• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 4, 2010

Google really (really) wants to get into the social network business, and the company has identified social games as key fators in the success of Facebook, the social network to beat. At least, that's what I get from Google's overtures to social game developers including Playdom, Electronic Arts, Playfish, and Zynga, as it lays plans for a new social network, which rumor has dubbed "GoogleMe."

The order of events is telling, considering no one knows what a Google social network would look like or how it would function. Google CEO Eric Schmidt did promise it won't be a "copy" of Facebook, but the search giant seems to be taking a page from Facebook's, well, book, by putting social games front and center in its plans. Google is pretty serious about this approach: last month it bought a stake in Zynga for somewhere between $100-$200 million.

Essentially Google is trying to reverse engineer a process which unfolded organically for Facebook. But can you really reproduce serendipitous success this way?

There's no question Facebook has profited from social games created by Zynga, including Farmville and Mafia Wars, both in terms of user engagement and revenue. In April, 78 million Facebook users played Farmville, accounting for about 16% of Facebook's roughly 500 million active users worldwide. They spent somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion hours, or up to a third of the three billion total hours spent on the site in April (my math is based on various estimates that 30 million people play Farmville every day, spending an average 30 minutes per day on the game, plus total Facebook usage stats per Nielsen).

Meanwhile Facebook gets a cut of Zynga's revenues from virtual goods sales, which came to around $270 million in 2009 according to one estimate by Lightspeed. That means Zynga games are major contributors to Facebook's bottom line, kicking in roughly $80 million or 11% of Facebook's total revenues of around $750 million in 2009.

These games aren't necessarily stable long-term phenomena (over the last couple months Farmville has seen the total monthly active users decline) but it seems safe to say social games in general currently make up a large part of the appeal of social networks. On the other hand, I am skeptical that you can make the process flow backwards, that is, that you can use social games to jumpstart a new social network.

A crucial point about social games is that they are -- duh -- social. Frankly, Farmville is crude to the point of being almost retro; the appeal clearly isn't the game play itself, but the interaction with friends who are also playing as your "neighbors," competing and cooperating in the quest to build a rural idyll. If people didn't have their friends playing (virtually) alongside them it would probably be excruciatingly boring; I'm trying to picture an offline version of Farmville, where you compete or cooperate with computer-generated players. No thanks.

On that note, Farmville grew rapidly after its debut June 2009, reaching 10 million active users just a month later and 70 million by the end of the year -- but it drew on an established base of Facebook users which grew from 250 million to 350 million over the same period. That's important because it made it easy to recruit new players through friends who were already on the site (in part via annoying SPAM messages, which Facebook later banned, it's true).

Ironically Farmville may now actually be more important to Facebook than vice versa -- but the fact remains that without Facebook there could be no Farmville in the first place. Common sense dictates that a social network has to be populated before you can build social gaming apps into it. If that's the case, Google faces a chicken-and-egg dilemma: basically, why would you join a social network to play a social game if none of your friends were playing?