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Social gaming is now a multi-billion dollar industry expected to pull in $14.2 billion by 2015, analysts say.  Yet developers in this space are finding it harder and harder to get their slice of those billions ($6.1B this year).  Growing pains are hitting the social gaming industry hard.

King of the game gang is Zynga, whose titles like Mafia Wars and Farmville have been the most-played games on Facebook for years.  The company is about to go public and expects to raise about $1 billion in revenue from that move.  Money that will pay off some debt and get their next titles out to the public.

Something that Zynga needs to do as Mafia Wars 2, it’s latest release, appears to have been nothing near the blockbuster they’d hoped for.  The follow on to the previous time killer has been wracked with bugs, user complaints, and abandonment after only a few hours’ play by the average player.

While revenues at Zynga are up ($306.8M at least quarter), profit is down by more than half from last year ($12.5M, a 54% drop).  This is reflected in the rest of the social gaming industry too, where costs of acquisition (money to get players) are rising fast as increased competition makes building a fan following difficult.

Electronic Arts, which has only recently moved into the social gaming sphere with the hit Sims Social, a knockoff of their popular Sims series for the PC.  Despite that game’s huge following (33 million users to date, 19% of which play daily), the game has yet to turn a profit.  Why?  Marketing.  EA spent millions marketing the game aggressively, which largely accounts for its popularity.

Analysts predict that only about 1/3 (or 33%) of social games are reaping a profit.

Innovative ideas are changing how games monetize, however.  Zynga has started making in-game ad deals, doing the video game equivalent of product placement – something movies and television have been doing for years.  Others are likely to jump on board with this plan.

However it works out, the social gaming industry is getting highly competitive and over users who are becoming more and more discretionary about their online time.

Major porn companies have banded together to sue ICANN over the new adult top level domain (TLD) .XXX.  The suit is an anti-monopoly claim against the non-profit that oversees most of the well-known TLDs (com, net, org, etc).

The major companies behind the suit are Luxemburg-based Manwin and Digital Playground, which together own many of the Web’s most well-known porn hubs.  They contend that ICANN is price gouging on the .XXX domain and want an injunction to stop the TLD and require its re-opening with competition and “reasonable price constraints.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of California on November 16 and accuses ICANN and its registry company ICM Registry of engaging in “monopolistic conduct, price gouging, and anti-competitive and unfair practices.”

This might seem frivolous, except that it’s very serious and could have long-lasting implications on the domain system as we know it.  The crux of the suit alleges that ICM (a for profit contracted by ICANN) used coercive tactics and promises of millions of dollars in fees if it were made the sole registrar of .XXX.

If Manwin and Digital Playground were to win this suit, it would fundamentally change a lot of how we use and interact with domain registrations and use.  Currently, there are a handful of TLD registrars in the world, each more or less operating regionally.  They pay ICANN a small fee for every domain registered through them and ICANN acts as the world’s “central hub” for domain registries.

When ICANN approved the dot XXX TLD earlier this year, a lot of buzz around its implementation was heard.  Early registrations were opened with companies paying many thousands of dollars in fees to secure their brands on the domain.  Including many who traditionally would not be associated with porn: like colleges and universities.

At $300 per registration, that’s not insignificant, considering that most have many names and variants to protect.  CraigAgranoff.xxx is one thing, but Craig-Agranoff.xxx, CraigAg.xxx, AgranoffCraig.xxx, Agranoff-Craig.xxx, and then several each for all of my owned properties (brands) could potentially ad up to tens of thousands in fees.  A university, for instance, might have their own name (and 3-4 variants), thier football team, their basketball team, their volleyball teams, their sports teams collectively, their various departments, and even famous backers or names of buildings on campus.

Securing these means securing your brand.  Not doing so could mean costly lawsuits later (either to fight misuse of it or to fight potential litigation for your not protecting someone from it).  Most businesses and apparently universities have opted to pay now instead of later.

But for the adult industry, that was not as clear cut.  ICM did not allow some of the domains to be sold in this relatively open pre-market, instead reserving them to auction to the highest bidder.  Despite the fact that the .com/net/etc equivalents may be clear brands owned by others.

These auctions are quite lucrative.  “Gay.XXX” auctioned for $500,000 and many others are going for $200,000 and up.

Another blow to ICM is their requirement that legal rights and claims against them be waived as a condition of registering with them.  This doesn’t look good for them in court.

