Here's an update for anyone who didn't get the memo: Facebook's applications "platform," a set of software tools for embedding timewasting entertainments within the social network's pages, is not a level playing field. Some applications are more equal than others. That's only become clearer since Facebook foolishly put Facebook's platform in the hands of its top flack, Washington-trained bloviator Elliot Schrage. Facebook's Great Apps program, meant to designate higher-quality applications, has become a shameful excuse for nepotism.

Awarding money on the merits is hard enough. When you mix in the need to help out your COO's brother-in-law's pet startup, or your ex-president's latest venture, it complicates matters. Is Facebook going to come out with a list of apps to fund that it's truly proud of? Or will this look more like an appropriations bill after it's made its way through Congress, larded with earmarks?

Zynga makes its games easier to win for users who successfully spam their friends into signing up to play. See the above image for how Zynga does this with Attack, its version of world-concquering game Risk. The problem for Zynga and its new investors: The executives who run Facebook's platform don't like this kind of viral growth. In a blog post Monday, Facebook's Paul Jeffries explained:

Facebook is about empowering and connecting people through the sharing of information. That’s undermined if users who receive an invitation or other communication suspect it was sent for an ulterior motive, such as gaining points in a game.

Yesterday, Jeffries' thoughts became rules for the Facebook platform. According to Inside Facebook,

Applications are no longer allowed to “create artificial or inappropriate incentives to use Facebook features (including, for example, sending requests and adding profile boxes).

In the past few weeks, Facebook has temporarily banned apps by top widgetmakers Rock You and Slide, and has punished other popular app makers too, making it clear that widgetmakers which break Facebook's ever-changing platform rules — "crack its code," so to speak — don't get away with it anymore.

That is, unless they're announcing funding from Kleiner Perkins on a day dedicated to convincing Facebook developers that such a sweet deal could happen for them, too.

VCs already were asking why should I not worry about Facebook copying [your widgets]. But it was a theoretical question. Now, it is practical and amplified. I think that Facebook has really killed the potential for investment in the platform or the attractiveness to entrepreneurs. I am unaware of a single VC investment in a Facebook app company post the new regime (Sheryl, Elliot, policy enforcement). and now this will definitely affect matters. The last two VC investments I believe were Friends For Sale and SGN [Social Gaming Network] — doubt either investor is happy nor would they do the same deal again.

If our widgetmaker source is correct, it is bad news for at least two Facebook hangers-on — Zynga, a widgetmaker and SocialMedia, an ad-network for Facebook widgetmakers. Both are trying to prove him wrong by raising a new round of financing.

A source tells us SocialMedia founder Seth Goldstein spent last week in New York trying to raise $20 million. A VC in the community confirms he's recently heard Goldstein's pitch. Goldstein himself tells us, "We're talking to investors," but he wouldn't confirm the terms.

Zynga, which in January raised $10 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Bob Pittman, is said to have hired a bank in order to find more funding.

Goldstein says that those worried about worried whether Facebook's aggressive moves against Slide will stunt VC investment in startup widgetmakers should worry about top widgetmakers like Slide or its closest rival, RockYou, instead.

These guys wanted to believe there wouldn't be a long tail of apps on the Facebook platform. But Facebook wants lots of little apps relevant to lots of little groups. Two guys from Estonia will be able to beat a team of 45 top flight engineers. Facebook doesn't want three major developers taking over the platform like some kind of CBS, NBC and ABC. Top Facebook apps aren't all going to be made South of Market.

Remember, Goldstein's a Facebook bull because his business depends on it. But one way to read his comment is as a confirmation that no one — including VCs — should expect widgetmakers to turn into large media companies. There may be a future on the Facebook platform, but last year's frenzy that once led HotorNot founder James Hong to declare the Facebook platform "the new Internet"? It's over.

That Facebook would throw this all in Schrage's lap is telling — about both Facebook and Schrage. Schrage, having shrunk his role considerably by following Sandberg from Google to Facebook, is likely desperate for some scrap of increased authority. And Facebook's geeks, getting assailed in the press for their decisions, are eager for someone slicker than they are to take the abuse.

Still, it needs to be said: Facebook's platform is technically immature, and needs a technical manager. Chamath Palihapitiya, whom Schrage is replacing as its head, may be inept at public relations — look at last year's debacle with Facebook's privacy-invading Beacon feature. But that doesn't mean he's bad at running a computing platform.

Schrage may not be a geek, but he'll now need to play the part. This should be fun to watch. And he can take comfort in one precedent: This isn't the first time the owner of an important computing platform has, in desperation, put a gladhanding slickster in charge. Microsoft's Kevin Johnson, who now oversees Windows, previously ran its sales operations. He also negotiated Microsoft's Facebook investment. He would surely approve.

"Yes, we view this feature as directly competitive to a relatively small part of our Top Friends functionality," Slide's Keith Rabois told us. "A developer on any platform must expect that their popular, but simple, features will be absorbed into platform over time."

But none of this has the salesman in Rabois down. He goes on:

You can see that Top Friends has a very large number of complex features that have a complicated back-end (Awards, Visual Personality, Music, world-class skins) — we expect those will continue to be long-term strategic advantages over other large developers and the platforms themselves

The secret of social networking revealed: world-class skin! We always suspected as much.

