Zynga, creators of the popular/ annoying (depending on your perspective) series of Facebook games such as Farmville, Cityville and Mafia Wars, have completed their eighth purchase in seven months by buying the Flock browser.

Flock, “The Social Browser”, was originally built on the Firefox architecture but the latest version has utilised Google Chrome as its base and incorporates Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, sharing of links and the ability to write blog posts directly from the sidebar. It can be considered a direct precursor to the much-hyped Rockmelt browser released late last year.

Following this purchase, Flock’s team will now be integrated with the games developers’ team in San Francisco. According to CEO Shawn Hardin, the team will be there to “help Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime — on any platform”.

It’s easy to see how having a social games-orientated browser could help Zynga perform – aside from having their own platform through which to launch their games, this single-platform integration could allow them to spread the games across more social networks from a single launch-point. Whether this is the route Zynga will take with their new acquisition – and indeed, if this would be responsible for a wave of mass unfollowing on Twitter and removal of even more posts from Facebook – remains to be seen.

Zynga certainly seem to be a company determined to take their games out of the Facebook feed and into the web at large. How will this affect those who won’t play and how will they manage to fight off the new competition from Google Games? Like most things in the internet marketing game, we’ll have to wait and see.

A new study from the Pew Research Centre is reporting that the internet has surpassed television as the dominant national and international news source for the young adult (18-29 year-old) demographic.

According to the study, 65% of people under 30 declared the internet as their main source for news, almost doubling the 34% figure of 2007. The other demographics, while not as pronounced, do show a similar trend, with television’s prominence dropping quite dramatically in some areas.

1500 Americans were surveyed and 41% stated that they get their national and international news online rather than from television while television received a 14% drop from 74% overall. Although the 51-64 age group holds television as their main news outlet, but another interesting statistic is that the number of internet newshounds in this demographic is very similar to those who consider newspapers their first port of call for information.

This new study has ultimately demonstrated a pronounced shift in the way we get out news; with the instant nature of Twitter and Facebook and the accessibility of blogs and online publications, not to mention whistleblower sites like Wikileaks, it’s easy to see why people would opt to stay informed online. There’s also the shift in TV viewing habits over the last couple of years to take into account; with on-demand TV, recording set top boxes and internet TV devices, we genuinely are using our media differently and that’s ultimately going to cause a shift. The way in which the traditional news outlets respond to this paradigm shift could well make all the difference between flourishing as they have in the past, merely surviving and failing altogether.

Mozilla’s famed creative director Aza Raskin is leaving the organisation behind Firefox to bring a ‘design renaissance’ to the health care industry.

Raskin has been with Mozilla since 2008 after being hired away from Humanized – the design company that he co-founded – and has become one of the leading names in his field, being the driving force behind many of Mozilla’s most successful and prominent projects such as Firefox for Mobile, Tab Candy and Ubiquity. From the first of January, however, these skills will be at the disposal of Massive Health, his new startup which he hopes will help to push the healthcare industry in the right direction, with products and services redesigned to be “Responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties”.

With a history of obesity in his family and the ever-rising costs of healthcare in the US, Raskin clearly feels that the time for health’s ‘design renaissance’ is now and with a number of high profile (though currently unannounced) investors, Massive Health has the pedigree to help make this happen. Whether Raskin and company have bitten off more than they can chew, only time will tell, but this is certainly a startup worth keeping an eye on.

It seems that even after stumbling in their $5.3 billion Groupon takeover attempt, Google’s chequebook will not be deterred. On Monday it was announced that the search giant had purchased mobile-payment startup Zetawire.

Not a great deal is known about Zetawire due to how early they were in their development cycle, but what we do know is that they have a patent for “mobile banking, advertising, identity management, credit card and mobile coupon transaction processing” – everything you need to turn your phone into a credit card, basically.

The deal was apparently closed back in August, around the time Google bought a couple of other start-ups, notably social apps company Slide and social currency group Jambool. Combining these two elements with Zetawire’s service, not to mention the increasing market-share of Android phones and Google’s moves into Near Field Communications (NFC) and localisation territory and we potentially have the makings of a very powerful mobile business platform, especially with the new Android-powered Nexus S being released with NFC hardware in place.

We’re looking forwards to seeing how the pieces fit together.

The internet is rife today with reports that Google has bought popular local deals site Groupon for a tidy sum of $2.5 billion.

The reports – which are unconfirmed at the time of writing – come on the tail of the persisting rumours of Google showing interest after Yahoo’s attempted $2-3 billion acquisition fell apart earlier this year. Groupon is one of the big internet success stories of recent times and with Google’s increasing moves into localised search and business, the merger would certainly make sense.

This merger would also make sense for Groupon as there are a number of copycat sites rising up trying to cash in on its success and with Google’s backing, Groupon would certainly find itself in a better position to fend it off.

As yet, we have neither confirmation or denial of this potential deal. More as it develops.

Facebook and Google have been butting heads over the last week regarding the privacy and ‘openness’ of user data, particularly when it comes to importing contacts from Google’s Gmail accounts to the social networking behemoth. With today’s expected announcement of Facebook offering users an email platform with @facebook.com or @fb.com email addresses, it’s perhaps understandable that Google are reluctant to let Facebook import contact details from their services.

Today’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco is expected to announce an update in the Facebook apps area and many industry news outlets are reporting that it will be an email service which has been developed under the name Project Titan. The social media giant already has over 500 million registered users and assuming that the site follows its standard behaviour of ‘just doing it’, and automatically signing users up, they could become a major player in the email field overnight.

