Bing employs Farmville addicts to beat Google

It's a procrastinators paradise, peppers your social networking feed with updates on 'lonely pink cows' and has now been shamelessly deployed by Bing to boost numbers on its Facebook fan page.

For those of you who haven't guessed it yet - congratulations on having a social life. For everyone else - yes - the answer is Farmville.

A real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, Farmville currently 'boasts' 82.7 million active procrastinators players everyday.

Operating on Facebook, the game is the site's most popular application, staving off stiff competition from other such wheezes including 'Vampires Versus Werewolves' or down-themed masterpiece 'virtual pillow fight'.

Clearly in a flap after noticing that Google had more Facebook fans than them, Microsoft let rip and indulged in a shameless round of that old playground favourite 'I've got more Facebook friends than you'; but not without the help of Farmville.

After signing Farmville up to MSN Games, Microsoft took just 19.5 hours to put it's carefully laid plan out to graze where it offered gamers 'FREE FARM CASH' for becoming a fan of Bing's fan page.

This wasn't the first time that Farmville has been linked to free farm cash give-aways. Developers Zynga are potentially facing class action lawsuits after previously scamming its users with misleading offers and unwanted services that cost 'real' money; that's right, not the Farmville kind.

Clearly hungry to load up on egg plants or whatever it is the kids are farming these days, Bing laid claim to an extra 40,000 new fans after just 24 hours of the promotion going live.

As it currently stands, Google now finds itself lagging behind in second place with a meagre 525,000 Facebook fans while Bing is top of the class with 574,000.

Google have yet to make a comeback but rumour had it that their dad is tougher than Microsoft's so we'll just have to wait and see.