The Social

Slide founder Max Levchin talks with Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li at Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--Max Levchin made a name for himself as the co-founder of transaction system PayPal, one of the Web's foremost utilitarian services. Then he made a name for himself again at the helm of Slide, which isn't exactly in the same space. Its flagship product, "SuperPoke," has become the poster child--er, poster sheep--for criticism of social-networking developer applications as a silly fad.

On Wednesday, after his keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I asked Levchin if he thought there were actually a chance for some social applications to emerge that are useful rather than goofy.

"There's definitely opportunity to build utilitarian, or pure utility, apps on Facebook," he said. So I asked him to give an example.

"Alcoholics Anonymous," Levchin said, without hesitation. "If you're trying to recover as an alcoholic, there's no easy way for you to join an anonymous group on Facebook. So creating an anonymous group type on Facebook for something that people have to get off their chest but don't really want to reveal their identity (in doing so)...it's pretty utilitarian. Grim, but utilitarian." Currently, Facebook's API doesn't permit developers to anonymize the social-networking experience.

I expressed my surprise with how little time it took Levchin to up with that kind of idea. He shrugged. "Maybe it's because I grew up in Russia."

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li interviews Max Levchin at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

SAN FRANCISCO--In his keynote address Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Expo here, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin said his current company, social-network application developer Slide, will prevent social sites from becoming fads.

Pretty ambitious for a start-up that made a name for itself by letting you throw virtual sheep at your friends on Facebook. (That'd be SuperPoke, a delightfully pointless Slide application.)

Levchin, interviewed onstage by Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li, was recently crowned Web 2.0's poster boy--as bestowed upon him by Portfolio magazine, which put him on the cover with the caption "Brilliant!" and a giant lightbulb seemingly balanced on his forehead.

"It's incredibly embarrassing and also 'pressure-full' and all sorts of other emotional things which I'm not all that good at expressing," Levchin said of the experience. "One, to be on a cover, and two, to be a 'poster boy.'" Plus, a $50 million funding round in January valued Slide at half a billion dollars.

Those are some pretty valuable sheep.

Early on, Li asked Levchin how exactly Slide makes money. Like so many other Web 2.0 execs, Levchin answered that he believes in advertising. He has it easier than most of his dot-com brethren: Slide has the good fortune of having enough active users and advertising connections, not to mention Levchin's star power, to score top-shelf advertisers. Neither Levchin nor Li touched upon anything involving the shaky economy and a potential downturn in online ads.

Li did ask whether Levchin is concerned about running a company that's wholly dependent upon the existence and popularity of other platforms--Facebook, MySpace, and the like. A big social network is perfectly capable of creating SuperPoke equivalents in-house, throwing a potentially fatal sheep at the company.

Levchin drew an analogy to Adobe's software, which is wholly reliant upon operating systems like Microsoft Windows. There were plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to put Adobe out of business in the past, he said, and Microsoft ultimately realized that it was in its best interest to keep Photoshop and Acrobat around. "I sleep relatively well at night about my competition, or the lack thereof," Levchin said.

The sheep, according to Levchin, can weather the storm.

The interview didn't raise any points that Valley junkies didn't know already. Application spam, he said, is an "intellectually challenging" issue that he hopes to solve "the same way (e-mail) spam gets dealt with today." And lightbulbs aside, Levchin maintained an air of humility, reminding the audience that his first four companies failed but that his fifth was "pretty successful." He was, of course, referring to PayPal, which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

He added that one of the ways he measures success is "the number of people that make a million dollars or more in your employee roster when your company has an exit."

So what makes Slide so special? It's that people actually use it, Levchin said. SuperPoke might be silly, but user engagement rates are through the roof. Procrastination-happy users of Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks for which Slide has created applications still haven't gotten sick of them. For a promotional tie-in sponsored by last year's hit movie Juno, a "pregnancy test" option was added to the SuperPoke roster--370,000 virtual pregnancy tests were administered in the first day of the campaign.

So what keeps him going? Levchin said he isn't really sure. "People are driven to do stuff. Jackson Pollack was driven to splash paint on canvases," he said.

Max Levchin, it seems, is currently driven to enable the world to hurl virtual sheep, Easter eggs, groundhogs, and meat pies (that was a Sweeney Todd tie-in) at their social-networking contacts. And thus far, he's been quite the success.

Enough for a magazine cover with a lightbulb above his head, even.

Embeddable widget powerhouse Slide gained buzz as a way to display photo slide shows on MySpace, but then saw meteoric growth as part of the Facebook Platform initiative. Now, the company has announced that 1 million of its Flash-based widgets are added to the network's servers every day for non-Facebook social media platforms. Slide's Facebook widgets, which rank No. 1, No. 2, and No. 6 on the list of most popular embeddable applications on the white-hot social network, are not Flash-based and consequently were not included in the tally.

Note that this refers to widgets created, not "installed" or "embedded," necessarily--presumably, if you create a widget that's ultimately a screw-up, that counts too.

Still, that's a lot of widgets. Slide offers its standard SlideShow widget as well as other widgets like Guestbook, SkinFlix, and FunPix. The company has also snapped up independently created Facebook widgets, most notably "Favorite Peeps." According to ComScore, Slide widgets pull in more than 134 million unique viewers per month. (Millions of widgets, widgets for free.)