Facebook’s email platform is expected to also integrate with Docs.com, Microsoft’s cloud-based office suite and looks to be a move which is squarely aimed at taking more of an internet market share from Google and this is probably where Facebook’s ultimate game lies. There’s obviously no money to be made directly from providing people with a free email service, but it does provide them with more pages that they can visit and increase the time they will spend on that site – that means advertising. More pages and more time means more money that Facebook can make from their advertisers and that bottom line is where the real war between Facebook and Google will be waged.

Google figured out this advertising model many years ago and it made them one of the world’s richest companies; they rolled out other services and this gave them more pages and more platforms from which to monetise more web virtual-estate. The difference perhaps, with Facebook’s model is that they are trying to get people to spend almost all their web ‘social time’ on that one site and they might face some stiff competition from the email addresses that users already have.

Ultimately, the way this ongoing revenue war between the two giants will go remains to be seen, as does how many people will be willing to switch to a new email address, but one thing’s clear – this is far from over.

The battle for supremacy in the IE alternative arena between Google Chrome and reigning champion Mozilla Firefox has been heating up as of late. Although Chrome has been gaining, Firefox still maintains a significant lead, but the recent announcement of the Chrome Web Store where users could purchase HTML5 apps including games and play them from their browser seemed that it might give Google’s platform the edge.

Then Mozilla announced theirs yesterday. The project that they’re referring to as a “prototype of an Open Web App Ecosystem” would seem to be a direct competitor for the Chrome Web Store and in many ways, this could be the decider in who wins in this generation of the browser wars.

There is a school of thought that says the element that put Firefox in the position that it’s in as market leader of the Internet Explorer alternative browser set is its range of plugins. These allowed the user to add almost any function they could think of to their browser, and over two billion of them have been downloaded over the years. When Chrome was initially released, installing plugins (or ‘Extensions’ as Google called it) was possible but required a fair bit of technical ability to do – certainly much more than clicking the ‘Install’ button in Firefox. It’s easier now, and Chrome’s Extension range is increasing rapidly to the point where many of the most popular Firefox plugins have either a Chrome version available or a suitable alternative.

This combined with the advent of HTML5 is perhaps why Google are entering the App Store world – the Chrome Web Store will be something that the competition won’t be offering initially, though Mozilla probably won’t be far behind with their “Open Web Apps” and this new feature could potentially be enough to give Chrome the edge.

Whether HTML5 apps will be enough to topple the mighty Firefox, or even take a larger chunk out of its market share remains to be seen, but whether or not the App Stores are the deciding factor in the next incarnation of the browser wars, they are likely to be a very important aspect in both the user experience and also the monetisation of the browser’s user bases.

You may have been confused (or perhaps disturbed) when looking at your Facebook news feed over the last couple of days and seeing a number of your female friends declaring that they “like it on” a range of common household places like the washing machine, the table, the floor etc.

As traumatised as you may have been by your mum saying she likes it on the stairs, the subject of these status updates is not actually related to their favourite place to get it on, it’s actually a breast cancer awareness campaign and refers to a woman’s favourite place to put her handbag, although that’s probably a big part of why this campaign has gone viral so quickly.

Of course, breast cancer awareness campaigns are no stranger to going viral on Facebook – you may remember the bra-colour status updates meme from January which, again, dominated newsfeeds all over the world.

The source of the campaign is unknown right now (we’d love to hear from you if you know) but it certainly seems to be having the desired effect of spreading awareness for this disease which will kill ten million women over the next 25 years.

Foursquare, the leading geolocation-based social networking game was the subject of much ire yesterday with its user base after a server issue had led to it being unavailable for over nine hours.

Although the service is back online now, there has been no official word on what the cause of the issue was or how it was resolved. The service has reached widespread adoption in the US and is often used to arrange social gatherings and is being leveraged by businesses offering discounts and such forth for regular visitors, but hasn’t quite reached the same level of usage in the UK just yet.

The complete service including Foursquare.com and the whole range of mobile apps was down and the only news about what was going on came from the service’s official Twitter account where Tweets were lacking in actual details but tried to reassure their users that they were working hard to fix the problems, utilising the hashtags #caseofthemondays and #nosleeptilluptime. Apparently a detailed post mortem on what caused the problem and how it was resolved will follow at some point today.

We’d be interested to hear your take on this. Did this affect you? Did you notice? Did you care? Let us know.

One of the main criticisms of Twitter is that the signal to noise ratio isn’t the greatest – for every great insight or celebrity scandal posted, there are a thousand posts which aren’t what you’d describe as amazing literature. That said, the instantly updating nature and access to a large audience does mean that the microblogging phenom is perfectly suited to breaking stories, and this function was utilised to great effect recently by journalist Adam Penenberg.

When Penenberg heard from a defence lawyer that Ford had been charged $131 million following a court case in Laurel Missouri after a Ford Explorer rolled over and killed talented young baseball player Brian Cole, he was amazed to find that there was absolutely no news coverage of it. Rather than simply ruminate on this, however, Penenberg decided to do something about it, and took to the social media sphere.

He posted over 50 Tweets in around two hours, telling the full story in over 1,000 words while also imploring other journalists to get involved in helping tell the story, including one particular Tweet which clearly summed up his feeling on the situation – ‘C’mon reporters. Am I only one who thinks $131 MILLION verdict against FORD in a product liability suit is news??’

There is a large debate at the moment about the future of the news industry. Whether it is going to be online paywalls, phone or MP3 player apps or even some form of social network-based reporting, this story definitely shows that the instantaneous nature of the medium, not to mention the potential to access a very large audience, certainly lends itself to reporting the latest news. How this could be monetised, however, remains to be seen.