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Sep 21

23 Comments

Farmville Economics: Risk Adjusted Crop Profitability

It’s clear that my addiction to spreadsheets and Farmville knows no bounds, so as predicted, here is my fifth post on the topic.

gameBig_farmville

Here are the quick links to my first four posts:

The wizards at Zynga have been busy, and with regular updates every week (or even more frequently), a large number of new crops have been introduced.  As the comments on my other posts have become quite demanding, here are two of my original tables, updated for all the new crops (as of September 20, 2009):

Crop Profit / Day
Super Berries 900.00
Asparagus 183.00
Sugar Cane 177.00
Peas 176.00
Tomatoes 174.00
Green Tea 170.40
Grapes 170.00
Onion 166.00
Sunflowers 165.00
Coffee 162.00
Blackberries 162.00
Blueberries 156.00
Carrots 150.00
Raspberries 132.00
Broccoli 129.00
Cabbage 116.50
Red Wheat 84.67
Aloe Vera 80.00
Peppers 77.00
Yellow Mellon 77.00
Rice 72.00
Corn 71.67
Pumpkin 69.00
Pineapple 66.00
Potatoes 65.00
Strawberries 60.00
Yellow Bell 54.00
Watermelon 50.75
Cotton 39.00
Soybeans 33.00
Squash 33.00
Artichoke 29.75
Eggplant 24.00
Wheat 21.67

Assumptions: All numbers are normalized for one planting square per day, and assume a “perfect” farmer who can operate all 24 hours of a single day.  It’s assumed that you will need to harvest, plow, and plant every cycle for a given crop.

As it turns out, many times players are optimizing for experience per day, rather than for profit.  As a result, here is an updated table that shows experience per crop, with the same assumptions:


Crop XP / Day Cycle (Hours)
Super Berries 24.00 2.00
Strawberries 12.00 4.00
Raspberries 12.00 2.00
Blueberries 12.00 4.00
Blackberries 12.00 4.00
Aloe Vera 8.00 6.00
Pumpkin 6.00 8.00
Tomatoes 6.00 8.00
Sugar Cane 6.00 8.00
Green Tea 4.80 10.00
Asparagus 4.50 16.00
Rice 4.00 12.00
Carrots 4.00 12.00
Peas 4.00 24.00
Onions 4.00 12.00
Soybeans 3.00 24.00
Peppers 3.00 24.00
Grapes 3.00 24.00
Coffee 3.00 16.00
Sunflowers 3.00 24.00
Broccoli 2.50 48.00
Eggplant 1.50 48.00
Squash 1.50 48.00
Yellow Bell 1.50 48.00
Pineapple 1.50 48.00
Cabbage 1.50 48.00
Wheat 1.00 72.00
Cotton 1.00 72.00
Potatoes 1.00 72.00
Corn 1.00 72.00
Red Wheat 1.00 72.00
Artichoke 0.75 96.00
Watermelon 0.75 96.00
Yellow Mellon 0.75 96.00

It’s fairly obvious from the numbers above that crops that can be planted and harvested multiple times per day have a significant advantage. This advantage is largely due to the +1 XP you get from plowing a square, and the multiple turns per day. While the longer duration crops have higher experience, they don’t generate enough experience to match the multiple cycles of crops like the berries, or the 8-hour crops like Tomatoes.  Of course, this ignores the time value of money, the primary topic of my first blog post on Farmville Economics.

It seems as if Zynga has been doing their homework when building out their technology tree with additional crops.  Using my 15 coin / XP estimate, the table combining the value by coins and experience is dominated by the new crops:


Crop Profit + XP / Day
Super Berries 1260.00
Blackberries 342.00
Blueberries 336.00
Raspberries 312.00
Sugar Cane 267.00
Tomatoes 264.00
Asparagus 250.50
Green Tea 242.40
Strawberries 240.00
Peas 236.00
Onions 226.00
Grapes 215.00
Carrots 210.00
Coffee 207.00
Aloe Vera 200.00
Sunflowers 210.00
Broccoli 166.50
Pumpkin 159.00
Cabbage 139.00
Rice 132.00
Peppers 122.00
Red Wheat 99.67
Pineapple 88.50
Yellow Mellon 88.25
Corn 86.67
Potatoes 80.00
Soybeans 78.00
Yellow Bell 76.50
Watermelon 62.00
Squash 55.50
Cotton 54.00
Eggplant 46.50
Artichoke 41.00
Wheat 36.67

The title of this blog post, however, is Risk Adjusted Crop Profitability.  One of my orginal concerns was that measures of profitability were not properly taking into account the amount of risk that each crop incorporated.

When you plant a crop in Farmville, it grows for an allotted time.  During that time, you cannot harvest the crop, nor can you recover your capital.  It’s completely illiquid.  After that time period, you have an equivalent time period (100% of the growing time) to harvest the crop.  At that point, your investment is liquid and recoverable.  After the harvest time has expired, over the next equivalent time period (between 100% and 200% of the growing time), your crops will wither square-by-square, until none are left.

As a result, a crop that yields a few more coins of profit, but that involves an up-front investment of fifty coins, may not actually be worth the risk of withering.

In case you think I’m being melodramatic, it’s a very common problem.  People invest all of the wealth into planting crops, get distracted or misunderstand the rules, and then end up with withered crops and no money left over to re-plant.  They have to depend on “lotteries” and “helping neighbors” to recapitalize.  (In fact many don’t, which may be a problem Zynga needs to monitor.)

