By now most everyone has seen the youthful face of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the co-founders of Facebook – the host of those products with names like Mafia Wars and Farmville.  Some people will tell you they love them. Others will claim that they inundate us all with mediocrity and mass marketing.  If you ask Richard Garriott, he will tell you that such productsd are the future. Here’s a quote from our earlier article “And I shall call it the wheel”:

“So, I believe the casual gamer and the social gaming platform represent the largest ever yet seen emergence or change within the gaming industry. And all of us in the development community have a choice to either participate and lead in this journey or get left behind.” – Richard Garriott

Richard Garriott thinks such is the wave of the future and has launched his company Portalarium to prove it.  If you ask Brad McQuaid he will no doubt agree with Mr. Garriott.  In fact Playdom has been buying up Facebook developers like they are intent on cornering the market and the Securities Exchange Commission said they have until tomorrow to do it.  Not that long ago that we wrote an article entitled The Developers are Circling…

… now it seems that they may be circling in the wrong place.

At least that seems to be the case based on an article carried by Reuters this morning.  How many people say to themselves “I wish I had paid more attention to that Jobs kid when he was working out of his garage”.  Well it seems that Mr. Paul Ceglia claims that he signed a contract with the co-founder of Facebook in 2003 to develop the website that became Facebook.  Reuters is reporting this morning that the terms of the contract entitled Ceglia to a “$1,000 fee and a 50 percent stake in the product” with “an additional 1 percent interest in the business, per day, until the website was completed” – which a law suite filed by Paul Ceglia said was February 4, 2004. Facebook says the lawsuit is “frivolous” (of course). Frivoulous or not, t Judge Thomas Brown of The Supreme Court of New York’s Allegany County has issued an order restricting the transfer of Facebook assets.

Time will tell whether the entire matter holds water or stinks like last week’s fish.  In the mean time, there is at least a remote possibility that developers could be circling in the wrong place.