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!).

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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 [...]

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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.

For those who don’t know what a digital Hot Potato is: It is an 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.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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