Is ‘Angry Birds’ The Future of Facebook?

As if 100 million distracted, yet mildly entertained, users wasn’t enough, Rovio games is taking Angry Birds to the next level: Facebook. The infamous time-killing site that has made millions for applications, will soon be the new home for the wildly popular mobile game. Rovio, the developers of Angry Birds, just got 42 million in venture capitalist cheese for “strategic expansion.” Strategic expansion, not to be confused with, strategery, means taking the gameplay success of Angry Birds and expanding it into the social media world, merchandising, and quite possibly, consoles. One of Rovio’s biggest investors was Accel Partners, which was one of the original investors in Facebook, making a 13 million dollar investment back in 2005 (when Pacino was still on the front page). They seem to think Angry Birds still has plenty of room to grow:

“I think it’s pretty clear that this is an unbelievable consumer phenomenon,” says Richard Wong of Accel Partners, who led the firm’s investment in Rovio. “We believe it can be an incredible consumer franchise beyond just being a mobile game.”

With the success of Zynga games, the biggest game maker on Facebook and one of the top 200 most popular sites in the world, one would think that an already popular game like Angry Birds would have a field day in the Facebook universe. For starters, Angry Birds should take advantage of the social nature of Facebook, creating a more competitive atmosphere that something like Farmville or other more popular facebook games currently don’t offer. Basically, instead of looking forward to endless updates on how someone’s corn is faring, we can now get invites to compete in Angry Birds. Just as long as we’re being constantly  bombarded with annoying invites in some fashion, that’s fine with me…

But what does this say about the future of Facebook? Zuckerberg and the original founders of Facebook (whoever that encompasses) were big on making Facebook a “social network where people could meet each other and ostensibly hook up.” Now, with the development of the news feed and the application platform, Facebook, goes way beyond meeting people. Facebook is now a place to rent movies, an RSS feed, and a gaming portal. It’s E-Harmony meets Bored.com meets iTunes meets Flickr meets YouTube (wanna meet up?) No surprise that a couple of the previously mentioned mother companies wanted to get in and buy Facebook around the time Accel made their investment.

Facebook has grown into a place where almost any time-killing activity is at our disposal–through the expansion of it’s platform and integration with 3rd party applications (with the added bonus of free marketing and connectivity to basically every site in the world). But doing so is at the risk of interrupting the experience that the site originally sought, and what Zickerberg has been religious about since the beginning of (The)Facebook. Will it be annoying when Facebook becomes so overrun by applications, and subsequent requests to join in on these applications, that the experience interferes with our ability to effectively communicate? Does social media become anti-social if all of our activities and communication take place on one online environment?

Angry Birds new Facebook availability isn’t on the same level as the invention of the printing press, but it is certainly a harbinger of the future to come. If its success is as great as the VC’s expect it to be, I think it’s safe to say we should prepare for some serious changes in the worlds of social media and online gaming.

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