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.