So how do we model risk-adjusted profitability?

In typical financial modeling, you would have a “cost of capital” – namely a borrowing rate that would be your cost of money over a period of time.  However, for this analysis, it didn’t seem appropriate – maybe I’ll revisit sometime in the future.

To model the Farmville risk, I tried to literally focus on the following facts:

  1. How much capital (coins) up front you risk by planting one square?
  2. What is the risk that you won’t be available during the harvest time?
  3. Probability of harvest + Probability of wither = 100%
  4. Multiply the profits per cycle with the probability of harvest
  5. Normalize to a risk-adjusted profit per day

In order to model #2, I’ve used the following assumption: you are expected to check Farmville once every 24 hours.  You can replace this with your own number, but given that Farmville has 15M+ active daily users, this assumption seems fair.

So, assuming any hour is the same as any other (on average), there is a 1/24 probability that you will be able to check Farmville in a given hour.  24 * 1/24 = 100%

I’m also assuming that your ability to check on a crop in any given hour is independent of the ability to check any other hour.  This keeps the probability calculations simple.

This means that for shorter lived crops, there is real default risk:

  • There is a 23/24 chance in any hour that you will not check on the crop.
  • This means, for a 4-hour crop, there is a 23^4/24^4 = 279841 / 331776 = 84.3% chance that you’ll miss checking on the crop during harvest time for full profit.
  • This means, for a 4-hour crop, there is an 84.3% chance you’ll miss the withering time, where you’ll receive partial profit.  (I’m assuming a linear decay rate)
  • This results in a default rate of 71.1% on a four-hour crop.

Using calculations similar to those above, I generated an expected profit per cycle.  I’ve regenerated the table (ignoring experience) for the crops, and ranked them by risk-adjusted profitability:

Crop Risk-Adjusted Profit / Day Risk of Complete Default
Peas 226.53 12.97%
Broccoli 217.37 1.68%
Grapes 206.37 12.97%
Sunflowers 201.57 12.97%
Asparagus 185.57 25.62%
Cabbage 181.47 1.68%
Super Berries 154.22 84.35%
Coffee 153.35 25.62%
Red Wheat 142.52 0.22%
Onions 135.58 36.01%
Yellow Mellon 130.15 0.03%
Green Tea 126.03 42.69%
Carrots 125.98 36.01%
Corn 123.93 0.22%
Peppers 117.11 12.97%
Sugar Cane 115.57 50.61%
Pineapple 115.54 1.68%
Potatoes 114.40 0.22%
Tomatoes 114.27 50.61%
Yellow Bell 99.87 1.68%
Watermelon 91.44 0.03%
Blackberries 80.30 71.14%
Rice 79.19 36.01%
Blueberries 78.89 71.14%
Cotton 77.22 0.22%
Soybeans 74.87 12.97%
Squash 72.46 1.68%
Pumpkin 68.82 50.61%
Aloe Vera 67.61 60.01%
Eggplant 60.71 1.68%
Artichoke 60.47 0.03%
Strawberries 56.35 71.14%
Wheat 52.43 0.22%
Raspberries 38.19 84.35%

Now, I’ve made quite a few simplifying assumptions here, so don’t confuse this with a PhD thesis in Farmville Economics. But it’s amazing to me how this list of crops, more than any other table, best reflects my own internal preferences on what to plant. Maybe that’s because the “once a day” estimate of average availability best fits my own time table during the week.

Another way of revising this estimate is to look at the “risk of complete default” as highly correlated with the “stress level” you feel when you plant a given crop.  Super Berries are awesome, but there is no question that when I plant them, I am hyper-aware of the need to check on them within a 2 hour window to harvest my profits.

Definitely an interesting lens on the topic of profitability.  Please feel free to share alternative views on how to evaluate the risk-adjusted profitability of Farmville crops here in the comments.

Update:  Here are additional posts on Farmville Economics, published after this one:

Sep 10

23 Comments

Farmville Economics: What Price Experience?

Despite the fact that some people find my recent preoccupation with Farmville amusing, the traffic to my original series of blog posts on the Personal Economics of Farmville has been extremely high.  This isn’t surprising given the incoming links from the Zynga Blog and the Wall Street Journal.

gameBig_farmville

Here are the quick links to my first three posts:

Well everyone knows that bloggers can’t resist traffic, so as a result, I thought I’d add a fourth post to the series, highlighting some of the insights into the economic value of Farmville experience points.

It all started with the analysis I presented in the second post, which modified the profitability matrix for each Farmville crop by adding an economic value for Experience.  Here is a snippet:

The question is, how do you blend the value of experience and coins? The truth is, the function for valuing experience is probably too complicated to get right.

However, I did find a simplistic proxy.  1 experience point = 15 coins.

Why? Well, it turns out you can just sit there, plow a square for 15 coins, and get 1 experience point.  You can then delete the square and do it again.  So at least, in theory, you can “buy” an infinite supply of experience points for 15 coins each.

Boy, did that start a firestorm.  It turns out, there is a well-worn analysis that says that Farmville experience is actually worth 10 coins.  Why?  If you plow a square of land (-15 coins, +1 XP) and plant soybeans (-15 coins, +2 XP) and then delete, you spend a total of 30 coins, and you get +3 XP.  Thus 30/3 = 10 coins / XP.

