The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we’ll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST.

Facebook’s press release is here.

Live Coverage

In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated “I wish I knew” when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted that Facebook is working on launching improved search, but they aren’t close to launching it yet.

2:49 PM: That’s it. The show is over.

2:48 PM: Great Apps can integrate with users just like native Facebook apps, and they get early access to features. The Great Apps program is in alpha stage and the first two partners are iLike and Causes. There will be a strong enforcement system with all apps, and they will disable apps that are a problem. Over the last year they’ve disabled apps for violation of privacy or other policies. They take this very seriously, he says.

2:47 PM: The second announcement is the Facebook Great Apps Program (Top Tier program). They embody all ten of the guiding principles, and they advance the mission of Facebook.
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Update: Our live notes from Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote are here.

Today is definitely Facebook day as they hold their second annual F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Last year they released their developer platform, which led competitors to hurriedly release their own competing offerings. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’ve made our predictions, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at 1:30 to make his keynote, and workshops will follow all day after that. The full schedule is here.

Some of the news is breaking early. For example, we will almost certainly see the Facebook payments platform launch in some form, for example - Facebook desperately wants to find a way to help application developers make money beyond advertising, and the iPhone App Store has shown that people are willing to pay for quality applications.

Even more certain is the launch of Facebook Connect, which will allow third party services to authenticate Facebook users and merge profile data into their offerings. Digg will be one of their launch partners, and will show off the new product on stage, say our sources. However, neither CEO Jay Adelson or Founder Kevin Rose will attend the event.

We’ve also heard from sources that Facebook will announce a tiering system for applications, confirming our previous post in March. Five to ten top tier apps, which have proven themselves trustworthy and which create as good or better a user experience as what Facebook is able to create itself, will be named in the near future. iLike (music) and Causes (charity) will be announced tomorrow, and more will come soon. We heard that Flixster (movies) was on the short list but was bumped at the last minute - perhaps due to their MySpace partnership announced yesterday.

Other apps will be grouped into a middle tier, where most of them will fall, and a bottom “unwashed masses” tier for untrustworthy or spammy apps that have little user value. Each tier will have different rules for engaging with users, particularly around invites, messaging and entry into the news feed.

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Causes, a Facebook and MySpace application that promotes viral donations of time and money to charities and nonprofits, launched a year ago. They’ve now released statistics today on their usage and donation numbers for that first year.

The company says they’ve registered 12 million users who are now supporting more than 80,000 non-profit causes worldwide. $2.5 million has been raised for 19,445 different 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. Facebook reports 60,000 daily users of the application, and MySpace reports 25,000.

Causes was founded by Joe Green and Sean Parker. Sean, a partner at Founders Fund , previously co-founded Napster, was the founding President of Facebook, and co-founded the recently acquired Plaxo. His goal with Causes, he told me last year when the company was called Project Agape, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.

So far, so good.

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A few weeks ago I had the chance to check out an upcoming Los Angeles-based startup called Intent, which should launch publicly this summer. And while Intent is a for profit startup, the founders say their goal, like Causes, is to help people along the road to making money.

The intent founders, which include Deepak Chopra’s daughter Mallika Chopra as well as Sarah Ross and Sal Taylor Kydd, will aim to fill a niche between lifestyle sites and medical properties - a destination for wellness content, a syndication platform, and a branded hub for people seeking to share their intentions (personal, social, spiritual and environmental). The site will include original content from wellness category luminaries, medical professionals, media personalities, and pop culture icons. They aren’t willing to disclose much more for now.

The company has raised under “less than $1 million” in an angel round of financing that included Richard Wolpert and other unnamed investors. The Intent blog is here.

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San Francisco based Founders Fund launched in 2005 with a $50 million venture fund. They’ve had two liquidity events since then, and a handful of other very high profile investments (Facebook, Powerset, Ooma, Quantcast, Slide, Geni, Causes, etc.).

Today they will announce a second fund, Founders Fund II. It’s much larger - $220 million. And unlike the first fund, the money comes mostly from outside investors. The new fund will allow Founders Fund to make 15-20 new investments, including pro-rata investments in follow on rounds.

A couple of investments have been made out of the new fund, they say, but have not yet been disclosed.

Founders Fund partners have deep connections in Silicon Valley, which help with deal flow (Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal, Ken Howery, founder and former CFO of PayPal, Luke Nosek, founder and former Vice President of PayPal and Sean Parker, founder and former CEO or President of Napster, Plaxo and Facebook). But they also approach deals differently than most other funds.

