If you're the application developer and they're the platform owner, you have to know death can come at any moment: Create a popular, simple application, and the platform owner might just rip you off in their next release. It's happened to Max Levchin's Slide, maker of the popular Facebook widget Top Friends. With its latest profile redesign, Facebook now allows users to specify which friends they'd like to display to profile visitors. (See how Facebook's version works in the image above and you'll note that with the friends I've selected, my goal is to intimidate profile visitors with my powerful connections.) Before you feel too sorry for Slide, note that this is a feature MySpace has long offered. Slide, seeing that Facebook lacked it, promptly cooked up Top Friends, which filled the void. Top Friends is Slide's second most popular application with nearly 1.5 million daily active users. On the strength of those user numbers, Slide has raised $50 million in a recent financing round, and is opening an ad-sales office in New York. We asked for Slide's reaction. They were surprisingly chipper!

Widgetmaker RockYou acquired Pieces of Flair and Speed Racing, applications which, according to Facebook's directory, see about 432,042 and 190,441 daily active users. Terms of the deals weren't disclosed, but an industry insider says RockYou probably paid $1 million for Speed Racing and $2 million for Pieces of Flair. RockYou's most popular Facebook application, Super Wall, continues to lose traffic ever since Facebook turned off Super Wall's ability to send notifications to Facebook users.

Traffic to RockYou's popular Facebook widget Super Wall declined from 2.1 million to 600,000 daily users over the last few days, as Facebook blocked the widget from sending users notifications and messages, claiming RockYou had violated Facebook's privacy policies. RockYou CTO Jia Shen told Inside Facebook the allegations and their punitive response are "slightly debatable":

Facebook's third-most popular widget, Slide's Top Friends, is back after Facebook suspended it on June 26. (The offense: displaying Top Friends' users birthdays and other private information that wouldn't normally be visible on Facebook.) What took so long? Following the suspension, Slide wanted to call its apps the most secure on Facebook. To feel comfortable doing so, it contracted a third-party audit firm to review its applications and source code, Slide exec Keith Rabois told us. "The issue with Top Friends was fixed immediately," Rabois told us, "But as you might imagine an independent audit takes time to perform." Elsewhere on Facebook, Slide's privacy troubles seem to be spreading.

Facebook released its schedule for its second annual F8 developers' conference on July 23. Facebook's servile, so-called independent developers have three tracks to choose from: "User Experience," "Technical," and "Business." If you work for a Facebook widgetmaker, you're probably confused, because who among you trying to build a business on the Facebook platform doesn't also need to be fully briefed on its user experience and technical aspects? To clarify, we've translated Facebook's description of each track out of verbose PRspeak.

On Wednesday, Facebook and MySpace users who have installed Slide's near-ubiquitous SuperPoke widget — the one that lets you throw sheep — will be able to send messages branded with characters and slogans from VH1's stable of reality series such as Flavor Flav from Flavor of Love. It's all an effort to promote the new series I Love Money — which, surprisingly, does not star hypercompetitive Slide founder Max Levchin. Who knew?

For the makers of widgets, those annoy-your-friends applications littering social networks, it's fractions of pennies from heaven: AOL ad network Platform-A has promised Facebook and Bebo widget developers that it can guarantee them "one of the industry’s highest" CPM — cost per thousand pageviews — rates if they sign up for its Widgnet publisher network. A Platform-A source says widgetmakers will get about 40 cents per thousand pageviews. Which is, of course, terrible. "Most [widgetmakers] won't sniff $1 CPMs," AdWeek's Brian Morrissey snarks.(Photo by MrVJTod)

Developers upset with Facebook's antiviral measures tell us enthusiasm for Facebook's platform is waning. Nonsense, says Steve Cohen, the head of platform engineering at Facebook rival Bebo. Earlier this year, Cohen built a platform for Bebo that was entirely compatible with apps built for Facebook. Cohen told Silicon Alley Insider that Bebo's big worry right now isn't that Facebook's redesign will kill developer enthusiam for the shared platform, but that a new Facebook platform will leave Bebo a step behind. Said Cohen: “Facebook really threw a monkey wrench in the whole compatibility thing. If we’re not compatible with Facebook, no one is going to develop for our platform.”

Who owns the most annoying applications on Facebook? It seems incredible that anyone would want to take credit for Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves, three of the most useless and yet most used applications on Facebook. And yet Blake Commagere, their developer, and RockYou, the company which markets those apps, and is happy to take credit for them when raising venture capital, are getting ready to deploy lawyers to settle the question over their ownership, we hear. Adonomics, the Facebook-app measurement firm, somewhat questionably estimates the three applications' value at $6.5 million — but attributes their ownership to Commagere.

