Zynga’s Mark Pincus says social networking is still an unsolved problem

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Entrepreneur Mark Pincus is unquestionably best known for founding and running Zynga. Its products—especially FarmVille—fueled the social gaming craze that took over the internet early in the previous decade. But Pincus, who hatched his first company in 1995, was already an old hand at startups by the time Zynga came along in 2007. Once you get to the businesses he’s invested in, which include Napster, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Snap, SpaceX, Joby, and Aurora, his career starts to look like a history of the tech industry over the past few decades. And yet Pincus’s book, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love!, published in June, is not a self-serving tribute to his own prescience. It devotes copious space to a social network he cofounded in 2003, Tribe.net, which—in case you weren’t aware—didn’t do as well as Facebook. Intended to be a cross between Napster, Friendster, and Craigslist, it isn’t even well-remembered by the standards of failed early social networks. Pincus has never stopped thinking about why Tribe didn’t make it. Above all, he blames his own inflexible attachment to the concept in its origi…