It’s a more complicated series, and it ignores the liquidity issue of requiring the purchase of 3 XP at a time, not 1 XP, but it’s a pretty good proxy for the “cheapest” way to buy experience.

The more I thought about this, however, the more dissatisfied I became with the answer.  The reason?  It ignores the incredible time cost of those set of actions:

  • Click the plow tool.
  • Click the square.
  • Click the market tool
  • Navigate dialog, click soybeans.
  • Click the square
  • Click delete tool
  • Click the square
  • Select “Accept” from the “Are you sure” dialog

Ugh.  For 3XP.  Can you imagine trying to get 4500 XP this way?  I can’t.

As a result, I’m even going to invalidate my original 15 coin / XP assumption.  In fact, you’ll notice that for truly painless actions, like buying a building, the number of XP gained is typically 1/100 the price of the item.  For example, when you pay 250,000 coins for a log cabin, you also get 2500 XP.

I think this effectively bounds the range of the value of XP.  Clearly, it’s worth more than 1/100 of a coin, because you ALSO get the log cabin, which is a pretty snazzy farm improvement.  It’s also clearly more than 1/10, because the time cost of that process is clearly extracting value beyond the coins.

So, value of XP is:

0.01 coins < 1 XP < 0.1 coins

I’m guessing the value of XP is close to 20 coins.  A haybale is only 100 coins, and it gives you 5 XP.  Since a haybale is a pretty negligible improvement, you can assume that most of the price is actually for XP.  So, that would bound the range even tighter:

0.2 coins < 1 XP < 0.1 coins

Now, I know what you are going to say: “You can sell the haybale for 5 coins, making it even cheaper!”.  The problem there is that now you have to go through the delete process, with the confirmation dialog.  Ugh.   I’m trying to avoid that work.

In fact, my analysis is still missing a “cost” for the implicit clutter a haybale creates on your farm.  You have a limited amount of space, so the “price” of a haybale is really:

Cost of haybale = 100 coins + MIN((time cost to delete haybale – 5 coins), opportunity cost of lost 1/16 of a square of land)

Maybe in a future post I’ll explore the opportunity cost of clutter in more detail.  It’s certainly the thing that would prevent you from literally filling your field with haybales to buy experience.  (Interestingly, Farmville just rolled out an improvement today that lets you buy haybales continuously!)

Finally, I have to share a tip that was posted on one of my earlier articles that has represented the single largest improvement in my Farmville quality of life:

If you “fence in” your farmer, then Farmville will harvest, plow, seed a square immediately, without waiting for the farmer to walk to it.

I was skeptical of this advice at first, but I tried it this weekend, and it speeds planting a large farm by AT LEAST 50%.  I use ducks to “fence in my farmer”.  I keep several in a box at the edge of my farm, and first thing I do is walk the farmer into the box.  I then move one duck to close the trap, and boom, 15 minutes added back to my life.  :)

Your mileage may vary.  Enjoy.

Update: I’ve posted the following new articles on Farmville Economics:

Aug 25

19 Comments

More Farmville Economics: Treeconomics

Wow.  The traffic from the first two blog posts on Farmville has been high.  In fact, the Zynga blog even picked up the two articles.  Very flattering.

I was all set to write a post tonight on the economics of trees in Farmville… but then I caught Pablo’s post on “Treeconomics”.

Brilliant.  Leveraging some of the work I had done, he does a evaluation of a 16-square of trees in terms of “yield” vs. crops.  Very interesting, confirming that a 16-square of Date trees can compare very favorably to almost everything.

I’m going to have to think about this a bit more – I want to build a model where I incorporate a few additional factors:

  • The “down payment” for trees.
  • The freedom to never have to “plow” or “plant” again. (value of time)
  • The freedom from working capital for seeds on an ongoing basis.
  • The removal of “withering risk”.  Crops wither after 20% of their growing time, yielding a complete loss of the capital to plow & plant.  Trees never wither.
  • The lack of experience points from trees
  • Incorporate the data from all the trees, not just the ones you can buy.

I’ll still write a follow up here, but tonight there is no need.  Check out this table from Pablo as  sample:

Cost Revenue/Harvest Days to Harvest Daily Revenue Daily Rev/ Invested $ Days to Payback
Date $800.0 $69.0 3 $23.00 2.88% 35
Lime $750.0 $75.0 5 $15.00 2.00% 50
Lemon $475.0 $41.0 3 $13.67 2.88% 35
Peach $500.0 $47.0 4 $11.75 2.35% 43
Fig $350.0 $33.0 3 $11.00 3.14% 32
Plum $350.0 $30.0 3 $10.00 2.86% 35
Orange $425.0 $40.0 4 $10.00 2.35% 43
Apple $325.0 $28.0 3 $9.33 2.87% 35
Cherry $225.0 $18.0 2 $9.00 4.00% 25

And this one:

Daily Profit Total Profit Initial investment Residual Value Profit
Super Berries $900.0 $81,000.0 $81,000.0
Date tree square $368.0 $33,120.0 $12,800 $640.0 $20,960.0
Tomatoes $174.0 $15,660.0 $15,660.0
Raspberries $132.0 $11,880.0 $11,880.0

Too cool.

Now go read it.

