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Slide to stop making Facebook apps

Nicholas Carlson · 06/09/08 11:20AM

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.

RockYou raises $35 million

Nicholas Carlson · 06/09/08 10:20AM

Widgetmaker RockYou raised $35 million from venture firm Doll Capital Management and private investors. Rumor has the deal setting RockYou's value near $400 million. RockYou created Facebook widgets SuperWall, Vampires, Likeness, X Me and claims 87.5 million visitors a month and 2.7 billion pageviews. Paying advertisers on RockYou include Paramount, New Line Cinema, Sony, Microsoft, and CBS. But they're not paying much.

Friends of Mike

cityfile · 06/09/08 08:57AM

"I now have 3,715 friends, of whom I actually know three," Mike Bloomberg told the Times over the weekend, referring to the Facebook profile he set up in late 2007. (Perhaps the article is responsible for his surge in popularity: He's up to 3,864 as of this morning.) So who are the three? There's Ed Skyler, for one. Anyone else in the Bloomberg administration have a Facebook profile? Let us know! [NYT]

Easiest Blog Book Deal Ever

Nick Douglas · 06/09/08 03:55AM

An anonymous blogger is posting Facebook statuses along with comically slightly disguised photos of the people who wrote them. It has the potential to be a carnival of derision, except the blog has no comment form. Good thing we do.

Facebook wants developers to build for boring but profitable enterprise market

Nicholas Carlson · 06/06/08 01:00PM

While Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tries to convince the world 20 million SuperPoke users have value, her minions are busy trying to convince enterprise developers to build applications that actually do. "One area we've seen a lot of value for the social graph is in the enterprise because it's a completely different way to envision an HR system or CRM," Facebook marketing exec Chamath Palihapitiya told conference-goers Thursday.

Bill Clinton updates Facebook profile to say "It's complicated" with Hillary

Nicholas Carlson · 06/06/08 10:40AM

Minutes after New York Senator Hillary Clinton sent an email to her supporters ending her campaign, President Clinton changed his Facebook profile relationship status from "Married" to "It's Complicated." He also added that he was now looking for "friendship," "dating," and "a relationship." We're guessing Bill Clinton doesn't actually update his own Facebook page and that the changes were more likely a frustrated campaign supporter's way of venting. (Update: Or maybe a satirical blogger's.) Asked by a "reporter" about the change, campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson answered: "What can I tell you? It's complicated."

At OutCast CEO Dinner, Robert Scoble greeted us warmly

Owen Thomas · 06/06/08 04:20AM

FERRY BUILDING, SAN FRANCISCO — Let's be clear: Local PR firm OutCast's CEO Dinner event Thursday night wasn't really a dinner — most people ate standing up. Nor were there many CEOs. (I counted one: Jim Louderback of Revision3.) It's a far cry from years past where the decimated post-bubble survivors of San Francisco's tech press corps would gather in a room and listen to OutCast clients like Gordon Eubanks of Oblix, a salty former submarine officer, utter zingers about the wonders of Viagra. OutCast is a sizable firm now, and it's got big clients like Facebook and Yahoo. But Mark Zuckerberg? Jerry Yang? Nowhere to be seen. Instead, you had a hall full of hacks and flacks. I wonder how many of them shook videoblogger Robert Scoble's hand? Photo gallery after the jump:

ConnectU lawyer on the IM transcripts that will totally milk more millions from Facebook

Jackson West · 06/05/08 05:40PM

Mark Hornick, the lawyer representing ConnectU's Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, on the "smoking gun" chat transcripts that data forensics expert Jeff Parmet may or may not have discovered on hard drives subpoenaed from Facebook implicating Mark Zuckerberg in grand theft source code: "We don't have them. The courts have them, Facebook has them, but ConnectU doesn't have them." [Silicon Alley Insider]

CNET hires (m)adman to blog about Obama's victory

Owen Thomas · 06/05/08 05:20PM

They'll let just about anyone blog these days, won't they? News.com's latest addition: recovering adman Chris Matyszczyk, who writes under the rubric "Technically Incorrect," and reminds me a bit of Dan Lyons's alter ego, Fake Steve Jobs — except that, having met Matyszczyk briefly, I think this is the real thing, not a put-on person. Matyszczyk's fantasy phone call between Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg is hilarious: Clinton blames Zuckerberg for her loss to Obama, and then hits the paper billionaire up for a donation. What's really funny: Matyszczyk is outsidery enough not to mention the fact that Zuckerberg's cofounder, Chris Hughes, left the social network early on to run Obama's Web campaign. Zuckerberg's posse really is at fault, and not in a metaphorical Facebook-generation way.

