KaKoo

We joked last week when Google changed its logo to a playable game of Pac-Man that the world’s collective productivity would take a sharp plunge, but it turns out that’s exactly what happened.

The blog for time management tool RescueTime did the math and determined that Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time, or $120,483,800 in productivity.

The cost was determined by looking at how much time was spent on Google’sGoogle homepage the day the Pac-Man logo was up (48 seconds) versus the average amount of time spent on other days (11 seconds) and multiplied by the number of visitors to the site that day (503,703,000).

The cost seems like a bit of a stretch, though. RescueTime assumed that the average Google user makes $25 per hour; that’s considerably higher than median income in InternetInternet-connected nations. Also, you probably can’t assume that everyone who visited the site Friday was on the clock at work.

If you haven’t wasted time at work playing Google Pac-Man already, you still have a chance to add to that lost productivity tally. Google has preserved the Pac-Man game logo at www.google.com/pacman (you can also download the game) even though the front page has returned to normal.

Facebook and game creator Zynga, recently valued at $4 billion, have signed a five-year “strategic partnership” to maintain the symbiotic relationship between the social network and games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Treasure Island.

Facebook Credits, Facebook’s virtual currency system, will be an important part of the partnership between the two companies and its use will be expanded within Zynga games in the future. The announcement issued by the two companies doesn’t say exactly how, though.

Further incorporation of Facebook Credits solidifies Zynga’s commitment to the Facebook Platform because players wouldn’t likely be able to transfer those credits should Zynga go off on its own.

In the days preceding this announcement, some bloggers speculated that Zynga’s departure from Facebook was a sincere possibility. The concern was that Facebook’s decision to deploy Facebook Credits (from which it takes a 30% cut of all revenues) and remove or lessen the number of notifications in users’ newsfeeds from games could inspire Zynga to seek an alternative platform.

GamesBeat noted that Zynga started using in-game features to fetch players’ e-mail addresses — a potential sign that the company was making sure it would be able to stay in touch with its customers outside of Facebook should the relationship go south. And let’s not forget that Zynga revealed plans to launch FarmVille for iPhone and other mobile devices.

Maybe bloggers were reading too much into the situation, or maybe Zynga was doing all of that to secure a better bargaining position with Facebook. Either way, everything seems fine and dandy for the virtual farming and mafia warring communities on Facebook for now.