ICANN should take this lawsuit seriously.  Not only does it have potential to change how domain registrations are made, but it could have long term ramifications for how new TLDs are introduced and the way that they’re handled.

This week has not been a good one for Facebook.  However, it has been a different story for Twitter.  If you have been keeping up with the news headlines you will probably already know that Facebook has been the victim of a rather nasty spam attack involving graphic porn images.  Many users have been disgusted by them – and they have gone straight to Twitter to talk about it.

So is this a new trend in the online social media world?  Do people leave Facebook and discuss various trends and occurrences on its rival social networking site Twitter instead?

It would seem that they do.  Many Twitter users have been discussing the attacks on the micro-blogging site, advising others to steer clear of Facebook – especially where children are concerned – until the site has sorted out the problems.

However, this is not the only time that Twitter has been the chosen venue for those who are disappointed with the service received by Facebook.  Salman Rushdie, the infamous author of “The Satanic Verses”, went to Twitter to vent his frustrations about the treatment he had received from Facebook.  Apparently, the social networking site wanted proof that Salman was who he said he was.  Salman is his middle name and Facebook wanted to list him as Ahmed Rushdie.  Understandably, since he is not famous by this name, Salman was rather annoyed.  Therefore, he went to his followers on Twitter to share his frustration.

You cannot really blame him, can you?

There hardly seems to be a single day of late when there has not been a negative news story about Facebook.  However, it appears that the social networking site has been hit by a particularly bad spam attack in recent hours, as a flood of pornographic images have been seen appearing on the profiles of numerous users.

Those in charge at Facebook think that the users who have been affected by the images may have inadvertently clicked on links that have enabled the hackers to release a virus into their Facebook accounts.  This in turn has led to the virus being able to post unwanted images on their profile pages.  Anyone who is a friend of the affected profile owners will also see these images.  The hack has caused much upset and disgust among Facebook users.

While Facebook seems to be moving quickly to shut down the accounts that were at the heart of triggering this virus, some believe a lot of damage has already been done.  There have been hundreds of news reports during recent hours, with lots of people already saying that this is the last straw and they have closed their accounts with Facebook.  This is of course another controversial move – you cannot delete your account, you can only close it.  So even now, people are unable to vote with their feet.

At the time of writing Facebook had not yet managed to put an end to the problem.  Hopefully it will not be long before they do, for the sake of damage control.

If you happen to enjoy card games, especially online games against real opponents, then you’ll probably love this one.  Poker legend Doyle Brunson refers to this game as “the Cadillac of poker.”

Made by Vaiden Gaming, Texas Hold’em Poker is both beautiful to look at and very fun and easy to play.  I don’t mean it’s “easy mode” poker, I mean the interface is easy to understand.  You can play against the game if you’re not connected or (I recommend) play against other live players from anywhere an iOS device is connected to the Internet.

You don’t play for real money, of course, but you can purchase VIP chips to give you game bonuses in the game’s freemium model.

Before you sit at the table, you can hang out in the lobby where other players who’re online congregate.  This gives you a chance to talk, find fellow players you’d like to friend and get in-game with, etc.  It can also be linked to your Facebook profile so you can not only invite friends from there for friendly matches, but you can also send brags about game events to your profile.

After all, what good is playing well if you can’t brag about it?

Although the game sometimes slows down if your connection is not good or a lot of people are connected – I noticed it was slower to draw cards when at a table full of online players during peak hours.  Otherwise, it’s great.  Some have complained that it crashes once in a while, but I haven’t seen that myself.

When Google Plus first launched a while back, those in charge stated that businesses would have to wait a little longer to get their own dedicated Google Plus service.  Of course a lot of businesses then went on to create pages on the standard Google Plus service, but now at last the proper business pages have been launched.

Nevertheless, while this has hit the news much as you would expect it to, there has not been as much fanfare around the launch as you might expect.  In fact, some people seem to be rather underwhelmed by the launch.  Some have jumped on and created a business page but then wondered what they should do next.  This has been the experience of some on the rest of the Google Plus site as well.  Therefore, it remains to be seen whether the launch of the business pages will take Google Plus to another level or not.

Some have questioned whether it is worth spending time promoting your business on Google Plus when it still has only around 50 million users.  This is a hefty number, but it soon feels a lot smaller when you compare it to the 800 million users Facebook can boast of.  Furthermore, you have to consider how many of those 50 million users are actually on Google Plus on anything like a regular basis.

Some still seem stumped by Google Plus.  Even though we can now create business pages, the launch seems to have been a damp squib more than anything else.