Slide was not too happy when Facebook temporarily pulled one of its most popular applications, Top Friends, from the social networking site for exposing too much profile information to people who were not friends.

Ahead of today’s F8 developer conference, I asked Slide CEO Max Levchin what Facebook could do to make developers’ lives easier. Not surprisingly, he’d like to see clearer rules about what is and is not allowed, as well as more formal, contractual partnerships between Facebook and app developers. (Facebook is expected to announce a tiered partner system today, and Slide may not qualify as one of the “preferred” partners because of the issues that led to Facebook’s police action).

Slide’s VP of Strategy, Keith Rabois, goes even further. He warns that if Facebook keeps shifting the foundation on top of which app companies are built it will threaten their viability. This might all sound like sour grapes, but coming from the biggest provider of apps on Facebook it does carry some weight.

Levchin, who was one the co-foudners of PayPal, also thinks that Facebook needs a universal payment system so that developers can start charging for apps like they can on the iPhone. The question is whether anyone would ever want to pay for a Facebook app.

Facebook is continuing its war on Facebook apps that push the limits on acceptable user interaction. Last week it was Slide’s Top Friends App, which it briefly suspended. Later Facebook also suspended another popular app, Social Me.

This time they’re targeting Slide’s rival RockYou and their Super Wall application, which tends to have a lot of spammy user content. But instead of shutting down the application wholesale, they’ve simply turned off the viral components of the app - invitations, notifications, etc.

The consequences have been just as dramatic. A month ago Super Wall had 2.4 million average daily users. Today it’s 600,000 and falling fast.

RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda confirmed that Facebook had shut down features of Super Wall, but says they’re working with Facebook to fix the issues and expect things to return to normal soon.

One thing is clear in all this: Facebook is serious about slapping down app developers who go too far in their efforts to grab new users.

Slide and Vh1 excel at making products geared towards America’s lowest common denominator. The first makes SuperPoke, a popular social network app that lets you send text messages saying you’ve done “stuff” to your friends. The latter produces reality show classics like “Flavor of Love”, “Rock of Love”, and “I Love New York”. And next week, their powers will combine to bring you VH1’s SuperPoke!Fest: a four day reality show marathon to promote a new show called “I Love Money” that will give users a chance to see their very own SuperPokes live, onscreen!

Beginning July 2, Facebook and MySpace users will be given a choice of 30 Vh1-branded SuperPoke actions that will let users “get romantical with” and “slip the tongue to” their friends. Each of these special Vh1 SuperPokes will be entered into a lottery, and the luckiest 10,000 users will get to see their poke displayed for a few seconds on TV.

I’m sure this sounded like a great idea during a marketing meeting, but did anyone ever pause long enough to realize that SuperPokes can be annoying, even when you know the people involved? I don’t care if OLIVER B has slipped the tongue to some girl I’ll never meet. And why is VH1 taking up about 40% of the screen to display these things?

The event is also likely to flood Facebook and MySpace with spammy messages from Slide as users vie to get their first names displayed on television. Slide probably won’t mind so long as it can maximize the number of users it reaches, but the rest of us may have to deal with a new onslaught of SuperPokes.

According to Slide, we’ve got even more of these promotions to come - let’s hope they take a different approach:

“This partnership, the first of many to come, offers our enthusiastic users the chance to become SuperPoke! stars on the television network they already know and love. Now, SuperPoke! is not only fun and social, but it might get you on TV too.”

Slide has recently been in the news for having their popular Top Friends application disabled by Facebook. The application apparently has a security hole that allows Facebook users to view portions of any Top Friend user’s profile - something that is clearly in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy.

MySpace used to be notorious for simply banning third party widgets that didn’t play nice (”not playing nice” generally meant any kind of advertisements in the widgets, but it was very arbitrary). Those days are long gone. Maybe now, though, Facebook is having a go at it.

Until now Facebook combated black hat applications by just tightening up the rules to shut down loopholes. The problem with that approach is that it tends to reward bad behavior, since the only downside is that it’ll be stopped at some point and your competitors won’t have the same ability to spam that you did. A race to the bottom ensued. And Slide and RockYou tended to be among the worst offenders.

