The company has confirmed to All Things D that it is actively investigating several opportunities, and is in talks with several partners about gambling on the Internet.

A Zynga spokesperson provided this statement to AllThingsD:

“We build games and experiences that our players want and love. Zynga Poker is the world’s largest online poker game with more than 7 million people playing every day and over 30 million each month. We know from listening to our players that there’s an interest in the real money gambling market. We’re in active conversations with potential partners to better understand and explore this new opportunity.”

As with any new entrant in the space, Zynga will have to fulfill several requirements, meaning any major rollout is still months away.

The San Francisco-based social games maker will have to wade through a maze of state, national and international regulations. It will have to secure the correct licenses, and it also needs the right technology to make betting over the Internet secure.

For either of these last two requirements, a partnership or acquisition of an online gambling organization or other technology would make the most sense, instead of starting from scratch.

However, the effort could easily pay off.

Zynga was one of the first online gaming companies on Facebook, and continues to dominate the platform today. If it is able to get its toe in the door, just as the laws change in the U.S., it could be a leader yet again.

Back in October, Zynga first started showing broad interest in the casino category.

Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus announced at a press event that the company was going to launch Zynga Casino, which would serve as a single destination on Facebook to build off its strong brand in poker.

Its first new game, which has not launched yet, will be bingo.

Until now, the company’s efforts have been limited to building social and mobile games that are given away for free and monetized through the sale of virtual goods.

Getting users to make bets and part with real money could prove difficult, even for a company that has so many dedicated fans.

One thing Zynga has going for it is that social games are frequently compared to gambling because of their addictive nature — both lure consumers into spending a few more dollars to continue playing.

The casino genre has also been quietly racking up big numbers on Facebook.

Besides Zynga Poker, which is the most popular poker game on Facebook, and one of the company’s longest standing titles, there are many other sleeping giants. Sean Ryan, Facebook’s director of game partnerships, has even called them “unbelievable monsters.”

Said Ryan: “It turns out that people are completely okay winning virtual currency that they can never cash out.”

If players actually have the chance to win money, who knows the size of the opportunity?

A Facebook spokesperson said the company does not necessarily see a future for gambling on the social network. “We don’t have any plans to get into real-money gambling,” she said.

It’s unclear if that eliminates others from experimenting. In the meantime, it hasn’t stopped game makers from exploring the category or the concept.

Last week, Seattle-based Double Down Interactive, which was named by Facebook as one of the most popular game makers of 2011, was acquired by video poker giant International Game Technology for $500 million. It has 4.7 million monthly active users playing a variety of games, including blackjack, slots, video poker and roulette.

The deal closely followed Caesars Entertainment’s purchase of Playtika, an Israeli game company known for its Facebook title Slotomania. Caesars bought the company in two stages, the first of which was rumored to be purchased for up to $90 million.

Caesars, which filed to go public in November, declined to comment because it is currently in its quiet period.

However, some of its plans were revealed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission. It said its Caesars and World Series of Poker brands are dedicated to online gaming, and will take advantage of real-money gaming as it becomes legalized. Right now, Caesars Entertainment offers games “for fun” in jurisdictions where online gambling is not yet legal, but has identified the legalization of online poker in the U.S. as “the largest opportunity in online gaming in the near term.”

Still, the biggest hurdle is the law.

Internationally, several countries have permitted gambling for some time, and those areas represent the most immediate opportunities.

But there are signs of the U.S. beginning to open up, too. On the day before Christmas, the Department of Justice gave the online gambling community an early present, according to a blog post written by Nelson Rose, a professor and lawyer.

“President Barack Obama’s administration has just declared, perhaps unintentionally, that almost every form of intra-state Internet gambling is legal under federal law, and so may be games played interstate and even internationally,” Rose wrote.

Essentially, what the Justice Department did was to issue a new interpretation of the Wire Act of 1961. Under the new ruling, it interprets the act as only outlawing bets on sporting events — not all events and contests, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

With that clarification in place, it will now be up to every state to pass legislation outlining operating procedures. So far, Nevada and the District of Columbia have moved quickly to enact laws. To get other state laws passed could be a lengthy process, especially during an election year.

