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RealGames has appointed two social networking veterans to its executive team, the company announced today. Jeff Revoy, formerly of Yahoo!, steps into the newly-created role of vice president of social games, while former Real VP of Engineering Wilf Russell has been promoted to chief technology officer.

Café World is one of the games Zynga has launched since the massive success of FarmVille, and its overall style of play is very influenced by that game. By serving food to customers and performing sundry other tasks, you can earn enough money to customize your little café to fit your tastes and grow it into a larger restaurant. Every recipe in the game requires a certain amount of time to create, anything from five minutes to three days.

Playfish fans have been eagerly anticipating the release of Hotel City since word of the game first surfaced earlier this week. The new hotel management game from the studio behind such hits as Restaurant City and Pet Society is now available for play on Facebook.

They say that the key to running a successful restaurant is to be hands-on. And that's certainly true in Restaurant City. The restaurant management game rewards players for being dedicated and returning to the game on a regular basis, making it a perfect fit for Facebook. But while the core mechanics are fairly simple, the game quickly becomes very addictive, something which is aided by some terrific production values and great social networking features.

Zynga has recruited veteran Electronic Arts executive Steven Chiang to become the president of the company's game studios. A 17-year videogame industry veteran, Chiang was co-founder of Tiburon Entertainment, which was acquired by EA in 1998. Most recently he was the senior vice president and group general manager for EA Sports where he oversaw the Madden NFL football series.

Metrogames might be a small player when compared to companies like Zynga or Playfish, but their games Biotronic, Music Challenge, and Plock have all managed to maintain around 1 million monthly active users on Facebook – more than enough to put them on the map. Playdom seems to think so too, as they’ve awarded MetroGames $5 million in series A funding to expand development of its games as well as its Metrogames.com social gaming platform.

The rapidly-growing popularity of social games was acknowledged for the first time at the 2010 Game Developer's Choice Awards with a brand new category for Best New Social/Online Game. Zynga's FarmVille took home the prize, which wasn't terribly surprising given that the farming sim currently boasts more than 83 million monthly users on Facebook -- more than double the numbers of its nearest competitor.

While FarmVille's success remains baffling to some people, Gamezebo was interested in finding out more about what makes the most successful game on Facebook tick. Zynga's VP and GM of FarmVille, Bill Mooney, was more than happy to answer our questions.

Yesterday we reported on two new games from two big publishers that were making their way to the Facebook. The first of these, Poker Blitz, has now surfaced.

If there was a single buzz word to come out of last week’s GDC event, it would probably be ‘social.’ Until recently, Facebook seemed to be the only major platform that social games developers had their eyes on. That’s starting to change. MySpace announced a new focus on gaming at last week’s GDC event, and it looks like they weren’t alone. hi5 has also recently announced changes to their social network, all with the intent of drawing interest from the game development community.

One of the dominant types of game on social networks like Facebook is the humble text role-playing game (RPG). The mafia game is a popular type of text RPG, probably owing to the popularity of the TV show The Sopranos. In mafia RPGs, players start their own mafias, staffed by members of their Facebook (or MySpace, or what-have-you) friends lists. Zynga's Mafia Wars wasn’t the first mafia RPG, but it’s certainly the biggest.