Tonight though that may have changed. A hugely popular Slide application called Top Friends (review here) has simply vanished from Facebook’s site. Users who had installed it don’t see it, searches for it in the directory turn up empty, and the URL for the application now redirects to the Facebook home page. It’s like it never existed.

So what happened? We won’t know until morning. But this isn’t just a broken application, since the app page is redirecting to Facebook.com.

Update: It looks like CNET has the answer - Top Friends has a security hole that allowed people to view partial profiles of people who were not their friends, and Facebook suspended them. I’d say it’s safe to say Slide is hard at work on a fix.

Until Facebook suspended the Top Friends app, created by Slide, anyone could browse partial profiles of anyone else on Facebook who had added Top Friends to their page. CNET News.com confirmed that the security hole exposed the birthdays, gender, and relationship status of strangers, including Facebook executives, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, and one profile that seemed to belong to Paris Hilton. Basically, the app was not obeying the privacy settings specified by the user, enabling anyone with the know-how to bypass the security once they obtained someone’s Facebook ID number.

Back in January Slide pulled off a whopper of a financing for an effectively pre-revenue startup: $50 million, valuing the company at a cool half billion dollars. Not bad.

No one was surprised to hear that arch-rival RockYou would soon close a big round of their own. And we have not been dissapointed. Today RockYou is announcing a $35 million Series C round, led by DCM. Previous investors include Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, and First Round Capital—none of which are mentioned as participating in the current round. The company had raised just $16.5 million over two previous rounds, bringing their total to $51.5 million.

RockYou is the second-most popular creator of applications on Facebook (after Slide), and says that its widgets are seen by 87.5 million people a month across the Web (compared to Slide’s 63.7 million). The company also offers OpenSocial applications that have been installed 10 million times. RockYou sells social-networking ads against the audience for its widgets. At 2.7 billion pageviews a month, that’s a lot of advertising inventory.

Now it just has to figure out how to get more people to click on them.

The stress between these two similar startups to compete is brutal. Sarah Lacy explained in her book how when either company would release a new feature or application, the other would race to duplicate it within hours:

This has all been building to a nasty war between Slide and RockYou, with each maintaining it is larger, each ripping off the other’s products. Having an enemy has helped focus Slide, and for now, it beats RockYou on every count.

Slide is a peculiar Web 2.0 company. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is founder Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal and has been profiled as a workaholic by the New York Times.

Its operations themselves aren’t terribly fascinating: they consist of cranking out fun, but trivial, widgets and social network applications for the likes of Facebook and MySpace.

But whether its products appeal to the digerati or not, it sure does appear to have a knack at making money off social networking when the social networks themselves are struggling to monetize effectively. How else can anyone justify the startup’s huge valuation?

Slide makes all of its money from brand advertising, primarily through its Facebook applications (although Levchin has indicated an interest in direct-to-consumer sales as well). To bolster sales efforts, it has decided to open a second office in New York City, where it believes 70% of all brand dollars originate. Unlike its San Francisco headquarters, which houses 80 employees (mostly developers), the New York office will consist of a sales team led by Jason Bitensky, a former national sales director for AOL.

I took the opening as an opportunity to ask Keith Rabois, VP of Business Development, some questions about how Slide monetizes its applications. Rabois explained that Slide mainly targets Fortune 50 companies and sells ad space almost exclusively on a CPM basis (no performance-based advertising or CPIs).

Advertisers on Slide roughly break down into three segments: entertainment, consumer packaged goods, and mobile. The entertainment segment consists of all the major movie studios, packaged good companies include big corporations like ConAgra, and mobile advertisers come from both the hardware side (Palm) and network side (AT&T).

Their campaigns are spread over three primary Facebook applications: FunWall, SuperPoke, and Top Friends. Each of these has its own advertising characteristics. FunWall runs sponsored videos that enjoy premium CPMs, SuperPoke features sponsored actions (like a whip for the new Indiana Jones movie), and Top Friends overlays videos on top of special network pages.

RockYou is often portrayed as Slide’s archenemy, and from a consumer point of view, it can be hard to tell their products apart. However, Rabois insists that their monetization strategies are substantially different. While RockYou makes its money from CPI and ad network deals, Rabois positions Slide as a competitor to Yahoo, which also tries to get brands in front of eyeballs.