Updates: I’ve now posted additional articles on Farmville Economics:

Aug 23

70 Comments

The Personal Economics of Farmville, Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote a fairly popular post about the personal economics of Farmville, the extremely popular Facebook game by Zynga.  There were enough comments and emails about the original post, I decided to write a quick follow-up to cover some of the most common ideas and concerns.

gameBig_farmville

I was also able to get the data on Red Wheat and Yellow Mellon, which were missing from my original post.  Also, this weekend saw the (temporary?) advent of “Super Berries”.  I’ve updated my original table here, showing the rank of all Farmville crops based on net profit per day per square.  Let’s just say there is a reason Super Berries are, well, super:


Crop Profit / Day
Super Berries 900.00
Tomatoes 174.00
Sunflowers 165.00
Coffee 162.00
Blueberries 156.00
Carrots 150.00
Raspberries 132.00
Broccoli 129.00
Red Wheat 84.67
Yellow Mellon 77.00
Peppers 77.00
Rice 72.00
Corn 71.67
Pumpkin 69.00
Pineapple 66.00
Potatoes 65.00
Strawberries 60.00
Yellow Bell 54.00
Watermelon 50.75
Cotton 39.00
Soybeans 33.00
Squash 33.00
Artichoke 29.75
Eggplant 24.00
Wheat 21.67

The most interesting questions and comments came from Abhi Kumar, product manager for Farmville at Zynga.  Needless to say, it was extremely flattering to have Abhi interested in my post, and to hear his thoughts on the topic.

The first point Abhi raised was interesting.  The question was, how would I factor experience into these calculations.  Clearly, experience is crucial to the game in several regards:

  • It’s crucial for rising in the technology tree, to get access to new crops, tools, and other beneficial items.
  • It’s a basic game mechanic that drives people to see their “score” rise.
  • It’s public to your neighbors.  As a social game, this adds an additional game mechanic, similar to a leaderboard, that encourages you to boost your score.

In order to calculate the experience for each crop, I took the experience that each crop delivers per cycle, added one experience point per cycle for re-plowing, and then normalized the values for a single day (24 hours) and a single square.

Crop Experience / Day
Super Berries 24.00
Blueberries 12.00
Strawberries 12.00
Raspberries 12.00
Tomatoes 6.00
Pumpkin 6.00
Carrots 4.00
Rice 4.00
Peppers 3.00
Soybeans 3.00
Coffee 3.00
Broccoli 2.50
Sunflowers 2.00
Pineapple 1.50
Yellow Bell 1.50
Squash 1.50
Eggplant 1.50
Red Wheat 1.00
Corn 1.00
Potatoes 1.00
Cotton 1.00
Wheat 1.00
Yellow Mellon 0.75
Watermelon 0.75
Artichoke 0.75

Not surprisingly, the quick cycle-time of the berries dominates this table.

The question is, how do you blend the value of experience and coins? The truth is, the function for valuing experience is probably too complicated to get right.

However, I did find a simplistic proxy.  1 experience point = 15 coins.

Why? Well, it turns out you can just sit there, plow a square for 15 coins, and get 1 experience point.  You can then delete the square and do it again.  So at least, in theory, you can “buy” an infinite supply of experience points for 15 coins each.

When you include experience at this price, the rank of the crops changes significantly from the original “coins only” version of the most profitable crops:

Crop Profit + XP / Day
Super Berries 1260.00
Blueberries 336.00
Raspberries 312.00
Tomatoes 264.00
Strawberries 240.00
Carrots 210.00
Coffee 207.00
Sunflowers 195.00
Broccoli 166.50
Pumpkin 159.00
Rice 132.00
Peppers 122.00
Red Wheat 99.67
Pineapple 88.50
Yellow Mellon 88.25
Corn 86.67
Potatoes 80.00
Soybeans 78.00
Yellow Bell 76.50
Watermelon 62.00
Squash 55.50
Cotton 54.00
Eggplant 46.50
Artichoke 41.00
Wheat 36.67

In many ways, this final table is a more satisfying answer on what to plant, since it gives a fairly balanced view across coins (which are needed to buy seeds, tools, and other items) and experience (which is also needed to raise your level to buy seeds, tools, and other items).

Clearly, this analysis is very sensitive to the value of an experience point. The more value you ascribe to experience, the more the compound table begins to resemble the experience-only version.

As part of my original post, I had run some analysis that suggested that if you value the time that it requires to check on your crops, harvest them, and re-plow & plant, then you might get a different order.  I’ve now updated the chart to include the three crops that I didn’t have yesterday.

Farmville_Economics_Updated

click to see the enlarged chart graphic

Based on the addition of the new crops, the top five crops in terms of their value in $ US / hour are:

  1. Yellow Mellon
  2. Broccoli
  3. Red Wheat
  4. Corn
  5. Watermelon

All of the values are still well below $1 / hour.

I re-ran these numbers utilizing the experience points.  While they did shift the numbers to the right, they didn’t alter the ranking significantly.  This is likely because the cost in time (15 minutes) for each cycle and the high conversion rate (1500 coins / $1 US) means that the time cost of checking dwarfs the incremental value of the experience per cycle.

That’s why you can see that one wacky line, Super Berries, which starts so high it’s off the chart, but crashes down under the weight of 12 cycle refreshes per day.

