zynga's activities on Facebook accounted for $445 million (12 percent) of the social network's revenue in 2011. This information comes from Facebook’s initial public offering filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. What the numbers show is that social gaming, and Zynga's brand of it in particular, is an integral part of Facebook's ecosystem.

By Kevin Dent

I started to play Triple Town as of last weekend; I had a blast and even more so when I see that they were actively supporting it with frequent updates. Then I started to hear some rumblings in the industry about how another game basically ripped it off.

Since then, we have seen Spry Fox issue proceedings against Lolapps. Most of us have read about it and shook our heads; I want to take the rhetoric out of it. I wanted to just look at the basic facts.

In an exclusive interview with GameBeat, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus denied accusations that it copied a rival developer's Facebook Bingo game, but also said that social game developers refine and improve game concepts on the market to create the best products.

Over the weekend Santa Monica, California-based Buffalo Studios claimed that the upcoming Zynga Bingo was a cheap knock-off of its Bingo Blitz game, which already has a million daily players on Facebook.

Facebook has released its list of the ten most popular games on the social network for 2011. Surprisingly it's not CityVille or The Sims Social at the top of the heap. The Playdom game, Gardens of Time was the most popular Facebook game in 2011, followed by EA's The Sims Social and Zynga's CityVille, Doubledown's Double Down Casino and Zynga's Indiana Jones Adventure World rounded out the top five.

The list compiled by Facebook only included games with more than 100,000 monthly active users and the highest of user scores.

Zynga is telling investors as it pitches for its upcoming initial public offering, that it can and will double its user base - a user base that has been in decline for the last few months due to good-old-fashioned drop-off and Facebook's change in the way it measures user activity. "We could see that doubling," Pincus said at the luncheon at a Boston hotel with potential investors. He did not give a time frame for meeting this target.

Ford is sponsoring what it calls the "largest Words with Friends" game ever to promote its all-new Ford Escape. The public gaming event will take place tomorrow at 11:00pm - Wednesday at 12:00am at Hollywood Blvd and Highland Ave or on the company's Facebook page via a livestream.

AXA Equitable, a life insurance company in Farmington, Connecticut, has created a video game to introduce life insurance to women in their 40s. AXA's Pass It On! launched on the web in September and now a mobile application is heading to more portable devices. Pass It On! lets players pick an avatar and walk the streets of New York City collecting gold and avoiding expenses. The character can also buy permanent life insurance (represented in-game as a gold shield worn as a backpack) or term life (a silver shield).

Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz says that the continued user decline in various Zynga games on Facebook is "extremely troubling."

Facebook has made some changes this week to the way it measures monthly and daily active users who use apps on the world’s largest social network. The company announced that it will no longer count users who land on an app without logging in. This changes - in some instances - more than halves the reported figures for some major games. While these changes don't change the actual traffic to Facebook apps, they do reflect active users more accurately.

While it might seem that Facebook is the number one destination in the world for social games, a new report indicates that the social network's dominance may simply be isolated to the North American market.

Two social game developers are warning that using inflated monthly active user (or MAU's) number is not a good idea - particularly when it comes to data coming out of games available in Asia. According to social game makers InnoGames and A Bit Lucky monthly and daily active numbers from Asia are not a good measure of a game's success because some regions don't offer any serious monetization.

In what can only be described as a non-shocker (except to the investor class who expected big money from the social game maker), Zynga has amended its IPO filing to point out that it is losing money... lots of money. The company noted that its net income for the second quarter fell to $1.4 million; which is about a 90 percent drop from $14 million in the same period a year ago. For some perspective, the company raked in $16.8 million in the first quarter.

EA's popular Sims Facebook game continues to soar past the competition. The game developed by EA's PlayFish studio now has 50 million monthly active users, according to social game analytics site AppData. The Sims Social launched last month, attracting almost 5 million players in a very short amount of time. The game picked up an additional 15.5 million players last week to reach 51.5 million MAUs.

Electronic Arts has been gunning for Zynga the day it acquired social games maker Playfish, and today Zynga is getting a wake-up call. For the very first time, EA has created a game that is capable of taking the top spot from Zynga's Farmville.. maybe. The Sims Social now has around 36 million monthly active users, according to AppData. The game has achieved these numbers a month after its launch.

Nearly five million Facebook users have signed up to play the new The Sims social game. The game published by EA and developed by PlayFish, debuted with 4,859,046 million monthly active users after leaving public beta. A little over 842,000 new users started playing the title today, with around 3,665,500 joining in the last week.

Social games giant Zynga can't seem to stay out of court; either they are suing someone or someone is suing them. Today they are being sued by a company called Agincourt. Agincourt filed the lawsuit in a Delaware federal court this week, citing Zynga's history of imitating other companies' products and alleging that the Farmville maker has violated patents it holds related to in-game prize redemption. Specifically the patents relate to processes for credit card payments and online prize redemption.

A new Facebook game that its developers describe as "uplifting" promises to reward players for acts of kindness in the real and virtual world. The game, A Better World, is an online space where good deeds get rewarded, positive thinking is encouraged and compassion and support for others are integral. More than 100,000 Facebook players have already discovered the game and seem to like it.

Activision went out of its way to say that its marquee AAA franchise, Call of Duty, has nothing to fear from Facebook. While its biggest Rival, Electronic Arts has invested billions of dollars in the social gaming space, Activision has no interest in tackling the space, and isn't concerned one bit with what is going on there. The company says that focusing its resources on a few core franchises for traditional gaming platforms is the right path to take.