Slide now has a total of 5 sales people. Expect them to bring aboard more as they attempt to further monetize their development efforts.

Meet Watercooler, a startup developing social network applications for all the usual suspects - Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster - that allow fans to rally around their favorite sports teams and TV shows.

The Mountain View-based firm raised a previously undisclosed $4M in Series A funding from Canaan Partners this past September. While it’s been developing Facebook apps since July 2007, it just recently launched a corporate website to provide a more unified front to its efforts.

While you may not associate the name “Watercooler” with the more famous app developers Slide and RockYou, as well as SGN and Zynga, the company has created over 700 community-building apps. Watercooler’s installs and active users earns it the #9 spot on Adonomics top Facebook developer list.

Watercooler’s apps focus on particular shows and teams, and give fans an opportunity to discuss recent events, share photos, and take quizzes. The applications can also communicate with each other, allowing for interaction between rival groups, even across the supported social networks. The company’s platform allows the company to produce these applications very quickly, each tailored to a particular show or team.

Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.

Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SAI decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.

The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.

Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)

Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SAI gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.

But what are you gonna do? At least SAI acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.

Multiple fake reviews for the Funwall App on Facebook have been deleted after it was discovered that the reviews came from employees of Slide, the apps owner.

Fake reviews seem to be part of the norm these days, however most companies are smart enough to cover their tracks; Slide employees on the other hand post from accounts that are part of the Slide Inc Facebook network.

A couple of samples (via this thread on Facebook)

FIVE STAR RATING
I can’t live without it!
by Sohyen Claire Kim at 2:12pm on January 30th, 2008
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=1000000 … ref=fbprvw

You can enjoy this super amazing FunWall apps!!!!
Very Strongly Recommended!!!! big_smile

FIVE STAR RATING
Fantastic Application!!
by Mayumi Yoshida at 1:44pm on February 1st, 2008
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=1000000 … ref=fbprvw

I totally love FunWall!! I can put Youtube videos, greeting cards, neat pix and fun postings…it’s super convenient and addictive!!
And I love how I can forward my friends’ fun stuff that they sent me!!

Hooray for FunWall!! Seriously, a Wall cannot get any better than this.

FIVE STAR RATING
w00t!
by Adora SlideEleven at 6:41pm on February 16th, 2008
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=1000000 … ref=fbprvw

love it.

FIVE STAR RATING
luv it!
by Adora SlideEight at 1:15am on February 17th, 2008
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=1000000 … ref=fbprvw

The Adora Slidexxx names are a particularly classy touch: not only is Slide spamming Facebook with fake reviews, they’re also using fake accounts with fake names and more staggeringly adding the fake accounts to the company only Facebook group (The name Adora comes from Slides Sr. Product Manager Adora Cheung). A full list of the fake accounts on Slide Inc here; there are pages upon pages of fake accounts, which also breach Facebook’s TOS.

MikeP on the same thread sums it up beautifully: “Slide writing fake reviews on their own reviews board is hilarious! is that really the behavior of a company worth $500M?”

Here’s a new theme song for the bright sparks at Slide who thought this was wise:

Dow Jones VentureSource put out some data on Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. earlier this week that I’ve put together into these charts. The first one above shows how much money has been invested in Web 2.0 startups so far this decade. In 2007, venture capital poured into Web 2.0 companies at a record pace—$1.34 billion. That was up 88 percent from the $716 million invested in 2006.

But did Web 2.0 deals peak last year? Take out the $300 million raised by Facebook, and the amount invested was up only 46 percent, a marked slowdown from the 132 percent dollar growth the year before. (The amounts charted above, starting with 2001, are $68 million, $29 million, $79 million, $232 million, $716 million, and $1.343 billion)

The growth in the number of deals is also slowing. Last year, there were 178 Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. That was up only 25 percent, after doubling every year for the previous four years. And in Silicon Valley last year, the number of deals actually dropped from 74 to 69.

