Back in 2007 when nobody knew what a Farmville chicken coop or afacebook poker chip was, social games on networks like Facebook and MySpace were just peeking their collective heads from out behind the stone. The biggest applications were still viral garbage like “which simpsons character are you”. Fast forward 3 years and social gaming is in the midst of a growth cycle seen not seen since before th dot com internet bust in 2000.

Companies big and small are releasing a flood of facebook applications, hoping one of them catches on and goes mainstream like Farmville, Zynga Poker or Mafia Wars. Established companies like Electronic Arts are spending hundreds of millions to buy up relatively new ones like Playdom in an effort to buy their way into the social gaming scene, and others are busy developing their own in house brands to dedicate solely to Facebook applications. All this is testament to how far the industry has come since facebook poker chips were the first virtual currency to become a craze on facebook a few years back.