Farmers of FarmVille who are looking to purchase in-game currency will now have a new option. Apart from the previously  available options, Credit cards and PayPal, Farm Cash and Farm Coins can now be purchased using Facebook Credits – Facebook’s virtual currency.

This new payment system have been adopted in a number of popular Facebook games like Happy Island, Happy Aquarium and Happy Pets, where Facebook Credits is the sole option for in-game purchases.

This new payment option in FarmVille is arguably bigger for Facebook Credits than it is for the game, with the amount of exposure it will get through the game.

FarmVille has more than 83 million users, making it larger than Twitter. If the Facebook Credit payment option catches up in FarmVille, Facebook could very well cross the speculated $1 billion revenue mark in 2010, taking into account the 30% take on revenues generated through Facebook Credits.

Just 3 weeks ago, the Facebook game, FarmVille, had only over 73 million monthly active users. Now the game has over 76 million monthly active users! This is not surprising because Zynga never fails to add something new to the game.

In fact, so many new things spiced up the game the past few weeks. They released Super Bowl special items, last week. These include: the oh-so-cute Chicken Cheer and Chicken Joy (both cheerleaders); Horse and Sheep Spectators; football players, Cow Kicker, Line Quackers 1 and 2; etc.

This week, they released Valentine’s Day special items, including: Fire and Ice Roses (for those level 35 and up), Yellow and White Roses, Hot Pink Pigs, and Pink Patch Cows.

Some of the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day items can be sent to friends, although these have to be purchased first using FarmVille Cash (FC).

Finally this week the new horse stable was launched. Players can find their very own in their gift boxes. However, the horse stable they will find is an incomplete one. To complete it, they need 10 of the following items: nails, bricks, boards, horseshoes, and harnesses. Each player has a free brick to begin with. The necessary items can be received as gifts from friends or can be bought at the marketplace for 1 FC each. Extra FC can be purchased ($1 for every 5-6 FC). After completing the horse stable, the player will be awarded with a grey horse! The stable can be filled with 20 horses (brown, grey, and the new pinto horse) and can be harvested every day. Unfortunately, only 1 stable is allowed per farm.

Something to look forward to: according to some sites, Zynga will be releasing FarmVille clock towers, dogs, kangaroos, and colts soon!

The Crunchies Awards is an annual competition for startups, internet, and technology innovations of the year. The 2009 awards were held last Friday, 8 January 2010 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Guess who won the Best Social App award? FarmVille!

FarmVille competed with

• Aardvark (http://www.vark.com)
• Brizzly (http://www.brizzly.com)
• DailyBooth (http://www.dailybooth.com) – runner-up
• SocialVibe (http://www.socialvibe.com)
• StockTwits (http://www.stocktwits.com)

FarmVille is Zynga’s top Facebook game, followed by Mafia Wars, CafeWorld, FishVille, and Zynga Poker. Currently, this game has over 73 million monthly active users in Facebook, alone. The game is popular to those between 18 and 35 years old, although there are those who are already in the 50s and older who still play the game.

This Facebook app is played all over the world. Below is the ranking based on the number of users from different countries:

1. USA
2. Turkey
3. Philippines
4. United Kingdom
5. Italy
6. Canada

A new feature of the game is being able to feed the chickens in the player’s neighbors’ coops. Doing this earns the player 4 coins and 1 experience point. After feeding, the chickens then lay an egg. If it is a mystery egg, the player can post it on their wall and friends can claim the egg and open the mystery eggs to get a mystery item.

Playing Facebook games is probably one of the biggest crazes nowadays. In fact, we get numerous invitations from friends from all over the world to join and play with them. Popular ones include: Farmville and Café World by Zynga, Pet Society and Restaurant City by Playfish, and Happy Aquarium by Crowdstar. Among these, Farmville is probably the most popular with 70 million users.

Facebook has approximately 350 million users worldwide and about one fifth of them play online games. That is okay if it is done at home. However, it has been proven that these games are also played at work.

In India alone, their Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry said that survey results revealed that about 12.5 percent of corporate sector employees’ productivity goes into playing Facebook games. That is like one hour of every employee’s 8-hour workday.

In the US, Nucleus Research, Inc. found that almost half of office staff visit the social networking site at work. So that about 1.5 percent of productivity is lost. That is like 7 minutes of work lost daily per employee working on an 8-hour shift.

Because of this loss in productivity, many companies have banned access to social networking sites. However, there are some people who think that these games are good for employees, as long as it’s not overdone.

According to Santosh Chaturvedi, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bangalore, online games are beneficial to employees because their mind gets to take a break from work. This change in mindset may allow them to concentrate better when they get back to work, thus increasing productivity.

Farmvillie  is one of the most popular game in Facebook. The game, developed by Zynga, has more than 69 million active users.

The game as the name suggests allow Facebook users to farm; plough, seed, harvest along with rearing trees and animals, and own houses and decorations. It becomes addictive when users play it with their friends and try to level up and put their creativity in arranging and decorating their farms.

Micro-blogging site Twitter does not give directly comparable figures, but data from research firm Nielsen said traffic fell 27.8% between September and October to 18.9 million unique visitors.

Facebook’s strategy head Trevor Johnson told TechRadar, “Applications make up a huge part of Facebook. There are over 90,000 applications on Facebook.

“Sixty-nine million active users are using FarmVille alone, that’s more users than Twitter.”

There has been speculation about the impact of the rapid growth of Facebook’s upstart rival Twitter on its user numbers.

But Facebook as a whole, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg, has 350 million users around the world.

The site said that worldwide it was achieving 200 billion page views a month, with 1.6 billion messages are sent daily through its chat tool.

In the UK, Facebook said it had 23 million unique users a month, with each of those logging on spending around 25 minutes on the website per day.

[Source: Sky News]