In 2007, the median deal size was $5 million, up 22 percent. And the median pre-money valuation was $10 million, up 66 percent (from $6 million in 2006). Both deal size and valuation for Web 2.0 companies remained below the average VC deal across all industries ($7.6 million and $16 million, respectively)

Here is a list of some of the biggest venture financings of 2007, including ones for Facebook, Ning, Zillow, Veoh, MyStrands, and Hi5. Slide’s $50 million isn’t included because that was in 2008. Hey, maybe things haven’t peaked after all.

Investment banker Michael Montgomery has his chance to prove he’s still relevant in the tech banking world if this VentureBeat story is true. The rumor is that Meebo has hired Montgomery & Co. to represent them in a new fundraising round that may value the company at a cool $250 million.

If they pull it off, they’ll set Meebo’s value at half of the $500 million Slide was recently able to talk the markets into. That Slide deal had Montgomery & Co. competitor Allen & Co. behind the deal.

In fact, Allen & Co. seems to be representing all the hot startups these days. In addition to representing Slide in that massive valuation, they’ve worked with Bebo in their recent sale to AOL and Digg in their ongoing acquisition talks, etc. Montgomery, meanwhile, has been taking on lower profile deals like Technorati’s recent fundraising/sale effort. If Montgomery pulls of this deal, perhaps Silicon Valley startups will stop looking exclusively to Allen & Co. for the big stuff.

Is Meebo worth half a Slide? Well, I’m not sure Slide is worth half a Slide, to be honest. If anything, though, Meebo is a potentially more interesting platform. They have created a syncronous world of chat that works perfectly along side a number of applications. Gaming, for example, is a natural fit with Meebo.

Still, Comscore says Meebo has only 4.6 million unique monthly visitors. That’s valuing each of them at $54. That’s significantly more than AOL paid for each of Bebo’s 22 million Comscore visitors ($39). My guess is the valuation may get taken down a notch or two before the deal’s done. Or perhaps not, if Montgomery does his job and gets a few bidders going after the deal.

On Monday AOL will announce the acquisition of San Diego-based Goowy, a startup founded in late 2004 and which launched, incidentally, in my living room in late 2006 (we had a TechCrunch party where Goowy, Meebo, Sphere and other startups launched). The size of the deal is not being disclosed.

Their first product was a Flash-based webtop or alternative operating system. But later they went into the widget space with their YourMinis product, and that is the reason AOL has acquired them.

AOL SVP of Social Media, Messaging and Homepages David Liu said this was a deal they’ve been considering for the last nine months, and that they plan to integrate Goowy’s technology into both user-facing AOL products (to widgetize them) as well as their Platform A advertising network. Expect Platform A to launch significant new advertising products in the widget space soon, Liu says.

This is a significant win for Goowy founder and CEO Alex Bard, who has run a tight operation over the years. The company has just six employees and raised a single round of financing from Mark Cuban in April 2006 (the size of that round remains undisclosed, but it was almost certainly under $1 million). He says the Goowy team will remain in San Diego for at least the short term.

Goowy competes with a number of startups in the widget advertising space, including Widgetbox, ClearSpring and Gigya. VideoEgg, Slide and RockYou also compete in this area.

AOL has been busy acquiring promising young startups - they bought Israel-based Yedda last November as well.

It should come as no surprise that the ad inventory on social networks like Facebook are not worth much. A new offer by Lookery, a startup that places ads on social apps inside Facebook and Bebo, is offering a guaranteed ad rate of 12.5 cents for every thousand impressions (CPM). The promotion, which runs through April is probably close to what Lookery can get for ads it places on Facebook. Add in 2 cents per thousand impressions for serving the ads and you get to about a 15 cent CPM. That is probably a good average for the bulk of inventory on Facebook, which makes up the vast majority of Lookery’s business.

This is a market-share play for Lookery. By offering a guaranteed rate, it hopes to attract enough application publishers to get to a billion impressions a month, up from 170 million in December. Lookery is smaller than the other major social-app ad networks, like Slide, RockYou, and Social Media. On social networks, more so even than on the Web in general, advertising is obviously a volume game. And Lookery is trying to catch up to the larger app ad networks, which may very well have higher average CPM rates, by taking all the low-hanging penny inventory that is out there.

Find out more here.

Google and Facebook are fighting hard to hire this years crop of computer science graduates, we’ve heard, and ground zero is Stanford. Most of the class of 2008 already have job offers even though graduation is months away.

