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Zynga is the leading maker of social media games like Farmville and Mafia Wars.  You know, the games you love to hate on Facebook and Myspace.  The equity analysts at SecondShares have put a dollar figure on the value of Zynga if it were publicly traded (it’s a privately-held company).  That value is $5 billion.

Yes, Billion with a B.

They also think that by 2015, the value could double to $10B.

Suddenly, robbing banks and attacking your rivals with a shotgun and two Colt .45s doesn’t seem quite as lame anymore.  Maybe these addictive games are really worth something.

SecondShares based their valuation on a lot of things, including outstanding shares (venture mostly), growth rate, and so forth.  The largest amount of value, however, comes from Zynga’s user base.  It’s sheer size, length of captivity within each game (most spend at least 20 minutes a day), and the current revenues per user (from buying game items to clicking on ads).

This user metric is astoundingly profitable and beats most Web-based user-retention schemes by a long shot.  Few Internet properties can boast the kind of user numbers and time spent engaged that Zynga can.

The authors of the report were Lou Kerner (formerly Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs), Eli Halliwell (Sanford Bernstein), and Jay Gould (Gamers Media CEO).  They measure Zynga as the number one gaming platform online in social media with an estimated 237 million monthly active users and 6 of the top 7 social games right now.  That puts them leagues ahead of the next-largest competitor, Electronic Arts (who owns Playfish) and CrowdStar.

Wow.  Who knew that time wasters like Farmville were actually worth money?

Our lives are becoming increasingly digital and more focused on reputation than ever before. Job applicants aren’t just subject to a couple of calls to listed references and a quick check of past employment. Now, human resource managers are doing background checks, running credit scores, and even Googling their prospects.

Yes, many HR managers now put prospective employees into search engines to see what comes up. You can learn a lot about a person by just putting their name in Google and hitting the search button.

The trouble is, what appears and what is actual may not be the same. The truth is subjective on the Internet and what is displayed as how it is may not be what it really was. A friend of mine, for instance, was horrified to find himself listed as a member of a Neo-Nazi group ñ right on the first page results of a search for his name.

Of course, the person they were referring to wasn’t my friend, but they had the same name. Do you think a prospective employer would have known, though? Worse yet, what if the article had been referring to him directly, as a smear (or even honest reporting mistake)?

This happens and it happens more often than some people might think.

Your online reputation is a valuable commodity. My book, Do It Yourself Online Reputation Management, covers this and shows you how to make your reputation on the Internet appear rock-solid to anyone who checks it. As my co-author Herb Tabin says, “All of us are a brand now. Whether you like it or not, you’re name and reputation are a brand that you present to people when you meet them online or off.”

Making sure that Brand You is all that it can be is easy. Similar to cleaning up your dirty (and inaccurate) credit history on your credit report, scrubbing the dirt away from your online reputation is easy to do and only requires a little knowledge and persistence.

You don’t need specialized knowledge or skills, but you do need to know where to go and what to do in order to remove bad references from search engines, websites, and so forth. Luckily, that knowledge is easy to get and anyone can utilize it to make their online reputation pristine.

The big news this weekend, of course, was the release of Apple’s new iPad tablet, now officially in stores.  Thousands of units were shipped, purchased, and distributed as hype-junkies got their fix on the latest and lamegreatest of gadgets.  The glorified iPhones proved themselves to be, surprisingly, exactly that.

In less than a day, someone hacked the iPad using an iPhone 3.1.3 weakness, showing that the “new” 3.2 firmware in the iPad is not all that much of an improvement.  The jailbreak allows the user to gain easy root access to the iPad’s core to run unsigned apps and other goodies (or not-so-goodies).  The jailbreak was done by MuscleNerd and revealed on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Apple’s iTunes App Store has been going nuts as new iPad owners flocked to populate their new devices with apps.  The top download was a Facebook app that, it turns out, wasn’t from Facebook at all.  The impostor application sells for $2.99 and allows the user to access Facebook through their iPad.  Despite the fact that the tablet has a perfectly good browser and large screen to access Facebook.com without a hitch.  Except for that pesky “no Flash” problem, which this fakebook app doesn’t get around either.

Speaking of iPad apps, the trend analysis shows that big media companies and groups, who earlier seemed to think that the iPad would be their savior as they implemented their new paid strategy to rebuild their bottom line, weren’t doing so hot.  Their free apps (what are available, anyway, most weren’t ready at launch) were being downloaded brisquely, but the paid apps many of them hoped to field were, well, flops.

Overall, the new iPhone (er..Pad) is selling like most Apple gadgets do: like hotcakes.  For now.  I’m sure that over the next few weeks, laments about how it isn’t all that will start to surface.  It’s inevitable.

Introduced in October 2009, Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark is a program designed to help Web professionals and startups gain access to design and development tools and licenses as well as training and support.  From Microsoft’s perspective, of course, they gain access to realms that normally only Linux has enjoyed: the bootstrapping startups and webrepreneurs.

With the advent of other software tools that are also targeting the strengths of Linux, like Windows Server 2008 R2, the Seattle Giant is definitely moving towards gaining back their lost market shares.  The good news is that by doing so, they’re opening up a huge door for small businesses and startups who otherwise would have had to either not use Microsoft’s software or would have had to spend precious resources (large sums of cash) to buy them.

Through its trifecta of startup and entrepreneurial tools (BizSpark, DreamSpark, and now WebsiteSpark), MS is definitely jumping whole hog into the next generation of IT businesses.

WebsiteSpark is aimed at website developers, app builders, and hosting providers.  The program is in three parts: software deployment (Windows Web Server and SQL Server), training and support (from Microsoft experts/engineers), and marketing exposure (through MS Partners).

Any small company or startup with 10 or fewer employees and that specializes in website development or app building (or related) can qualify.  The program costs $100 for three years, at which time your company can either license the products wholly or choose a scaled down version.  Best of all, the $100 isn’t due until the end of the three years.

A ton of hosting providers (over 200 now in 30 countries) and tens of thousands of startups worldwide have jumped on board so far.

My friend Aronado Placencia hosted interviews on WebsiteSpark at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year.  Here is one of them:

In business and to the public, Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft) and Steve Jobs (founder of Apple Computers) are are bitter rivals.  In reality, they’ve been conducting a secret, well-hidden love affair that has lasted decades.  In fact, the two met before either the Seattle Giant or the Bitten Apple were even conceived.

As you can see here, the two were good friends in college and it is believed that their secret affair may have begun at this point.  At the time, gay love was not considered socially correct and the two likely covered their tracks for this reason.  Later, of course, the “head to head” competition between their two companies would serve as a marketing bonanza, so the secrecy was likely kept in order to foster that paradigm.

Recently, however, the two moguls have been seen together many times publicly and not always just for business.  It may be that they’re tired of the charade and have decided to slowly introduce their secret to the world.

During a recent interview, hints were dropped as Gates mentioned his “quiet” home life and Jobs has been seen visiting Seattle, Washington in his private jet more than once.

Now the two men can be seen, without escort, having dinner together and possibly a lover’s quarrel at an exclusive restaurant in San Francisco:

It’s likely that the two supposed rivals will soon be coming out of the closet.

Possibly as soon as April Fools is over.