I find it highly annoying that every time I accomplish something in the game, it spams my friends. One of the problems with Facebook is how quickly low levels of spam can accumulate and swamp someone as their number of friends grows. Mafia Wars just makes it that much worse.

I do like the general idea of a “social” game that lets you include friends in an off-line manner, but I’m not sure Zynga has the right formula yet. The Mafia Wars social interaction is pretty much gifting. Aside from that, it’s recruiting and spamming. I’m not a big fan of gifting with canned gifts (e.g. everyone has access to the same pool – I think apps where you can create unique gifts are much more interesting). Recruiting and spamming are not high on my fun list either.

What would work better, I think, is social games that let different people develop their characters in differnt ways (preferably leveraging some aspect of their real-world personality) and the bigger achievements require multiple skill-sets in some cooperative effort. The old RPG “party” system. Mafia Wars seems to take some steps in that direction, but it’s just not there yet.

Browser don’t have magical pixie dust that lets them show nice graphics without correspondingly powerful underlying hardware. If anything they need *better* hardware for similar results because of the inevitable inefficiencies of cross-platform translation layers.

Browsers don’t have hardware drivers or memory managers or file systems, either. The OS certainly won’t “die” although it may be commoditized so that people will finally accept Linux on the desktop. Given how terrible web *applications* are (as opposed to web games with extremely simple input and no data storage to speak of) I don’t see that happening anytime soon, though.

I think this leads to the death of the video card and the OS eventually.

It’ll be very interesting to see what a Brian Reynolds comes up with in that space.

It’s not like it’s expensive to run, though. I’m sure they’ve made a modest profit on the affair.