A couple people specifically wanted to see this analysis taking into account the new Tractor, which speeds plowing by up to 4x (although you need to buy fuel).  Since I don’t have a Tractor yet (working on it), I estimated what would happen if a cycle plow/plant took only 5 minutes instead of 15.  Here is the updated chart:

Farmville Economics Updated Tractor

click to see the enlarged chart graphic

For those of you playing at home, sorry to disappoint.  It turns out that dropping the time it takes does shift the value per hour out almost linearly.  You’ll note that in this chart, now the equivalent value for Yellow Mellon is over $2.62 / hour.  The order of the most valuable crops, however, does not change, because even five minutes dominates with such a high US $ to Farmville coin exchange rate.

Abhi did make one last point that I agree with completely.  The primary value of the game is not the coins you make.  (In fact, since you can’t really convert coins back to dollars, they are arguably worthless.)  The value is the fun and enjoyment you get from the time spent.

In fact, I could theorize that if you normally bill $50/hour for your time, the delta between your normal rate and the amount you are making with Farmville crops shows just how much you value playing Farmville.

Hope this post was as interesting to folks as the last.  I’ve got to go harvest some Super Berries…

Updates: I’ve now posted additional articles on Farmville Economics:

Aug 22

67 Comments

The Personal Economics of Farmville

I’ve been playing Farmville, a social video game by Zynga, over the past week, and I have to say that I’m extremely impressed.  It’s a very simple simulation game, with well integrated social aspects to promote virality, a good technology tree, and clever virtual goods integration.

gameBig_farmville

If you’ve played the game (and at this point, approximately 9 million people have), then you are likely already familiar with the primary economics of the game.  As a farmer, you have a certain number of plots.  It costs money (coins) to plow a plot and plant seeds.  Different crops take different amounts of time to grow, and are worth different amounts at harvest.  Quite simply, the question is:

Which crops should you plant?

Since I do love an excuse to crack open Excel, I built a simple model that tells you what crops are the “most valuable” to plant.  My model was simple:

  • Revenue is just the value of the crop at harvest
  • Cost is the cost of the seeds + the cost to plow the square

In order to compare crops, I had to normalize the values:

  • Normalized all revenue and costs to “one square”
  • Normalized all revenue and costs to “one day”, namely 24 hours

Thus a crop like Strawberries, which takes 4 hours to grow, can be theoretically planted 6 times in a single day.  Eggplant, which takes 2 days to grow, can be planted 0.5 times in a single day.

This model gives you the following simple table as output, ranked by “coins per square per day”:

Crop Profit / Day
Tomatoes 174.00
Sunflowers 165.00
Coffee 162.00
Blueberries 156.00
Carrots 150.00
Raspberries 132.00
Broccoli 129.00
Peppers 77.00
Rice 72.00
Corn 71.67
Pumpkin 69.00
Pineapple 66.00
Potatoes 65.00
Strawberries 60.00
Yellow Bell 54.00
Watermelon 50.75
Cotton 39.00
Soybeans 33.00
Squash 33.00
Artichoke 29.75
Eggplant 24.00
Wheat 21.67

(Note: I still haven’t gotten the revenue and cycle time for the new crops, Red Wheat and Yellow Mellon)

Most of the strategy guides that I’ve found across the web have basically gone just this far.

The problem with this model, however, is pretty obvious:

It assumes that your time has no value!

Listen, Raspberries might be #6 on this list, but you have to actually harvest and replant 12 times per day! (It’s a two-hour crop).  That only seems reasonable if you truly value your time at $0.  Theoretically, we should give some non-zero value to the time it takes to replant, and see how it affects the rankings.

To do this, I changed the model based on the following assumptions:

  • It takes roughly 15 minutes to replant your farm with a crop
  • 1500 Farmville coins are worth $1 (which is what Zynga charges to buy coins with PayPal or your credit card).

I then graphed out the ranking of the crops on a spectrum from $0.00 / hour value for your time, all the way to $1.00 / hour.

As you can tell from the range, the bad news is that even the best crop flips to being “negative value” per day at a monetary value of approximately $0.70 / hour.

Farmville_Economics

click the image to see enlarged verson

This graph paints a very different picture.  If you rank crops by what hourly wage “zeroes them out” in value, you find that actually, your top three crops should be:

  1. Broccoli ($0.69 / hour)
  2. Corn ($0.57 / hour)
  3. Watermelon ($0.54 / hour)

If you accept the idea that 1500 Farmville coins is worth $1 (which is a bit of a stretch since you can’t convert back to dollars…), then these are the crops that pay you the best “hourly wage” for your time.

There are a few things I’ve left out here:

  • Trees / Animals. I haven’t run these numbers for trees or animals, but it would be trivial to do so.
  • Working capital. These crops require different amounts of liquid cash in your Farmville account.  That capital theoretically has a cost, but I didn’t model it.
  • Experience. Some people are playing for experience points, not coins.  Ignored here.
  • Capital Risk. The different crops have different windows of time to harvest before your revenue goes to zero and your crops wither.  This analysis assumes a “perfect farmer”.

If you find this model interesting or useful, would love to see links back here from anyone who pursues any of these different issues.

Of course, that assumes that there is someone else out there twisted enough to spend time analyzing the personal economics of Farmville…

Updates: I’ve now posted several follow-on posts about Farmville Economics:

Jun 13

4 Comments

Once again, the web is safe for “adamnash”

Just in case you aren’t one of the 225 million Facebook users who received a notification, tonight at 12:01 AM EST (9:01 PM local time), Facebook decided to launch a massive “first-come, first serve” claim on usernames (or handles) on Facebook.