Last year, salaries of up to $70,000 were common for the best students. This year, Facebook is said to be offering $92,000, and Google has increased some offers to $95,000 to get their share of graduates. Students with a Masters degree in Computer Science are being offered as much as $130,000 for associate product manager jobs at Google.

Apparently the popular Facebook Applications class is getting a lot of attention from other startups, too. Slide and RockYou are both recruiting hard. One source says that RockYou is approaching students and telling them they aren’t hiring them, they’re “acquiring” their “companies” and will let them continue to work on their applications after graduation. That is, of course, some serious smoke blowing - any code they’ve been working on in the class is likely to be shelved by RockYou. Still, it’s a great way to recruit by making these students feel like they’re entering into some kind of an M&A transaction.

Something tells me the Pitzer students who’ve enrolled in the Learning From YouTube class aren’t getting the same types of offers.

If you are a CS student at Stanford or another top university, tell us what’s happening with recruiting.

Update: Good comments below from students confirming these (and even higher) salaries.

Three months ago Slide founder Max Levchin assured us that, despite rumors, he wasn’t raising money, and hadn’t even updated his pitch deck. He sure got his act in gear in a hurry, it seems. Today Business Week and The NY Times are reporting that Slide has raised $50 million at a valuation north of half a billion.

Three months ago when he officially wasn’t pitching a new round, the rumors were that he was looking for at least a $200 million valuation. It sounds like he got the bidding war he was looking for. This was their fourth round of funding.

As often happens in big later stage rounds, the well known Silicon Valley venture firms sat the deal out. Investors in this round include Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price.

Business Week’s Sarah Lacy seems a little stuck when justifying the valuation - “But let’s get back to the question of whether Slide is worth $550 million. At this second, the answer has to be no, by any normal valuation math. But if Levchin’s plans succeed, Slide will be worth far more.” What isn’t clear to me is exactly what Levchin’s plan for success entails. Currently they’re a widget company with a ton of users (150 million or so worldwide). They’re transitioning and starting to focus on ad selling. But without more details…

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.

On Friday, RockYou took over the top spot on Facebook’s list of applications with the most active users. The application, called Super Wall, overtook Slide’s FunWall. Slide still has the No. 2, No. 3, and No. 6 Facebook apps, while RockYou only has one other app in the top ten (X Me, at No. 5). The top apps are still ruled by a few dominant names.

In a press release touting that it is now better than Slide, RockYou also claims to run the biggest ad network on Facebook. But it is unclear how many of these ads are circular links to other apps. There is a lot of funny money on Facebook. Rock on.

Details emerged today on Google’s broad social networking ambitions, first reported here in late September, with a follow up earlier this week. The new project, called OpenSocial (URL will go live on Thursday), goes well beyond what we’ve previously reported. It is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

What they haven’t done is launch yet another social network platform. As more and more of these platforms launch, developers have difficult choices to make. There are costs associated with writing and maintaining applications for these social networks. Most developers will choose one or two platforms and ignore the rest, based on a simple cost/benefit analysis.

Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.

What They’re Launching

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

Applications can have full functionality on profile and/or canvas pages, subject to the specific rules of each host. Facebook, by contrast, limits most functionality to the canvas page, allowing a widget on the profile page with limited features.

OpenSocial is silent when it comes to specific rules and policies of the hosts, like whether or not advertising is accepted or whether any developer can get in without applying first (the Facebook approach). Hosts set and enforce their own policies. The APIs are created with maximum flexibility.

Launch Partners

Partners are in two categories: hosts and developers. Hosts are the participating social networks, and include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

Developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

What This Means

The timing of OpenSocial couldn’t be better. Developers have been complaining non stop about the costs of learning yet another markup launguage for every new social network platform, and taking developer time in creating and maintaining the code. Someone had to build a system to streamline this (as we said in the last few sentences in this post). And Facebook-fear has clearly driven good partners to side with Google. Developers will immediately start building on these APIs to get distribution across the impressive list of hosts above.

And they’ll do it soon, too. It’s clear that the developers who arrived early to the Facebook Platform party won easy customers. Those that came later had to fight much harder. Developers found their new gold strike, and they will soon all be there, mining away.