Sean Parker said today in a phone interview that a glut in venture capital, combined with reduced capital needs of most startups, has led to a shift in balance of power between entrepreneurs and VCs. Founders Fund recognizes that shift and has evolved does deals a little differently because of it. For example, they invented and promote the issuance of a special class of stock, called Series FF, which allows entrepreneurs to take money off the table much earlier in their company’s lifecycle. They also allow significantly more liberal voting rights to founder board members than many other funds. See this article in the SF Chronicle earlier this year for more on how they do business.

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Causes is one of the most popular Facebook Applications, with over 300,000 active users. The service, which leverages virality to spread the word about worthy causes, aggregates 40,000 causes that benefit 13,000 nonprofits worldwide. In many ways, it’s a pyramid scheme for good.

Now founders Sean Parker and Joe Green are leveraging another phenomenon to increase participation even further: virtual gifts. Facebook has been selling them since February this year. A number of unofficial virtual gift applications created by third parties have also launched on Facebook. Clearly, they are here to stay. Facebook says 24 million of them have been given away through the official application alone (although many of them were free).

But now you can give a gift that says a little more than “I spent a dollar on you.” With Gifts from Causes, you can give a $10 - $200 gift to a friend. Each virtual gift (see image below) benefits a different charity. 100% of the proceeds (minus only credit card fees) go directly to the charity.

$10 gives two blankets to people in a disaster area. Or one insecticide-treaded bed net to a child in Africa to fight Malaria. Or a soccer ball to a poor child. etc. So the next time you want to send your boyfriend a rose, think about spending $15 instead and sending him a teddy bear. In the real world, a sick child will receive a real teddy bear, thanks to your generosity.

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We wrote about Project Agape, a new startup that is applying viral principles to altruism and social causes, in late March (”Project Agape” is a working name for the service, it is yet to be formally named). Today, the service is launching as one of the initial Facebook Platform partners.

The company was founded by Sean Parker and Joe Green and is designed to help social causes - charities, religions, political parties and candidates, etc.

Integration with Facebook is very, very deep, which isn’t surprising given the founders connections to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO. Parker was Facebook’s founding President, and Green was Zuckerberg’s college roomate.

Facebook already has a popular “groups” application, and many social causes are represented as a group. Groups, however, don’t let users do much more than join. With Agape, users can create causes, take donations, and recruit members. Whenever someone creates a cause or joins one, it shows up in their news feed for their friends to see. Information about the cause is also included in the profile itself, including total amount raised by that user and new users recruited.

There’s a multi level marketing approach, too. Any money donated by other users you’ve recruited is also included in your “money raised” total (see top image). Gaining status by recruiting members and getting donations will be a big incentive for users to not only join a cause that they feel strongly about, but will also get them to participate on an ongoing basis.

I spoke with Green and Parker and asked them why they decided to show their service to the public for the first time via Facebook instead of launching on their own site. The answer: Facebook has a huge and active user base (20 million users, each viewing 50 pages daily on Facebook), and they are a demographic that is highly likely to want to become involved actively in causes they believe in. The hugh popularity of Facebook Groups is evidence of this, they say.

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Yesterday I sat down with Sean Parker at his offices at the Founders Fund in San Francisco to see a demo of his new and yet-to-be-named startup (the working name for the project is Project Agape).

Parker is a larger-than-life twenty seven year old who co-founded Napster and Plaxo and was the founding president of Facebook. He’s been working full time on Project Agape for the last eight months, while still putting in the hours at Founders Fund as a Managing Partner.

Parker knows about how to apply viral principles to ideas. Half of our 1.5 hour meeting was spent discussing these principles and how to fine tune ideas to the point where they can grow exponentially. The only thing that can stop a good viral idea is when it runs out of population, he says. If Napster, Plaxo and Facebook are any example, he just might be right.

Project Agape is still under a heavy cloak of secrecy (Om Malik first got wind of the new venture a week and a half ago), although I was able to see a demo and some additional conceptual work. Parker’s goal, he says, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.

Charities, political parties and affinity groups all rely on participation from people who share the same beliefs and ideals. But recruiting and fundraising are largely stuck in the pre-Internet era: social pressure and guilt are applied to get others to donate to that marathon for the Leukemia society, or donate time working with the homeless. Parker wants to harness those proven incentive structures use his new startup to increase their effectiveness.

New sites like Change.org and dotherightthing and Six Degrees help people talk about issues online, but they don’t go far enough in using virality to get new users and get them actually doing things. Parker wants the kind of activity around these organizations that Facebook sees - tens of thousands of new daily users and hours and hours of social interactions. The result, he says, will be a much more efficient engine for organizations to get volunteers and raise money.

The company is based in Berkeley and will make some announcements in the coming weeks, and a beta product will be available in a couple of months. Stay tuned for more.

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