Mark Pincus Blog

Iphone games can fill our nooks and crannies of useless minutes

A lot of people say they don't have time for games. I think they really mean they are too busy at work to play games.

Iphones have the potential to let us fill our nooks and crannies of time. These are minutes wasted in lines, taxis, airports and boring meetings and conf calls that we could be playing with friends.

Yo supports sf spca

Proud that zynga's yoville community raised $20k for the sf spca selling spca branded dogs.

zynga is searching for world class product managers

if you have great experience either in software product management or a super analytical position at a top i-bank or consulting firm pls send us your resume. www.zynga.com

pleasing all 45 million customers all the time

I ran across a blog this week that I wanted to comment on. In it, James Derk, a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, detailed some negative experiences he had with Zynga customer service ( http://tinyurl.com/cudmlp).   I want to thank james for sharing his thoughts and apologize for the furstrating experience he had with us. 

The article highlighted one of the toughest challenges we face as a company -- keeping pace with the growth in our community.  We’ve grown from 1M to nearly 10M daily active users in just 9 months and we’ve have had to scale our customer service systems in real time. 

We’re definitely experiencing some growing pains, but behind the scenes we’re working hard to align our organization behind customer needs.  In the last quarter we’ve brought our average response time down to less than 4 days for all but the toughest problems (hacking and cheating tickets take longer to research and resolve), we launched our knowledge base ( http://tinyurl.com/co5kak) and user forums (http://tinyurl.com/cpj3u2z). The response has been very positive.

i believe that the idea of a free web service offering live customer support is pretty new. if any of you see other best of breed approaches that you think are better we would love to hear about them.

Zynga’s mission is to connect the world through games and in order to do that, we need wildly happy customers. We’re working around the clock .  We welcome your feedback!

Proud and ashamed

I'm proud to read today that obama had the courage and strength of leadership to force the disclosure of america's recent torture of suspected terrorists.

At the same time I'm ashamed to be a citizen of a country that would institutionalize torture.

Starting in 2002 I blogged my disgust for this and utter shock that our country actually had a *debate* about whether this was ok. Are you fucking kidding? imagine 1933 germany *debating* whether there were circumstances that justified genocide.

As much as I disagree with obama's economic policies, I respect his desire to raise our country back up, to regain our moral backbone.

Zynga network outage today

Dear faithful zynga game players,

We are experiencing a severe outage today. My understanding is that someone sabotaged att's network by cutting fiber circuits.

I'm sorry for any service outages anyone faces.

Yoville problems

We have gotten complaints from users who can't login to yoville and get a blank screen. Pls email chrish@zynga.com. Sorry for your problems.

Zynga customer service

Some people have posted complaints to this blog about problems with zynga games and customer support. Zynga has 30 people in cs supporting 8.5 million daily users with a goal of 48 hour response time.

We have recently been fighting hackers in our yoville game and are working hard to help people who have lost items or currency.

if you're a zynga user and don't get a response in 48 hrs pls email us again. We will resolve all issues as soon as possible.

Hopeful on a sunday morning

I feel a broad sense of hope as we anticipate obama's coming leadership. I'm not sure I will agree with his politics (the world hasn't been ready for a libertarian yet). But I'm already impressed with the person he is putting forward.

Obama has the potential to help america find its *leadership*. We need leadership in the presidency. We need it in our fin institutions. We need to BE leaders in showing the rest of the world the path to freedom and peace.

So I'm hopeful this morning as we await a powerful first 100 days.

Atlas shrugged

I'm psyched to hear this amazing book will come out as a film this year. Couldn't be more topical given how every company has their hand out for govt bailouts. Being the only one not asking for money is like being the last tax payer. Or like holding the world up on your back...