FarmVille: Zynga asks for opinions on possible friend-of-a-friend neighbor feature

Wait, do you here that? It's the sound of great ideas being hatched in the Zynga offices. Specifically, some great ideas are being tossed around by the FarmVille team, and we're being asked to rate them via a new fan survey. This survey is available to complete underneath the FarmVille gameplay area, in the same place you'd find sponsored links for free Farm Cash promotions.

Once you start, you'll find that the majority of the survey asks us to rate current or possible social features in the game, based on how much we like them. There are plenty of current features here to rate, such as how much we like having to ask for building ingredients from friends, or how we like gathering bushels for crafting recipes, but (of course) the more interesting options here are those that aren't currently available. While there's no guarantee that any of these will launch in the game officially, it's hard not to be a little excited.

Two features in particular have us cautiously optimistic, both offering the ability to add new neighbors to the game, without actually adding them as Facebook friends. Specifically, we've been asked if we would like the ability to add complete strangers as neighbors (and then interact with them as normal), or whether we'd like to simply extend our neighbors list to friends-of-friends. Both of these choices would (we assume) allow us to add another user to our network, with which we could trade free gifts, send quest items or building materials, and even visit each others' farms, all without worrying about that person finding out our personal information as we've never added them as a friend.

Remember though farmers - while these features may be incredibly exciting, they aren't actually live yet (and may possibly never be). To help things along though, remember to take the survey and vote accordingly. Who knows? With enough positive votes, we might actually be able to expand our farming networks to dozens more people that regularly play the game!

Would you take advantage of an ability to add users as neighbors without adding them as Facebook friends? Have you ever added complete strangers as Facebook friends just to have neighbors in games?