You might be wondering why this is big deal, since these have existed on every other site for years.

Well, the reason is because this is Facebook, and ironically because they waiting this long to launch handles, it’s now moved from part of the new-user experience to a huge virtual geek battle for your name.  (if you want yours, go to http://www.facebook.com/username)

I, of course, claimed “adamnash”.

Not very creative, I know.  When I chose my first username, freshman year at Stanford, I picked a nickname I had in high school.  (To this day, the wonders of the web have preserved old Usenet posting from under than handle… embarrassing.)  Thankfully, when you declare Computer Science as your major at Stanford, you get a virtual second chance – your Xenon address.

With a full name that fits in an old-style unix handle of 8 characters, it seemed too obvious.

I am adamnash.

These days, of course, you can find me at:

Brilliant from an SEO perspective, I guess.  Not that hot if I was looking for anonymity.

Now, I can safely say, Facebook is safe for “adamnash” as well:

I feel a little guilty for hogging all the virtual cyberspace for myself.  There are other Adam Nashes out there.  I think there are over 30 on LinkedIn alone.

But not that guilty.  I’ve been “adamnash” since 1992.  I’m not going to stop now.

Mar 22

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tweets…

If you have not been following the latest Twitter drama, I thought I’d share it briefly here on this blog.

Meet Connor Riley.  She seems like a nice enough young woman, going to UC Berkeley.  Her personal student website is online, including her resume.  After all, she is looking for a job.

Good news!  She landed an offer from Cisco, one of the few big tech companies hiring these days.

Unfortunately, she sent out a message on Twitter that was captured as follows:

theconnor_ciscofatty2

She apparently didn’t understand that by default, everyone can see  you tweet.  Needless to say, someone at Cisco saw this tweet (likely from a saved search or TweetDeck stream for “Cisco”) and responded as follows:

fatty_answer

Thus, the “Cisco Fatty” incident was born.   Amazing stream – you can see the Twitter search here.  The drama.  The intrigue.  A couple articles:

Connor actually posted a response on her personal site.  It’s not much, but here’s a sample:

Sometimes in the course of applying for a job, it becomes apparent that it’s a job you don’t want to do. I declined one such job early on Tuesday, and then, because I live at some distance from many of my close friends, I decided to use Twitter to tell them about what I had been thinking.

Let me tell you about how I use Twitter: I have 45 friends. I know all of them. They know me. 95% of them have lived in a dorm or a house with me. I practically can’t offend them, although sometimes I try.

So one checkbox stood between my using Twitter correctly to suit my needs and my using Twitter in a way that would make @timmylevad start baying for my head.

It’s not really that compelling.  Still, I found myself thinking about a few things:

  1. Get used to “Bad Tweet” stories. We’ve heard a few “bad tweet” stories before (remember the “Memphis” incident?).  And we’ll hear more.  It’s the new, hot social medium, and these stories will take on a life of their own.
  2. The bad economy affects reactions. This would be one of those classic schadenfreude stories, except that with the economy where it is, people are particularly indignant at anyone who would flaunt and dismiss a great job at a great company like Cisco.  It’s overstating the case, but in some ways, this taps into anger the same way the AIG bonuses do.  This is just a Gen Y, techie version.
  3. Twitter seems private, but is public. There are least two very clever aspects to Twitter that have helped its member and usage growth.  The first is being designed, from the ground up, to separate “following” from “follower”.  Who you see is kept separate from who sees you.  The second, however, is a play on privacy.  Twitter feels private, and the interface leads you to believe that only the people following you can see your tweets.  However, in reality, everyone can see everyone else’s tweets by default.  The advent of realtime search streams has only made this more obvious.

People use Twitter like its a new, better form of group chat… but it isn’t.  These messages don’t just go to friends and family on your buddy list.  These updates don’t go only to your connections. And until the interface changes to suggest to people that their tweets are public, we’re going to see more and more people make the same mistake that Connor did.

Mar 17

2 Comments

Would You Pay $12.99 for 5 Hours of Facebook?

This is a note I meant to post over a week ago, but didn’t get around to it.

The question is, would you pay $12.99 for 5 hours of Facebook?

The reason I ask is, until a couple weeks ago, I would have assumed the answer was no.  Facebook has become the latest in a line of great, free internet products.  It flows open and free, like a trillion pages of Niagara Falls, unimpeded by usage charges.

Then I flew Virgin America to JFK & back.  5-6 hours each way.  And the flights had Wi-Fi.

(The Wi-Fi was fantastic, by the way.  I got a phenomenal amount of work done on the plane, and having live access to email and the web was incredibly useful.  Having realtime access to Twitter wasn’t as useful, but certainly was fun.  I also saw some funny behavior patterns – like people watching live sports on the laptops while their seat-back television was on CNN or CNBC.  Anyway, I digress…)

For $12.99 you got wi-fi… for about 5 hours.  Worth the cost most likely to make the flight productive for work, especially compared to an $8 snack pack.

Next to me on the plan was a woman, likely 20-25 years of age.  As soon as we were allowed to use our laptops, she flipped hers open, paid the $12.99… and went to Facebook.

I was sitting one seat away from her, so I could see what she was doing.  She spent about 3 hours on Facebook, with a small amount of miscellaneous web surfing mixed in.  But it was almost all Facebook.

