Facebook has been punishing widgetmakers for some time now on its platform, banning them here and there, for the most opaque of reasons. Widgetmakers should probably glad to hear the favoritism is at least codified now, and comes in the form of a carrot, not just a stick. But they aren't that happy. There is resentment among some widgetmakers over the politicking gaining preference on Facebook's platform will now likely require: "[We are] in the business of satisfying users every day, not lobbying for subsidies." No wonder Facebook put Elliot Schrage, a thoroughly political former think-tanker, in charge of the platform.

No wonder. From a Facebook Developers' blog post

Because we want you to follow a more normal sleep schedule than we Facebook engineers swear by, the Hackathon won't last all night long, and instead will be held from 3pm till 11pm.

According to Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, those hours means this year's F8 hackathon doesn't deserve the name:

The hackathon is a hallowed tradition at Facebook. It starts when someone in the course of any workday calls for a hackathon. This usually happens about once a month. Anyone except Zuck can call for one. They settle on a night, and over junk food, beer, and Red Bull, Facebook's corps of engineers stays up all night coding. A hackathon has only two rules: the project has to be something cool and it couldn't be something they'd normally work on. Once the sun comes up, they all go to breakfast somwhere together and then they crash the entire next day. All meetings on that day are canceled. [Zuckerberg] knows they could get the same production just working a normal day, and it wouldn't screw up everyone's sleep schedules. But he could never replicate this esprit de corps.

The whole point, in other words, is screwing up people's sleep. But how would you expect an aging flack like Schrage to understand such fine points of hacking?

There may be some wisdom here nonetheless. With animosity brewing between third-party Facebook platform developers and the social network, perhaps trying to create "esprit de corps" between the groups with a groggy all-nighter would have just made things worse. Still, we're sure Zuck is sad to see the F8 hackathon go. The early bedtime means he won't have a chance to replicate last year's "John Hughes moment" with girlfriend Priscilla Chan, also documented by Lacy:

Long after the keynote was done and everyone left was hacking away, Zuck and Priscilla were walking hand in hand, amidst a floor of empty chairs, locked in quiet conversation. The scene was more like a moment from a John Hughes move than the pivotal point that would rock Silicon Valley's startup world. As if they were going to start to slow-dance at any moment.

• Track 1: User Experience
• Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More — Learn how to cope with us killing all the viral tricks you used to get users to add your applications.
• Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website — See how easy it is to let our users use all your features and stay on our site, as our users. We're the platform; you're the app, bitch.
• Building Great Applications on Facebook — We'll discuss guiding principles and best practices. For example: no more apps based on R.L. Stine characters.
• Design and User Experience at Facebook — Hear directly from the Facebook Design team on how we think about design and how little we think of yours.

• Track 2: Technical
• Advanced App Building — It's easy to build a simple Facebook app in a couple hours, but you'll just be embarrassing yourself and annoying our users. In this talk, learning the caching features of FBML, advanced features of FBJS, smart uses of the API, and more.
• Feed and Social Distribution — With the new Facebook profile, you won't be able to spam users into submission. Learn how to design great Feed stories!
• Building to Facebook Scale — Facebook handles hundreds of millions of requests per day. Your apps probably can't. We'll try to help you fix that.
• Made for Mobile — Mobile devices are opening up and creating new opportunities. For Apple iPhone developers. Why are you here?

• Track 3: Business
• Building a Business on Facebook / Metrics & Analytics — Learn everything about how to build a business on Facebook Platform from developers who are doing it. This way you'll believe its possible, and they'll be flattered by our attention.
• Marketing your Application on Facebook — You've developed an application. Now what? This session will cover how to trick users into thinking their friends won't like them anymore if they don't install it.
• Entrepreneurship on Facebook Platform — In this session you'll hear from industry luminaries in venture capital and seasoned, multi-company entrepreneurs who owe us favors or are living off past successes and have nothing else to do.
• fbFund: A Look Inside — Seeding Opportunity on Facebook Platform — Learn about the inner workings of fbFund and see what the grant winners are developing so you can spend all your time copying them while some developer in Austin who stayed away from this pointless gabfest actually builds something no one else saw coming.

Users got angry when Facebook dropped the News Feed on them out of nowhere in the fall of 2006. Developers are still grumbling about the pending redesign. Now, when Facebook introduces a change, it's announcement by slow drip — tremendously boring. Just like a Zuckerberg keynote. If Zuckerberg really wants to be like Jobs, he's going to have to stop worrying about the users, stop worrying about the developers, and start trusting his gut. Jobs displays utmost confidence in how his fans will receive his products — and that, not his presenting style, is what makes him so compelling.

(Photo by AP/Ruttle)

We're told that Accel is looking at investing in Facebook app developers. Naturally. Breyer's $13 million investment in Facebook two years ago was seen by some as a sign of a building bubble. Now with estimates of Facebook's value ranging in the billions of dollars, of course, rival VCs like Bay Partners are jealous.

But Breyer can't possibly be content with just one home-run investment. It stands to reason that he wants to build a keiretsu — a network of startups which partner with each other to build their businesses and boost their common investor's returns. John Doerr and his colleagues at Kleiner Perkins did this in the 1990s, with AOL, Netscape, Amazon.com, Intuit, Excite; Michael Moritz, at Sequoia, likewise, parlayed his firm's investments in Cisco, Yahoo, and Google into other moneymakers. Breyer's only real '90s hit, meanwhile, was RealNetworks — a thin reed on which to lay a keiretsu.

You have to admire the evil genius of the plan, if true: Breyer, a Facebook board member, can cherry-pick only the most successful app developers before rival venture capitalists have even heard of them. And Breyer, too, can guarantee favored startups something no one else can — protection from an abrupt decision by Facebook to block or cripple their apps. That power — implied, never spoken — also would bear a concomitant threat: Startups who don't play along with Accel, and accept the valuation they're given, may suddenly find Facebook an unfriendly place to write software.

So, Facebook developers, report in — is the rumor true? Has anyone gotten an offer they can't refuse? A hard sell from Accel? Drop us a word.

We're warning you: do what we say or we will not market you. If you really embarrass us, you are out.

Pimp the "Platform." The press eats up that word and will induce comparisons to Microsoft and Google. Do not associate us with your application, we are so much bigger than your little application. We are just giving you an opportunity.

Marketing has created all new boilerplate.

Here's the new boilerplate. You will use it.

Better yet, just use this. We've done the work and (almost) trust you to fill in your company's name correctly.

We're sooo much better than that. You too. Well, at least, we are.

We need you, but not that bad.

We're so over that. We're the future. Bigger, better, different.

Mark's too busy talking to investors and the press to talk to you. Be happy with what you get. He was just going to repeat something about the "social graph" anyway.

You know who. Better not mention them. We know it's tough, we already slipped once ourselves... Just don't do it.

If you do everything we say and we still like you, you'll have the pleasure of being listed with 65 other companies to our benefit.