All Things Digital

Last year, BoomTown caused a tempest-in-a-Web-teapot by asserting that Facebook apps were, for the most part, inane.

And, while many said the market would develop from the frivolous to more useful–making Facebook a true “utility,” as promised by Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg–that day is not today for the social-networking site or its third-part widget makers.

Instead, it’s still Pinocchio at Funland (and we know how that turned out!).

While this is great news for my 3- and 6-year-old boys, it still makes grumpy old me dubious.

Because, as I wrote in a post called “The Children’s Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It)” that was published last October, I still assert that businesses based on Zombies and apps called Pop Ur Zit are questionable models:

But, so far, as popular as those apps have become, what Zuckerberg and the widget-makers have wrought is mostly silly, useless and time-wasting and the kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children.

I never thought I would call the often frivolous AOL (TWX) back in the day–very simply, a Neanderthal version of Facebook–a mature offering in comparison…

And if that is all there is, can Facebook really build a viable and long-lasting business on what is essentially a bunch of games that will ultimately become wearying for users? Doesn’t it need more robust apps that actually are useful and relevant and make Facebook the service that Zuckerberg has often told me was a ‘utility’?

While Facebook–with a cleaner and more strict look and a better navigation–is surely less goofy than rival MySpace (NWS) for anyone over 12 years old, and its video, photo and email features are nice, the vast majority of its apps are still mostly as dumb as a box of hammers.”

Unfortunately, that’s still the case and today, we have a nice chart below from FlowingData to help our little case along from a visual point of view (click on the image to make it larger).

Case, unfortunately, not closed.

Yesterday, I was a judge on a three-person panel at the Under the Radar: The Business of Web Apps conference, held at Microsoft’s (MSFT) Mountain View, Calif., campus in Silicon Valley.

The event, sponsored by Dealmaker Media, was a very good version of many such conferences held often around the region, where start-ups come to show themselves off in what amounts to a geek version of “American Idol.” There were just over 30 companies there yesterday.

In other words, entrepreneurs come to make a PowerPoint pitch before the panel and the audience and then we get to ask questions and make comments, a la Simon Cowell.

(I tried to channel Paula Abdul, but 10:45 a.m. is much too early to start drinking–um, it’s just Diet Coke!–for me!)

The companies I judged–with Stephen Stribley of Microsoft Office-Live and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners’ Prashant Shah–were in a category called “Manage Up.”

That meant they were all essentially in the enterprise-software-as-a-service arena that has gotten–and will get–increasingly hot.

The group I judged included: Act-On Software (an on-demand Internet communication and collaboration service), Magento (an open-source e-commerce), Mumboe (an online document-management service), and NetBooks (a Web-based business-management system).

All were interesting and promising, although all had issues, from security to marketing challenges to, of course, bigger competitors.

I did a video of snippets of the presentations of all four in a row, starting with Act-On, as well as a little interview with one of my favorite VCs–but only because he is funny–Mitch Kertzman of Hummer Winblad. He was there to support several of his investments, including SlideRocket (an Internet presentation application).

Here’s the video:

Fine, call me a grumpy old lady, because I don’t want to pass around a toasty complex carbohydrate globally.

Right now on Facebook, I have been trying to decide what to do near on two weeks or more, after receiving a “Hot Potato” tossed to me by my old boss, Washington Post Co. CEO and Chairman Don Graham (oh, yes–his family also owns a key hunk of the legendary paper, too).

For those who don’t know what a digital Hot Potato is: It is a widget (also called a third-party app) created by a very nice-looking group of guys at a design outfit called Hungry Machine for the Facebook platform.

“You have to pass it on and watch it travel around the world. 27,012 other people did!”

With all due respect to Don Graham (who is a mentor of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, by the way), Hungry Machine and all world-trotting spuds, I don’t think so.

Read more »

So about a month ago, I got irked by various comments execs at popular widget-maker Slide made to the Associated Press about the boom going on right now in the market for those small third-party applications that people can put on their Web pages on popular social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Most annoying was the idea floated by its founder and CEO Max Levchin about an IPO for Slide, so I wrote a post called “Reason to Be Annoyed by Widgets No. 243.”

As I said then:

It’s a sign to me that suddenly makes the scene feel very bubbly, given that Slide certainly has traffic, but no proven track record to continually make money.”

So after my rant, I thought it might be a better idea to go visit Levchin and see what’s what at Slide’s offices in downtown San Francisco. The start-up offers many widgets, like ones to add slideshows or guestbooks or enhanced photos, like FunPix shown here, to a Web page.

It is growing like gangbusters, claiming that upwards of 134 million unique visitors a month use its widgets. It is top widget king on Facebook, where it has more than 45 million apps installed and more than 5 million active users daily on the service.

Slide is backed, by the way, by the Mayfield Fund, BlueRun Ventures, Khosla Ventures and the Founders Fund. It has about 60 employees.

This is obviously a very interesting trend. While I often mock the widgetmania that has gripped the too easily grippable denizens of Silicon Valley, as I had said before, some widgets are actually helpful and substantive and introduce a plethora of innovation and features into MySpace or Facebook that the services would or could never have offered.

Plus, they represent an important move to widely distributed applications and content, which are going to move the Web to a whole new level of use. I often call it promiscuous computing.

Yes, naughty BoomTown, but what I actually mean is that everyone in the game has to send their products far and wide and dispense with the centralized distribution that has dominated the digital scene until now.

But does that mean these companies are more than just feature-makers? Or are they new and more distributed and hipper versions of old software companies? In other words, is Slide just a new-fangled type of Intuit?

We’ll see, so check out this video and the three others that follow. The first is a tour of Slide’s offices, followed by a three-part interview (all in individual posts below, and also with links below the first video, too) with the very sharp and articulate, as you will see, Levchin.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here is the first of three interviews with Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin. If you want to read more about why I visited him, see this explanatory post.

In this part, he discusses his background and how his idea to make it easier to use the Web turned him into a “widget king.”

If you want to see others, they are here:

Part 2

Part 3

Here is the second of three interviews with Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin. If you want to read more about why I visited him, see this explanatory post.

In this part, he discusses how one might make, oh yes, actual money in the widget game. Guess what? One Slide ad salesperson has a lot of work to do!

If you want to see others, they are here:

Part 1

Part 3

Here is the third of three interviews with Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin. If you want to read more about why I visited him, see this explanatory post.

In this part, he discusses the IPO market for widgets. Are they Intuit, Adobe or, um, not? Also, what should Yahoo do (as usual)?

If you want to see others, they are here:

Part 1

Part 2