Digital Chocolate's Trip Hawkins

You would think so - but actually, on Facebook we can connect every user with a photo, name and location. There are whales of every size shape and colour all over the world.

Clearly there are different types of people who can decide that they care enough to become whales. There are women, young customers, old customers, Asian customers. One of the complaints is often, oh, we're in this third world country, there's no money here - but then you find that there are whales. They're everywhere.

I remember when Diner Dash first came out, I thought it was stupid. Thinking - women are always complaining about doing these demeaning household chores, and here's a game where you do more demeaning household chores. You don't get to be the hero, you're just serving food. I want the hero's journey, I don't want to just serve food. So I didn't get it. Didn't get it at all.

I think now over 200 million people have played that game. They've built a whole industry, really, from that type of game. So I think we're recognising that there's more to gaming than we can imagine. There's definitely a way to appeal to women, a way to appeal to children, every different culture.

But I agree with you about the way it is right now. The western, male, competitive gamer - that's the most obvious market to focus on because we know there's a lot of them, they have a lot of money and they're competitive. Competition is a beautiful thing.

You have to be careful with that. If you and I are friends on Facebook and you have a game where you spend weeks building a base and I come in and I blow it up - you're not going to play it anymore. You have to control exactly how much damage I can do to you, how quickly you can build it back up.

There's all that personalisation, I sort of get emotionally attached to what I'm creating - you don't want to see that all blown up every time I turn around.

This is where you have to look at two different internet strategies. Say you and I have two different companies. We can say, okay - traffic is going to come into my site and I'm going to be pre-occupied with keeping players on my site and not allowing them to redirect anywhere else. I think we both know that there are plenty of websites that try to do that, in different media categories.

Google's big agenda is the browser, that's where they make most of their money. The Android market is really a device to reduce Apple's market share.

I think that's an obsolete way of thinking. I think that's not a very practical way of thinking, because that customer's going to leave anyway. If the way that customer leaves is by clicking on your site, and then you owe me a click...

Exactly. We support that. We know that it works because we do it, but there are a lot of companies that don't like it. They think, I don't want to help my competitors.

But you'll notice that when you go to buy a car, all the dealers are in one area, because they've realised that it makes it easier for people to buy a car, so they sell more cars. It's not everybody's instinct to realise that it should work that way.

If you think, okay, here's a gamesite where they have traffic and I can get my game discovery there, but the game has to be there and it's according to their rules. I think there's another way to approach it - to say, I've got traffic, you've got traffic, let's trade traffic. Let's not try to control the customer when he's on our site. Let's recognise it in the browser.

Customers are coming and going. They'll come back if your product is good. If you have conviction that you can make a good game and have some faith that they'll come back, you can work with people who think the same way.

If the only way to get traffic is to go and sit on somebody else's portal, then by definition the big portals end up winning. That's catering to distribution thinking. But in the browser you don't have to do that.

So if enough developers recognise that - they can all collaborate and help each other and collectively have the power of one of the big guys.

To be honest they should. But here's the interesting thing. We think of Facebook and Google as being closed platforms like Apple, but they're really not. Google's big agenda is the browser, that's where they make most of their money. The Android market is really a device to reduce Apple's market share.

What Google really cares about is having a good browser on more devices. Similarly, Facebook's agenda is really the open graph.

So, if you have some other games and they don't comply with Facebook policy - that's ok. They can live outside Facebook, you can buy a Facebook connect. You can still get traffic from Facebook, you can still send things to Facebook newsfeeds that comply with Facebook rules and yet you're independent. That's where Applifier and some others are likely to go.

In a way Facebook's happy with that because they want thousands and thousand of other sites using Facebook Connect because they'll attract users to the site that are not yet Facebook members. Some will become members. The big financial opportunity for Facebook, they think, is that if they keep Facebook.com clean then they'll maintain control over the social network. If they then get the universal login as such that all these other sites have you logged in automatically, then they'll take over the long tail of the internet and then they can run an ad network through it.

That's a more powerful ad network than Google has because Facebook knows more about you than Google does. They can do better ad targeting at higher fees. That's a very powerful thing.