It was interesting to me, because the economics of Facebook have been fodder for discussion in the Valley for a couple of years now.  And here I was, watching someone pay $12.99 for Facebook.

It then occurred to me how much money the “dumb pipes” of the internet are really making.  How many people upgrade their internet service to broadband because they want to make YouTube faster?  How many people are effectively paying the service providers to access content created by others?  How many people pay charges for internet service at hotels, airports, coffee shops?  To wireless providers, cable providers, satellite providers, phone providers?

It’s an interesting counter-balance to the argument that the service providers give for bandwidth throttling and other pricing power maneuvers.  They would still argue they aren’t getting enough of the pie.

Still, I’m pretty sure that Facebook got 0% of that $12.99.

Makes you realize why AOL actually worked back in the day.  You know, in simpler times.

Jan 5

3 Comments

Mom Gadget on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter

Had to share this small gem of a find.  It’s not one of my normal RSS feeds, but my wife forwarded me this article from Mom Gadget:

Mom Gadget: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin – Double U – Tee – H

(Turns out, the reason she asked me to look at it was to translate the “Double U – Tee – H”.  I told her it was WTH or “What the Hell”.  There were several minutes of back and forth before she was convinced I was right.)

In any case, the article covers a basic cyber-mom question of what social networks she belongs to, and what each is for.  I thought the four snippets were great:

  • MySpace is a socializing website for teens, young adults, stars and music
  • Facebook is sort of the same only for young adults and tracking down your old school classmates and college friends without having to join Classmates.com for $29 plus a year.
  • Linkedin is for professional adults and for networking with people in business and sometimes it’s helped people land really awesome jobs.
  • Twitter – everyone is doing Twitter. Twitter is like text messaging meets the internet. It’s a way to text all your friends at once and have them text you back.

Of course, the primary theme of the article is one of social network fatigue. Apparently, this mom draws the line at these four.

Daily/Weekly use, in order of repeat visits (December 2008):

  • Google Reader
  • My Yahoo
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • WordPress.com (this blog)
  • Facebook
  • E*Trade
  • Mint.com

Twitter is the biggest surprise for me.  I’ve been playing with it for months, but I’ve noticed my activity has been increasing measurably.  This past month, I’ve been checking it multiple times per day (thanks to TwitterFon for the iPhone).  Mint.com also has spiked up now that it has iPhone integration.

Jul 29

Congratulations to Mike Schroepfer & Facebook

If you missed the 39 articles currently on Google News on the topic, Mike Schroepfer announced today that he has accepted an engineering leadership position at Facebook.   Mike is the current VP of Engineering at Mozilla, and has been there for about three years.

Here are Mike’s comments, direct from his Mozilla blog.

In my opinion, of course, this is a huge win for Facebook, as they get a top-notch engineering leader to join their team.  It’s bittersweet, of course, because I’m also a huge fan of Mozilla and the team over there.  I think Mike summed it up best in his post by expressing confidence in the ability of the Mozilla team to continue to innovate and deliver on their mission and vision.

If you are curious, here is Mike’s LinkedIn profile.  You can be sure I’ll be on his case for him to keep it up-to-date. :)

Mar 28

Antisocial Journalist Discovers LinkedIn… and becomes a Fan

This is a fun story, courtesy of the Boston Herald.  Reminds me a bit of my mother’s conversion last year to a true LinkedIn fan:

Boston Herald: Antisocial Critic Now Web Phanatic

I finally caved to peer pressure last week, convinced that the “best time to look for a job is when you’re not looking” cliche is all too true. Uploading my e-mail address book into the LinkedIn system, I invited nearly 300 personal and business associates to publicly admit they know me.

“Hi there!

After years of avoiding social networking like the plague, I’ve finally decided to show up to the dance.

Using “plague” and “dance” is a mixed metaphor to be sure, but please forgive me.

We’ve been in touch previously for one of my Boston Herald columns or TV production assignments, and I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

Pretending I’m asking for a date to the prom for an agonizing 300 times might have been too cutesy for some recipients. But I thought it was much better than the trust pitch.

A funny thing happened over the next few days. The annoying process of networking became enjoyable. Scratch that. I actually found LinkedIn to be addicting.

“Darren, welcome to the dance!” wrote Joe, a business development guy for a local engineering firm. “Those of us who are poet/artists in marketers’ clothing see (social networking) for what it is – a sort of goofy/fun thing that could actually pay off in many ways.

“So welcome, and may you use your new powers for good not evil. You’ll probably want a Blackberry next – don’t fight it, they’re cool.”

Who would RSVP to my invitation next? How high could I get my number of contacts? I found myself in an undeclared competition with my co-workers. A guy down the hall went to college with one of my favorite TV meteorologists. When he added her to his network, the office considered it a major coup.

At LinkedIn, we spend most of our time working on new and useful ways of leveraging your professional network and professional reputation to make you more effective on a daily basis.  But it’s still amazing to me how emotionally powerful the basic “reconnect” features can be for people.

I think this journalist did a great job capturing how good that first euphoric wave of connection can feel for someone just discovering LinkedIn.  It’s a lot of fun to see in print.