Slide rival Rock You's Super Wall saw traffic plummet 70 percent in the last week. InsideFacebook's Justin Smith speculates the dip is due to "some kind of punitive action against the application" over privacy concerns by Facebook, "perhaps by restricting feed access or by lowering the application’s notification or invitation limits." Another source tells us Flixster, the widgetmaker behind the Movies app, is going through similar punishment from Facebook over privacy concerns.

The news, long expected, that Facebook would open-source its platform is not reviving the buzz. And the comparisons people are making now are not as complimentary.

A revamp of how Facebook handles third-party applications is "Orwellian," one observer says, which I suppose makes Zuckerberg Big Little Brother. "We've heard from many users that adding applications is cumbersome," writes Facebook developer Pete Bratach. And yet application-tracker Adonomics reports that Facebook users have installed more than 912 billion applications. The real effect of Facebook's redesign is to make it less likely that Facebook users will install applications their friends use. This may reduce complaints about annoying applications, but it will also slow the spread of applications on Facebook from user to user — an overwhelming part of the Facebook Platform's appeal.

It's sensible for Facebook to do something about its reputation for being all about zombies and pirates. What doesn't make sense is dissembling about the reason it needs to. Facebook's problem isn't that applications aren't popular enough; it's that they've become too popular, and grown out of control. The changes to how applications get added, as well as changes to the design of profile pages which downplay applications, will put more of Facebook's screen real estate back in its control. Why not just say that?

Because Facebook needs to maintain the loyalty of developers, if only for appearance's sake. I've never been convinced that widgets add that much to Facebook in a business sense. But they gave Facebook Valley buzz, which it cleverly, and profitably, capitalized on. Microsoft would never have invested in a mere social network — but start talking about Facebook as a computing platform, and the likes of Bill Gates get interested fast.

Which is why, when Facebook executives get up on stage talking to a Wall Street crowd, as Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did last week at the D6 conference, they're swift to talk up the work of developers. But on the site itself? They'd just as soon the developers disappear.

(Photo by Brandee Barker)

Facebook evangelist Dave Morin touts the ability to take one's real identity from Facebook to other websites. And indeed, that's one reason why I mocked MySpace's move; its users' pseudonymous logins have no particular value as sources of identity.

But do I really want to interconnect all my online identities? That's the premise of the "data portability" movement — that we really want nothing more than to take our friends with us from one website to another. And yet I'm content to segregate, say, the work acquaintances I have on LinkedIn from the more personal relationships I track on Facebook. Would Valleywag's commenters want to have their real names attached to their accounts? Some are happy to, while for others, that's a deal-breaker — and the site would be the lesser if it lost them.

Mark Zuckerberg's original, brilliant insight — to connect Facebook's identities to real names, schools, and workplaces — is its advantage over rival social networks like Bebo and MySpace. But I'm not sure I want a Web with non anonymity. Morin and others will hasten to note Facebook's privacy options — but surely they realize that when others give up their anonymity, there will be peer pressure for most to do so.

Real identity has value, say, when conducting commerce, which is why it's laughable that eBay partnered with MySpace and not Facebook — just another sign of that company's clueless technological leadership. But anonymity has its benefits. Facebook Connect threatens the anonymous Web. For that reason, I can't wish Facebook Connect anything more than partial success.

FB's valuation is driven by the perception it can serve as a platform (or launching pad) for derivative businesses. Without that perception, FB is a $3-5 B company. Period. When developers lose enthusiasm for the "platform," every FB employee has their net worth cut by 67%.

Building gimmicky widgets that serve no real use, third-party developers had too much success, too early, too easily, on Facebook's platform. For all his puffery, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is correct that useful applications could and should be built on the connections between people and their shared interests. Yet so far, I can't think of a Facebook application I've installed that I can't live without. So why should the developers who built so much junk continue to be successful? They shouldn't. And if Zuckerberg's new rules force these developers to dream as big as he does — sometimes awkwardly and in public — then good.

His other argument is that sponsored applications, such as Federated Media's BMW "What Drives You?" campaign, can provide — take a deep breath — "more directly aligned and integrated brand experiences" than Facebook's own Pages product, which maybe lets users post some video if they like.

Smith is preaching to the choir. His readers are mostly hopeful developers who have already bought into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's promise of an ecosystem on the Facebook platform, so we're sure his optimism is appreciated. The problem with Smith's theory is that for apps to take advantage of user intent, they need to offer actual services in specific areas like travel, finance and shopping. So far, all most of these optimistic developers have built are apps intended to provide a pixelated picture of "fun," or prey on adolescent insecurities.

Users have already learned to ignore app invites and Zuckerberg surely realizes it. That's why Zuckerberg felt comfortable downplaying applications with his original plans for Facebook's upcoming redesign, provoking strong reactions from developers. It's hard to say which side was greedier, and which more richly deserves its comeuppance .

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Developers, both small and large, told us they hated the idea. Still, since Facebook owns the platform, Zuckerberg should have been able to ignore their criticisms and protect Facebook's new moneymaking plan. Now, instead, there's a new tab on user profiles for just the News Feed. When he launched Facebook's platform, Zuckerberg drew comparisons to Bill Gates, the creator of another powerful platform. But Gates bullied developers, not the other way around.