Zynga's official announcement that it's going to attempt to out-Facebook Facebook - at least as a gaming platform - comes as no surprise.

Having built its business on the back of Facebook's social graph, the now publicly-owned company needs to control its destiny - and that means its users.

This means it will - as much as possible - try to extract its users from playing games on Facebook.

Hence Zynga is stressing that its platform will be "a unified experience that will connect all players on any platform from Facebook to iOS and Android to Zynga.com".

In that sense it’s looking to be a meta-games platform.

Looking outwards

However, running a successful platform means opening up your technology to third parties, just as Facebook enabled Zynga to become successful in the first place.

So while the longterm competition for all such platforms companies - notable competitors include Japanese outfits like GREE and DeNA - is measured in terms of user numbers and fought over in terms of user acquisition, in the short term, the battle will be over gaining content.

Obviously that's good news for content creators.

Zynga has already been busy signing up some recognised names such as Konami and Majesco, although the majority of its announced partners to-date are hardly household names - 50 Cubes, Portalarium, Playdemic, Mob Science, and Row Sham Bow etc.

Certainly, it will be interesting to see how active Zynga decides to become in the mobile space, where GREE is rapidly signing up developers partners including Gameloft and Ubisoft. It also has EA, Konami and Capcom performing successfully in Japan.

Zynga has highlighted mobile as a key growth opportunity, particularly as it's hardly going to investing heavily in Facebook-only games.

But perhaps the company Zynga's move most puts under pressure is DeNA, which despite its strong presence in Japan and its $700 million cash pile has been remarkable quiet on terms of its third party mobile content publishing strategy, at least in the west.

Whose user?

However, the wider philosophical question is what we mean when we talk about these companies 'owning the audience'?

As Apple has proved with Game Center, and OpenFeint found in its pre-GREE days, having a large number of people who have registered for your platform is a meaningless metric.

Hence, much more important than user numbers, is some idea of user exclusivity.

Of course, there's no such thing - as Facebook will no doubt be finding out over the coming years - only content exclusively. And that costs money.

And that's the really good news for developers.