Facebook has removed the "Wall" from its redesigned profiles. Early screenshots of the redesign featured a separate tab for the popular feature, but the latest shots show the Wall, where other users can leave comments on a profile, with the user's News Feed — now just called the "Feed." Users will be able to filter the Feed to see only Wall posts. Facebook-app developers, already exasperated by the redesign process, tell us they don't like the idea. Says one: "Mixing in 'X wrote on Y's FunWall" along with more personal messages from friends may deteriorate the quality of the new Wall/Feed feature as a whole." Put another way? Widgetmakers don't like losing their privileged position in the News Feed. Full screenshot of the new look, below.

Despite the rumors, we all know widgetmaker RockYou isn't really worth $400 million. Not with the way ad buyers feel about spending on social media. We hear RockYou's latest investor, Doll Capital Management — which funded the company with another $35 million today — didn't value the company at $400 million either. "I believe the round was priced at $250 MM, and definitely not higher than $300 million to $325 million," an executive familiar with the deal says.

Slide VP Keith Rabois says the widgetmaker is done making widgets — at least for Facebook. Rabois told SIlicon Alley Insider that Slide wants to focus on improving its existing apps, like SuperPoke and Top Friends. The company also knows it needs to start figuring out how to make enough money to justify its $550 million valuation. Last week, Slide hired AOL's former director of national sales, Jason Bitensky, to head up a new New York office. Money aside, Slide's announcement may be little more than politicking.

Linking up social websites, as proponents of "data portability" would have us do, can be hazardous to your privacy. And Paris Hilton's, and Lindsay Lohan's. But even the widgets on a single social network can leave us exposed. SuperPoke, a popular application made by Slide, will show you who's thrown a sheep at anyone, as long as you have their Facebook ID — the unique numeric identifier which shows up in the URL of their Facebook profile. Mark Zuckerberg's SuperPoke feed is here; substitute the number of another Facebook user for Zuckerberg's "4", and you can see every last sheep he or she has been involved with.

Welcome to the Silicon Valley hype cycle: One year, and you're over. That seems to be the consensus on Facebook's vaunted platform, whose one-year anniversary went largely unremarked. The company itself didn't blog about it until today, and sources tell us an open-bar party Facebook held in Palo Alto was low-key to the point of despair. It can't have helped that Google was throwing a massive party in San Francisco the same day to close out its conference for developers. How different a scene from a year ago, when the F8 launch event of Facebook Platform won comparisons of the company to Microsoft and of founder Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates.

Little-known MySpace "cofounder" Kyle Brinkman announced new rules for application developers on the social network's platform today. They're meant to prevent the spam bubble Facebook went through after it launched its platform last year. In response, Facebook tightened up its rules, and offended developers in the process. MySpace's new rules:

Earlier today, we reported that participation in Facebook's developer forum is down, most likely due to Facebook's new restrictions on Facebook-application spam. We praised these new rules, saying Facebook won't miss its lousiest apps. Now an executive from a major, well-funded widgetmaker tells us, "Your post misses the point." Before you reach for the "Block" button, hear him out:

New accounts and activity on Facebook's developer forums are down dramatically since January, reports Adonomics founder Jesse Farmer. And as the above chart indicates, Facebook's users no longer add third-party Facebook applications as much as they did at the beginning of the year. Along with increased competition from social network Hi5 and consolidation into larger widgetmaking companies, Farmer blames the slowdown on Facebook for "instituting increasingly demanding and arbitrary rules on platform developers, which they then enforced selectively and for their own benefit." We agree the slowdown is likely the result of the new rules, but we don't so much blame Facebook as praise Facebook for them.

When a Facebook user adds "skiing" to the interests on their profile, it's hard for an advertiser to tell exactly what the user means. A Google search for "Ski rentals in Wolf Creek, Colorado" is much more informative, by contrast. Advertisers know what kind of pitch to deliver, albeit in the form of an AdWords haiku. Inside Facebook's Justin Smith argues advertisers have an easier time targeting users of Facebook apps — for example, one who installs a skiing weather-map application, and looks up conditions in Wolf Creek. It's one reason he says that Facebook applications will prove easier to profit from than Facebook itself.

Why has Mark Zuckerberg courted disaster by offending the developers who helped make him worth $4 billion on paper? He has no one but himself to blame, says the CEO of a top Facebook widgetmaker. Facebook failed to control application spam last summer, he says, after it launched its platform. And so last night Facebook revised its rules to allow the applications with favorable user-feedback ratings to send more notifications and invitations. Apps with bad reviews will now have tighter restrictions. It's too little, too late, our source tells us.