Facebook adds Social Ads reviews, ruins all our fun

Nicholas Carlson · 06/05/08 03:20PM

For months now, we've watched as Facebook served users pornographic ads, as well as less expertly targeted come-ons. Now, with a new feature that lets users review the ads they've been served, the company's figured out a smart way to fix the problem. We're a little sad. Who won't miss the days when straight men get pitched as gay, or a NSFW banner ad ran here and there? Screenshots of Facebook's new ad review service — nabbed by AllFacebook — are below.

Citing new evidence, ConnectU founders want out of Facebook settlement

Nicholas Carlson · 06/05/08 12:40PM

The ConnectU founders have long argued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used code commissioned by ConnectU, a rival college-based social network, to create Facebook at Harvard. Now, after agreeing to a settlement with Facebook in February, the ConnectU founders want out of the deal. They say instant messaging files found on Facebook's computers offer new "smoking-gun" evidence to make their case.

Photos from Randi Zuckerberg's wedding

Owen Thomas · 06/04/08 04:00PM

Darlings, everyone who's anyone is flying to a Caribbean island to get married. Larry Page and Lucy Southworth did the deed on some spit of sand called Necker Island. Randi Zuckerberg? The Facebooker took over something like the entire island of Jamaica to get hitched to venture-capital associate Brent Tworetzky. Or just Runaway Bay — our sources can't get that part entirely straight. But we did get a batch of photos from the wedding. A destination wedding in Jamaica? Expensive. Making your younger brother, who's ostensibly your boss and worth $4 billion on paper, dress in a turquoise vest and an ill-fitting tuxedo shirt? Priceless. The photos:

Some Designers Don't Want to Be Facebook Friends With Marc Jacobs

Richard Lawson · 06/04/08 11:43AM

Just because Marc Jacobs is on Facebook, it doesn't mean the rest of the design world has to be. The hugely successful fashion designer has long been blessing us with ever-changing relationship status updates, so we can keep immediate, obsessive tabs on who he may or may not be boffing at the time. It's a public existence! (Or, at least public when people actively go looking for it). And it's one that other fashion designers don't exactly aspire to. The Observer spoke to three colleagues of Jacobs at an event last night, all of whom seem wary of Jacobs' internetting ways.

Amazon.com and Google to rule Web, according to Wall Street's Captain Obvious

Jackson West · 06/04/08 11:40AM

Yahoo, IAC and eBay are in for rough sailing, but Google and Amazon.com should cruise smoothly and emerge as the big winners in the coming years, according to analyst Jeffrey Lindsay of Wall Street research firm Sanford C. Bernstein in a 310-page report published yesterday titled "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning." Tellingly, there's no mention in the summary article of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a totes awesome IPO. [Reuters]

Why can't Facebook and MySpace make more money?

Nicholas Carlson · 06/04/08 11:20AM

NEW YORK — While Google struggles to make back the $900 million it guaranteed to MySpace in 2006, Facebook revenues will maybe top $300 million in 2008 — which would put the price paid by Microsoft for its tiny piece of the social network at 50 times revenues. Why can't the social networks make more money? Don't ask Google's top U.S. ad salesman, Penry Price. "There's no answer yet how to monetize some of the places we're working today," Price told the audience at EconAds yesterday. At the same event, NeoAtOgilvy COO Greg Smith said "We're still trying to put ads on MySpace and everyone's asking why its not working. It's because its the wrong solution."

Facebook's widget security? You could throw a sheep through it

Owen Thomas · 06/03/08 03:20PM

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.