Dec 5

2 Comments

Here Comes Another Bubble: YouTube Video (The Richter Scales)

Hits a little too close to home… especially on the housing prices in the Bay Area. :)

So clever I watched it twice. Plus, I feel like being a fan boy because when they say “hire an engineer”, I’m pretty sure I know that engineer! :)

Oct 10

eBay Launches Social Networking… or at least, Neighborhoods

eBay launched Neighborhoods today, part of their big push to re-invigorate activity and excitement around the core of the auction platform.  eBay was built over people connecting about the products and categories that they collect and sell, and this effort definitely attempts to recapture more of that original community feel.

What are Neighborhoods?
Think of Neighborhoods as a gathering place for fans of a certain product, team, artist, and more. They’ve been created around popular items and searches and are designed for members with a very specific interest in mind.

For example, if you’re crazy about Audi automobiles, steer yourself over to that Neighborhood. Or maybe you love the “Slippery When Wet” album…the Bon Jovi Neighborhood could be for you. You’ll be able to find links to Neighborhoods on applicable search results pages and the Community hub, or simply search for them at http://neighborhoods.ebay.com.

Within a Neighborhood, you’ll find a discussion board dedicated to that topic where you can ask and answer questions, brag about your latest auction win, or discuss what’s new. You can upload and share photos related to that topic – and vote on which are best – or check out related listings, reviews, guides and blogs. You can even use our tools to see who else is part of that Neighborhood, or to find other Neighborhoods that might interest you.

Auctionbytes covered the launch basics on their site as well.

You can find eBay Neighborhoods here.  I joined this neighborhood dedicated to the Apple iPhone here.  Performance is incredibly slow right now, but I’m assuming they are working out the kinks there.

I caught some flack a few weeks ago for a post I wrote on Ning, where I basically argued that eBay should have acquired Ning before it received financing at a $200M+ price tag.  At the time, I compared it to eBay Groups, which was the 2004 effort by eBay to upgrade their community functionality.  Clearly, eBay Neighborhoods is a much fairer comparison.

Discuss.

Sep 10

1 Comment

Office 2.0 Panel Wrap-Up

I thought I’d post a quick follow-up to the Office 2.0 conference, especially since I mentioned the appearance on this blog earlier this week.

The Office 2.0 conference is dedicated to exploring the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise, and I was a bit surprised by the dedication and passion that many of the attendees and fellow panelists had for the topic.

There are a few summaries of the panel that I participated in, called “Social Computing”, already online.

To stick with Jeremiah for a second, his blog calls our panel, “the best panel I’ve seen in a long time.”  In particular, Jeremiah appreciated both the atypical format of the panel as well as the fact that we spent some time talking directly about Facebook and the question of the blurring of social & professional lives, particularly among the millenial generation.  Here’s the direct quote:

While I despised the vendor pitching from one panel on mobile (Attention moderators, control your panelists, respect those who paid to attend) the best panel I’ve seen in a LONG time was the one moderated by Shel Israel, focused on Social Computing, the esteemed panel included: Anil Dash of Six Apart, John McCrea of Plaxo, Adam Nash of LinkedIn, Shiv Singh of Razorfish, Athena von Oech of Ning. I enjoyed the format, it wasn’t the usual Q&A, but each speaker (moderator included) were able to present their ideas and concepts up front, great format. As expected, Anil elevates the conversation to a strategic discussion, it’s always a pleasure to hear him. Many of these vendors are from social networking companies, and although Facebook wasn’t on the panel (those guys are hard to get) the conversation persisted around Facebook. As with most vendors, if they don’t have a ‘facebook strategy’ they pass it as a fad, or are nonchalant attitude. I clearly see the threat for some of these vendors, hence my focus on the topic. I like the shift the panel took, towards the impacts of social computing (social networks, blogs, media, live web) tools towards society, in which Buzz Bruggemen piped up from the audience that he only had business contacts, not personal contacts on Facebook. In response, I tickled the panel for their opinion on personal/business lives meshing, especially with the millennial generation. The panel answered back, that those who had both merged were rare.

I’m probably going to write up something a bit more formal for the official LinkedIn blog on this topic, but as a personal note, I’m proud of the panel for taking on real meaty questions head on, even though a 45-minute window really isn’t enough time to do the topic justice.

For me, the event was my first chance to take some of the vision and excitement from my first few months with LinkedIn, and share it with a public audience.  I’m more convinced than ever that the most important aspects of our professional careers are our reputation, experience, and connections to those who we know and trust, and who know and trust us.  LinkedIn is extremely focused on building a platform that enables professionals to be more effective on a daily basis, and based on the comments of those who came up to me after the panel, it’s clear that this vision resonates with people who are passionate about Web 2.0 in the enterprise.

Jul 10

Valleyfreude Video on Valleywag (Facebook IPO Video)

Sorry, I know I’m just providing blog-chamber echo here, but I had to post.

I had read a while ago about the video, “Valleyfreude” that was made by Randi Jayne, sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.  Every article about it highlighted the line:

“F*ck you Yahoo, they’re going IPO“

Given the recent buzz around Facebook, it wasn’t surprising to have this kind of unpredictible tidbit pop up everywhere.  However, I was a bit surprised and disappointed to find out that the video has been taken down from most sites.

Valleywag still has it here.  Enjoy.  It is worth watching.   Click it now before it’s gone!  :)

I was surprised to find out that Mark’s little sister seems to have also created video hits like, “How to Get a Guy in Silicon Valley“.

I’m at a loss for words.

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