In the meantime, launching games only in Nevada and D.C. doesn’t represent the big opportunity everyone was hoping for.

To be competitive against Caesars and IGT, Zynga may have to partner or acquire companies that already have the licenses in place or the necessary expertise.

Some of the more obvious candidates include Bwin, which operates PartyGaming.com and is traded on the London Stock Exchange; Betfair, and other operators, like Bodog, Bet365 and 888.com. Many are based in the U.K. and handle a variety of casino games and sporting contests there.

The entrance into a new market, such as gambling, would take substantial resources, and Zynga has them thanks to its public offering. In December, it raised $1 billion, making it the largest Internet IPO since Google.

So, will Zynga be the next “unbelievable monster?” Clearly, it is willing to try.

So what happens if you cut directly to the chase and build true casino games like slots, poker or bingo?

It turns out that rings up a pretty healthy business, too. The best part is that because of U.S. gambling laws, game players don’t ever get to cash out their winnings.

In other words, the house always wins.

In July, Sean Ryan, the director of game partnerships at Facebook, said the casino category is creating “unbelievable monsters,” and is still largely untapped by developers. “It turns out that people are completely okay winning virtual currency that they can never cash out,” he said.

But the category giant is no longer sleeping.

Earlier this year, Playtika, the developer behind popular Slotomania, was acquired by Caesars Entertainment Corp. for $80 million, and others are scrambling to keep up.

Today, Berlin-based Crowdpark has announced that it has raised $6 million in capital to help fuel its concept of social betting, where people can bet with friends on everything from who will win a football game to whether Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are getting married.

“This is just an entertainment product. You pay with Facebook Credits, so the players do know they don’t get any money back,” said Crowdpark’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer Ingo Hinterding. “It’s 100 percent legal.”

And there are many other players in the space, too.

Arguably, the first to establish the category was industry leader Zynga. In 2007, it launched Texas HoldEm Poker, a game that continues to attract close to 6.4 million users a day and is one of the company’s Top 3 revenue-generating titles. Two weeks ago, Zynga said it was expanding its casino games with an upcoming launch of Bingo.

Meanwhile, a number of lesser-known companies are literally hearing bells and whistles going off.

Seattle-based DoubleDown Casino, which has slots, video poker, blackjack and roulette in the same app, today launched a new game called Photo Booth Friends.

It falls under the “slots” category, which means you click to replicate the effect of pulling down the handle to see the reels spin on the screen. Photo Booth Friends lets you customize the reels with photos of your friends.

DoubleDown recently celebrated achieving one million daily active users, and has eclipsed other popular games like Zynga’s Mafia Wars, based on monthly active users.

Ryan name-dropped DoubleDown as one of the unbelievable monsters, and according to sources familiar with the company’s financials, we hear the game is now generating $140,000 a day in revenue. For reasons of competition reasons, the company declined to comment.

Others exploring the casino category include RealNetwork’s GameHouse and Electronic Arts through its recent acquisition of PopCap Games.

Here’s an infographic from Crowdpark, breaking down the social betting opportunity on Facebook:

Casino photo credit: FreeRishad.

It has more active users than its next five competitors combined.

With that kind of momentum and few other players able to achieve such scale, many game developers are asking the question: Is it too late to get into social gaming?

“If you aren’t one of the top three to five game developers by year-end, then you are in really big trouble,” said Jens Begemann, the founder and CEO of wooga, a Germany-based social games company that was the second-largest player in the space until Electronic Arts purchased PopCap last week.

Begemann, pictured right, said size is an inherent advantage, because you can market new games to your existing user base.

“Zynga is big because Zynga is big,” he said.

Sean Ryan, the director of game partnerships at Facebook, delivered a very passionate speech yesterday at Casual Connect in Seattle, pleading to the developer-heavy audience that it’s not too late for new entrants in social gaming — that it’s still early and there’s lots of ground left to cover.

“Social platforms are only three years old, and there’s massive value creation going on,” he said.

But there’s a little bit of a catch.

The opportunities really lie in identifying categories that have not already been gobbled up by the leaders in the space. “We have CityVille and FarmVille. We are doing well there — and I’m not saying it couldn’t be done better — but we are good there,” said Ryan (pictured left).

