The Social

Facebook has unveiled a list of 18 applications--for the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and Facebook Connect for the iPhone--that have been awarded investments from its FBFund seed funding program and invited to participate in a summer incubator workshop in its hometown of Palo Alto, Calif.

The workshop, called FBFund REV 2009, will run for ten weeks from June through August, according to a post on the Facebook developer blog by company representative Cat Lee. The post also contains a full list of winners, which range from a paintball game app to a dating service to an e-mail management program.

"Already planned are sessions with speakers from our fbFund Advisory Council, business luminaries, and our Facebook Platform team focused on everything from operating lean startups and metrics for success to marketing and monetization," Lee wrote. "The days will be packed with opportunities to get together, learn from one another, brainstorm and iterate on applications and business models. At the end of the summer, all of the startups will present to Silicon Valley angel and venture capital investors to get feedback and explore investment opportunities."

Facebook announced a chunk of finalists for this year's FBFund earlier this month.

Two nonprofits, a developer assistance program called Samasource and a student microloan project called Vittana, will also participate in the incubator program but can't receive funding due to the terms of FBFund.

Auditude, a video advertising company best known for technology that can identify clients' video content and run ads against it, has raised a $10.5 million Series B funding round from Redpoint Ventures and existing investor Greylock Partners. This brings the company's total funding to $23 million.

Last time we checked in with Auditude, the company had inked a deal with News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV Networks to detect both official and user-uploaded MTV content on the social network's MySpaceTV platform. It was seen by many as a savvy antipiracy measure. Since then, Auditude has started powering a broader variety of video ads on MySpace and its MySpace Music product, as well as partnered with Warner Bros. Entertainment. More content deals are on the way, CEO Adam Cahan told CNET News.

"From our perspective, we are looking to work with everybody," Cahan said. "We are trying to tackle what I think is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges on the Internet right now, which is (that) tons of people are watching video, 80 percent of folks out there, and yet very few people are really making a business of this yet."

Redpoint partner Chris Moore will join Auditude's board of directors, which also includes former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta. A member of the short list for the top post at MySpace Music, Van Natta instead took the CEO role at rival streaming service Project Playlist.

Forget flowers and chocolate. Valley darling Twitter is going to have a really sweet Valentine's Day. The company announced Friday that it has added some more cash to its most recent round of funding, thanks to an infusion from Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners.

The deal just closed on Thursday night, according to a post on Twitter's official blog. But the team at Twitter, which has not yet put forth a business model, hopes to make it clear that they weren't desperate for cash.

"We weren't actively seeking more funding because significant capital from last year's partnership with Bijan (Sabet) and his team at Spark (Capital) is still in the bank," the post by co-founder Biz Stone read. "Nevertheless, our strong growth attracted interest and we decided to accept a unique opportunity to make Twitter even stronger with a very attractive offer."

Financial terms weren't disclosed in the blog post. The Silicon Alley Insider said they've heard $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners. We're looking into this; we heard that the company's valuation, meanwhile, may be as high as $250 million.

But wait! It sounds like money's on the way, even though Twitter just keeps raising more venture capital. "We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products," Stone's blog post read. "Throughout this year and beyond, our small team will grow much bigger to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead."

Twitter raised its third funding round, led by Spark Capital, last spring.

This post was updated at 11:33 a.m. PT.

Document-sharing service Scribd has pulled in $9 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Friday. The round was led by Charles River Ventures with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group.

With the new cash, Scribd plans to speed up its product development and hire new employees.

And the first of those hires was announced in conjunction with the funding announcement: George Consagra, who most recently served as chief operating officer of AOL's Bebo, has been hired as president. (Co-founder Trip Adler has the CEO post.)

Scribd's monthly user count is now at around 50 million, the company said.

Accel Partners, a longtime investor in social network Facebook, has created two new funds that add up to just over $1 billion, according to The New York Times.

One of the funds, totaling $525 million, will be used to invest in European start-ups.

But the interesting part, at least where juicy tech gossip is concerned, is the other $480 million, which is going toward a new late-stage venture fund. A few speculative bloggers have connected the dots and taken this to mean that Accel may be looking to pump more cash into Facebook.

The firm first invested in Facebook in 2005, and partner Jim Breyer sits on the social network's board of directors. With the recession starting to hit social-network ad spending, and some critics expressing concern about whether Facebook's revenue can keep pace with its wild growth, there's a legitimate question as to how effectively Facebook has battened down the hatches for the economic storm.

Raising more money would be an obvious solution, given the social network's repeated insistence that it's more important for the company to focus on expansion rather than profits for the next few years.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed speculation that his chief financial officer, former YouTube exec Gideon Yu, has been attempting to drum up interest in more venture cash.

Accel has also invested in Glam Media, Metacafe, Etsy, BitTorrent, Trulia, Wetpaint, and a whole host of others. But Facebook, unsurprisingly, is front and center right now.

Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post has announced its latest venture funding round. The upswing: It is $25 million, not $15 million as previously rumored.

The funding comes from the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Oak Venture Partners. No valuation was provided, but AllThingsD's Kara Swisher suggests it's slightly under $100 million. The company has 46 employees.

Fred Harman of Oak Venture partners will join Huffington Post's board. Previous investors include Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners.

This is the company's Series C funding round. Traffic to its Web site skyrocketed amid the hotly contested presidential election this fall, but The Huffington Post--started by a team led by political pundit and author Arianna Huffington--has been making strides to expand beyond the left-of-center political coverage that made it famous. Political news sites, many critics speculate, may see a significant drop in traffic now that there's no presidential election filling up headlines, and that's not a good thing when ad spending is tightening amid the economic downturn.

Local news, more video, and a fund for investigative journalism are next on the plate for Huffington Post, according to a press release, in addition to possible acquisitions. There is also a "world news" page in the works, hinted a source close to the company, who added that other coverage areas such as sports are discussed but are further from a launch.

Facebook members can now vote on the second round of finalists for its FBFund seed funding competition, which will give out a total of $225,000 to five grand prize winners. The 25 companies currently in the running have already pocketed $25,000 apiece for the applications they have proposed for Facebook's third-party developer platform.

This is the second annual FBFund competition, but the first one in which members have been able to vote on their favorite apps. They can vote once per day, and can watch promotional "commercials" about what each one of them does. Voting involves installing an app called "FBFund08," which members can embed on their profiles.

The 25 finalists run the gamut from multiplayer games to college search to event planning.

Not only is the voting system a way for Facebook to promote and reward high-quality apps, but it's also a promotional strategy for Facebook to drum up more member interest in the developer platform and prove that some apps are actually worth installing. Some critics say interest is dropping, and the platform has suffered from months of negative press about "zombie bites" and other goofy apps.

Here's an interesting tidbit: The FBFund08 app was not created by Facebook, but by Wildfire, one of the app development companies in the running for an FBFund grant. Facebook effectively acquired the app from Wildfire to power the poll. But, Facebook representatives assured CNET News, that won't give Silicon Valley-based Wildfire any unfair advantages.

The $10 million initially invested in FBFund comes from Facebook investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund.

That rumor of a $400 million valuation might not be too far off base: social-media application powerhouse RockYou announced Monday that it has raised $35 million in Series C venture capital.

The round was led by venture firm DCM, with contributions from several private investors. Previous RockYou investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International, and Sequoia Capital.

It's the kind of money that may raise a few eyebrows, considering many believe the social-application space doesn't offer a proven business model yet. RockYou is responsible for a number of popular applications--SuperWall, Vampires, Likeness, X Me--on Facebook and several OpenSocial-compatible platforms (MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Bebo, and Orkut), as well as an ad network. The company has already done marketing campaigns for clients like Paramount, New Line Cinema, Sony, Microsoft, and CBS, and claims to have 87.5 million monthly unique visitors with 2.7 billion page views.

Along with Slide, RockYou is one of the biggest companies in the social-network application development space. And with the $35 million, RockYou plans to work on "additional tools and services" to further improve its advertising platform for brands and marketing campaigns that want to jump on the social-application craze.

"DCM believes that RockYou will be the catalyst of this new global ecosystem that delivers next-generation advertisements through its innovative advertising network and social applications," DCM co-founder and general partner David Chao said in a release. "With the current momentum, RockYou is positioned to become a top-10 Internet property in the world in the near future."

Disclosure: CBS, one of RockYou's past clients, has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

The Social Gaming Network, parent company of social-networking applications that do exactly what the name implies they would, has reason to celebrate.

The company has netted $15 million in first-round funding from Greylock Partners, the Founders Fund, Columbia Partners, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners.

Yes, that's $15 million for the people responsible for the Warbook, Jetman, and Super Snake applications clunking up your friends' Facebook profiles.

It makes sense. Gaming applications have proven to be some of the most popular apps on social-networking developer platforms like Facebook and MySpace.com, and veteran entrepreneurs have taken note. The Social Gaming Network was started by the founders of Webs.com--known in the Internet's earlier days as Freewebs--and Zynga, another well-funded gaming start-up created by Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus. Both companies have turned to independent developers too, encouraging them to work on games on their platforms-within-platforms.

The new funding will be used to "allocate even greater resources to research and development of its gaming platform, and produce more tools for social game developers who want to create a richer gaming experience on the social networks and the social Web," according to a statement. But it was also hinted that the cash will help the company add "more depth to its platform and diversity to its portfolio of games."

Considering the Social Gaming Network has made acquisitions in the past--snapping up Facebook applications such as Free Gifts--there will probably be more on the way.

Wonder if they'll make a play for Scrabulous.