You forgot to mention that Zynga is one of the major reasons why Facebook is starting to decline in the U.S. People hate Farmville and Mafia Wars and the associated spam.
That said, Words With Friends is an excellent implementation of Scrabble and it's actually social, not alienating like that Farmville garbage. It's quite well-polished. I respect the attention to detail.
The original Words With Friends app was, of course, developed before Newtoy were acquired by Zynga. Fortunately, the social DNA (and polish) of the game has remained intact.
Why down vote this? While the spam from these games was turned off for non-subscribers, I heard Tim Train from Zynga say at a presentation that they are still experiencing the backlash from the legacy of spam.
Consider the majority market of Facebook users, many don't know how to "hide posts" and will often be turned off whent their facebook wall begins to look like their hotmail account.
Don't always assume the average user has the know-how you do and don't always assume they're interested in solving the problem either.
And even if you know how it seems like every time I log into facebook (admittedly rarely) there's a handful of new spam games making the rounds. It's a little frustrating that there's no blanket option of block all of the stupid game spam, or switch from a blacklist to a whitelist. I'd much rather un-block specific games than have to block every game ever made.
That should be false. Games bring back millions of users to facebook. Remember that while facebook attempted to hide games some time ago, they reintroduced viral features like a scrolling side ticker to spark up the traffic. Why would they do that if they would not benefit from it?
Wow, I actually hate Words with Friends — its ugly design, its noises, its super-slimy full-screen no-close-button ads, the way some games end in stalemate that the system does not recognize, etc.
That said, Words With Friends is an excellent implementation of Scrabble and it's actually social, not alienating like that Farmville garbage. It's quite well-polished. I respect the attention to detail.