Instead he recommends going after a few underserved niches, which may not reap as many monthly active users but can monetize well just the same.

Some of the top categories on his list are:

Hidden Objects: There are dozens of hidden-object games on other game platforms, but on Facebook there are only two, serving 200 million people. “You can’t make them social? Bullshit! … My guess is we can support 50 to 100 of them.”

Hardcore games: Ryan said the “core” genre didn’t appear on Facebook until a couple of months ago, and today a company like Kabam has raised millions in capital and has 450 employees.

Casino: He said this category is creating “unbelievable monsters,” like Playtika, which was acquired by Caesars Entertainment Corporation for $80 million. Turns out that people are completely okay winning virtual currency that they can never cash out, he said.

A few more: Hunting, Fishing, Christian, Urban and Romance.

Begemann agrees that the opportunities for newcomers lie in finding an untapped market, and says that the days of going after the mainstream casual game player and being a leader on Facebook are over.

He also believes, like many other developers here at Casual Connect, that if Facebook is getting all tapped out, then mobile is the next logical platform. He said he expects wooga to build two more Facebook games this year, and two mobile games.

Otherwise, he says the leading companies on Facebook will likely be Zynga, Electronic Arts and — he’s hoping — wooga, which has such hit titles as Diamond Dash and Bubble Island.

“If you are appealing to everyone and you aren’t in the top five by the end of the year, it won’t work,” he said.

Begemann says that’s because of the larger company’s ability to cross-promote new games to its user base, and bigger studio budgets for games, which are becoming more complex.

“If you start now, focus on a niche,” he said. “If you are trying to build your own city or farm or simulation, it’s difficult.”

Sean Ryan (pictured here), who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources.

Currently, Facebook does not create social games, but hosts third-party publishers of them on its king-making platform. Its most stunning success has been Zynga, maker of Farmville and CityVille.

The move seems sudden, since he just got his latest position. But sources said Ryan and execs at the Silicon Valley social networking giant had been talking about a job there before he went to News Corp.

Thus, at this point at least, Ryan’s main job will be a high-profile developer relations dude–in essence, keeping Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in line and also, presumably, happy.

Translation: Adventures in babysitting former Facebook COO and now Zynga COO Owen Van Natta!

Ryan, whose title will be director of gaming partnerships, will report to Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network.

Facebook is clearly building out its gaming talent bench.

Ryan will work closely with Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers–who joined Facebook after the acquisition of their social gaming start-up Walletin in November to head platform games engineering efforts.

Sources said that News Corp.’s efforts will now be taken over by John Welch, who came to the media giant after Ryan acquired his casual games company Making Fun.

At the time, Ryan said he was working on a platform designed to support games on Facebook, Apple’s iPhone Google’s Android mobile operating system and News Corp.-owned Myspace.

Ryan got to News Corp. a little after it acquired Irata Labs, a social gaming developer. He had the title of EVP and GM of Games at News Corp. Digital.

Ryan is well known in the gaming and monetization space. He was acting CEO of Live Journal and also CEO of Meez, a virtual world and also Listen.com.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

BoomTown is awaiting comment from Facebook and News Corp.

But Ryan and George Kliavkoff throw their 17th Annual “After-After” Party at the Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas at 11:59 PM Thursday, so come by and say congrats!

The latest move: News Corp. has acquired Making Fun, a one-year-old social games start-up, and will fold it into the gaming unit it started up earlier this year.

Sean Ryan, who is overseeing the games business, says he’ll put Making Fun’s talent to work building out a platform designed to support games on Facebook, Myspace, Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. The move comes six months after News Corp.’s first social games move, when it picked up game developer Irata Labs. (News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Ryan wouldn’t disclose a price for the deal, but it’s likely a modest one, given that this is essentially an “acqhire” of Making Fun’s small team, particularly founders John Welch and Lee Crawford. Ryan will also pick up the Making Fun name. He’ll use it to brand his mini-division, which is attached to, but separate from, News Corp.’s IGN gaming review site.

Ryan says his first games will debut early next year on Facebook and Myspace, followed by ports to iPhone and Android.