Webware

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.

Facebook's Senior Platform Manager Ami Vora took the stage at this morning's SNAP Summit in San Francisco to talk about "the state of the platform" from Facebook's perspective. Besides a rehash of the social graph spiel from the launch of the applications platform earlier this year, several interesting numbers were thrown around, including one that noted that 1 in 4 people in Toronto are on Facebook, and that each Facebook user turns about 50 pages a day. The most impressive, however, is that 85 percent of users on Facebook have added at least one application to their profiles since the launch of Facebook applications in late May.

Since the SNAP Summit is aimed mainly at Facebook developers, Vora went on to discuss some of the things that they've seen "work" for app creators from Facebook's point of view. "Every time you touch the user, think about how you're adding value to them," Vora said. She also noted that giving users interaction with buddies, integrating your app with Facebook's tools, and adding privacy controls will make an app stickier even to cautious users. In the previous panel consisting of the heads of several successful Facebook app creators from RockYou, Grow-a-Gift, and Graffiti, the big buzzword was "virility," and Vora noted that a big part of developers' successes thus far have been utilizing the tools that Facebook had provided to help share an app with their friends.

Following her presentation, Vora fielded several questions from the audience, ranging from Facebook's internal party plans following this week's Microsoft investment announcement, to adding a system for developers to integrate micropayments into their apps--something that, according to Vora, Facebook is "thinking about," but not implementing anytime soon.

An audience member also asked about what Facebook views to be its biggest competitors. Vora nixed mentioning any other social networks (most notably MySpace) in place of saying that other forms of media are Facebook's biggest foes, including TV, radio, and "petting your dog." Surprisingly, she answered more questions than Zuckerberg, who just last week at the Web 2.0 Summit managed to spend nearly half an hour talking to Federated Media's John Battelle without divulging anything that hadn't been said in the past five months.

Facebook's Senior Platform Manager Ami Vora took to the stage at the SNAP Summit to talk about all things Facebook for the crowd of developers and entrepreneurs.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Andrew Mager)

The Facebook chat panel at the Web 2.0 Summit this morning was a time to talk about the Facebook platform and how it's changed the development and monetization of Web services. Several of the panel speakers have immensely popular apps on Facebook, and widgets for MySpace including Slide, RockYou, and iLike.

The two big question pitched to the devs were how Facebook has changed what they've done internally and what's on the horizon. "We looked at the Facebook platform and thought this could be the greatest paradigm in technology since the Internet itself," said Ali Partovi, the CEO of iLike. Partovi and company are one of the real success stories of the Facebook platform, and are currently up to over 700,000 daily active users with their iLike music-sharing application. Partovi also noted that when they launched their app the first weekend of the Facebook apps platform launch, the company had to rent a truck trailer full of servers to handle the traffic.

Partovi also said that iLike is currently pooling close to 100 percent of its resources on the Facebook app, and is actually launching new features first on the Facebook platform before it happens on iLike.com. Other developers on the panel said that their development focus for Facebook apps fell somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent. Slide was the only one of the bunch that noted it's only spending 10 percent of the time working on Facebook in lieu of working on offerings for other social networking services like Bebo, MySpace, etc.

Also mentioned was the article by Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital earlier this month that lambasted the Facebook app platform as being aimed at "toddlers." Lance Tokuda CEO and co-founder of RockYou said, "She's not a teenage girl...we're targeting the MySpace market...one day I'm going to build something just for her." A statement that eventually led to a chat about some of the more inane apps on the Facebook platform, and how involved users are wiling to let themselves get, both with time and money. One app in particular even lets people spend $10 of virtual currency to throw virtual feces at one of their Facebook friends (or enemies). ILike's Partovi links the "infancy" of these apps because of the age of the platform, and what developers have had the time to build. He also noted that apps for Windows weren't that great either when the operating system first launched.

So what has made this platform so successful? ... Read more

Vuvox was one of the few services that wasn't quite ready for the public after showing off its wares at Demo 2007. Like Flektor, Good Widgets, RockYou, Slide, Mixercast, and other mashup services, Vuvox lets users pull in media content from the Web or a hard drive, and put that content together using a Web-based editor. The end result is something that's visually engaging and can be shared via e-mail, or embedded on blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles. The service is officially opening its doors to everyone as of today.

Vuvox grabs your media in two places. The first is from Web services such as YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, and Google. The other place is your hard drive. You can upload files one at a time, or in batches after installing Vuvox's small browser plug-in. Once you've added your media, it's a simple drag-and-drop process. You can reorder, combine, or delete pictures or video in a simple queue. When you're done creating, you can apply one of Vuvox's 11 different themes. Each is unique, and has various visual styles that enhance, or in some cases stylize, your media. You can also use some advanced editing tools, like a cropper and layer mask, to tweak your shots.

Once published, each user gets their own channel. Other users can come by and comment on slide shows, and then share the slide shows with others either by e-mail, embedded link, or a URL. The service also has a featured section, showing off some of the more popular, or notable, works by users.

Like most services these days, Vuvox also has a Facebook application. Similar to the full version of the site, you can grab content from Flickr and Picasa. Since it's Facebook, you're also able to pick photos from your Facebook albums. When finished, you have the option to share the content with friends, and post it to your profile. The only downside here is that the Vuvox editor has been tweaked slightly, both in size and features, to accommodate the Facebook crowd. The results look just as good, but the editing experience isn't nearly as enjoyable.

Is Vuvox worth using over the competition? It's pretty impressive for a new service, and quite polished. The one snag is that it can be a little slow, and you don't have a lot of control over the way some of the themes play with the presentation of your shots. If you're looking for a similar media mashup tool that offers stylization but also a little more user control, check out SplashCast (also a Demo 2007 launch) and Flektor (review).

Adding your photos from Flickr or other Web services is very simple with Vuvox. Just drag them over to the storyboard on the right.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

For more screen shots of the interface and an example of the embedded application, click the Read More link below.

... Read more

Slidez is a new photo slide show tool for showing off photos on blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles. Slidez pulls double duty as a hosting service and presentation tool, allowing users to upload and organize their photo library online. It's not a substitute for photo-hosting services like Flickr, Photobucket, or Yahoo Photos, but its embeddable slide shows are good-looking, and easy to put together.

Basic photo management is kept simple with a batch uploader that allows you to select multiple photos from your hard drive. As a test batch I uploaded 20 shots without a problem. Your photos reside in a master library, where they can be dragged into individual albums called "presentations." To re-order shots within a presentation, just drag and drop photos like you would in a software app like iPhoto or Picasa.

To share a photo show, just click the Share button. This will pull up options to send the URL to the show via e-mail, embed it as a slide show, or grab the XML feed for people to subscribe to using their favorite reader.

The slide show arena is a crowded space with services like Slide, RockYou, Vmix, Goodwidgets, Splashcast, and Badgr. Admittedly, most of those services have their sights on MySpace and other social networking sites. Slidez seems aimed at people who want to make and send a slide show without fuss and it manages to do a good job.