Zynga sets up shop outside of Facebook

If your Facebook newsfeed has suspiciously few requests for watering crops in the near future, you may have Zynga With Friends to thank for it. The social gaming network will direct Zynga's various games across platforms into one lobby, as the company revealed at its Unleashed event today.

Zynga With Friends will present all game requests in a social stream, allowing users to access tasks or requests in a single place from any game or the lobby itself. It will also support matchmaking with known friends or players suggested by similar interests in Zynga titles. The games and unified service will remain accessible through Facebook, though they will also operate independently.

Some of the company's games will also be updated with simultaneous multiplayer, as illustrated in an onstage four-player match of Bubble Safari. Zynga employees competed to finish first on their own game boards in the bubble shooting puzzler while triggering effects that influenced their competitors. Zynga With Friends will also support live chats across games.

The Unleashed event held announcements for several other new and soon-to-be-released social games. Matching With Friends, a mobile puzzle matching game, is available now. Zynga Elite Slots, the next in Zynga's Casino line, will feature more machines as well as social jackpots. Ruby Blast puts subterranean-themed levels and power-ups into a match-three game. The Ville, a decoration and social interaction game launching tomorrow, lets players hang out with friends' avatars. And restaurant-building game ChefVille lets players trade ingredients and unlock real recipes to use at home.

Chief mobile officer David Ko said Zynga is now the largest mobile gaming company in the world, and it plans to expand further by partnering with several developers to bring their games to mobile platforms, including Atari and Majesco.

Pincus closed the event with a "coming soon" teaser trailer for FarmVille 2, which showed polygonal graphics as well as the franchise's agricultural mechanics.

Zynga has recently been troubled by falling stock prices, and though its shares saw a small boost today, they still fell 5 percent by closing, according to MarketWatch.