Zynga says that this move doesn't indicate a break away from Facebook, rather it is a move to build a platform that complements Facebook's Open Graph.
Zynga says, "These developers will be able to leverage our zCloud infrastructure for scalability and availability and our analytics to measure and drive their social engagement with metrics such as ASN (Active Social Network) which measures how many friends our players interact with." Zynga says that they will open up their API to game developers later this year, so there can be more games on their social platform. Through this announcement, Zynga also announced some partner developers, MobScience, Row Sham Bow and Sava, who will use Zynga's technology to build and analyze the new social environment. should be out later this month and will be available in 16 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Thai. Of course, they've also added a chat function, where you can chat with your friends as well as other members of the Zynga community who are interested in the same games as you. There will also be a feature called Player Profiles, which will let you check your friends’ helpfulness score to see who’s most likely to help you back. The games will still retain their social element through a feature, called Social Stream, which allows you to play games with your friends as well as discover new ones on Zynga's own site. Games that will be available first on are Words with Friends, CastleVille, Zynga Poker, Hidden Chronicles and CityVille.