Gawker: valleywag, super wall

RockYou spends around $3 million on two new profile decorators

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:20:00 EDT

Widgetmaker RockYou acquired Pieces of Flair and Speed Racing, applications which, according to Facebook's directory, see about 432,042 and 190,441 daily active users. Terms of the deals weren't disclosed, but an industry insider says RockYou probably paid $1 million for Speed Racing and $2 million for Pieces of Flair. RockYou's most popular Facebook application, Super Wall, continues to lose traffic ever since Facebook turned off Super Wall's ability to send notifications to Facebook users.

Rival widgetmaker Slide went through similar traffic troubles a couple weeks ago when Facebook shut down its popular Top Friends app over privacy concerns. But in an earlier conversation, Slide executive Keith Rabois told us that in instead of buying up smaller apps, Slide is pursuing a different strategy:

Slide is in the business of building deeply engaging branded applications, at the same level of complexity and quality as a destination website, and is not interested in assembling a broad portfolio of light weight applications that are merely impression-drivers in an ad network.

Did Slide get rival RockYou's Facebook apps punished?

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:40:00 EDT

Traffic to RockYou's popular Facebook widget Super Wall declined from 2.1 million to 600,000 daily users over the last few days, as Facebook blocked the widget from sending users notifications and messages, claiming RockYou had violated Facebook's privacy policies. RockYou CTO Jia Shen told Inside Facebook the allegations and their punitive response are "slightly debatable":

There are policies Facebook has issued, but there is always room for interpretation - and in light of current changes, the interpretation is a lot more stringent now in contrast to before.

Facebook's probably getting strict because its preparing for a relaunch of its design in July. Or — and this pure speculation — the third-party security firm Rock You's rival Slide hired to audit its own privacy might have gotten paid a little extra to take a close look at the competition and alert Facebook to any infractions. We wouldn't put it past hypercompetitive Slide founder Max Levchin and his crafty sidekick, Keith Rabois.

Facebook applications chase Mark Zuckerberg's shadow

Tim Faulkner — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:43:13 EDT

Mark Zuckerberg's strategy of holding out for a Facebook valuation as high as $15 billion is contagious. Developers of the most popular Facebook applications have become mini-Zucks, unwilling to part with their astronomically self-valued creations. If Lance Tokuda, the chief executive of RockYou, sees any difference, it's only one of scale. Speaking about his companies popular Super Wall application, Tokuda, says "If you told me you were going to write me a check for $10 million, I'd say, 'Forget it.'" Why?

What Tokuda didn't mention to the New York Times is that Sequoia Capital, RockYou's venture-capital backer, is rumored to be shopping his entire company for a price between $200 million and $500 million. It's hard to say which is more inflated: Tokuda's price for Super Wall, a minor improvement on Facebook's built-in Wall message board, or Sequoia's price for RockYou's entire collection of "barnacles," as the Times describes its applications.

Tokuda and Sequoia, of course, are only being smart. Of course they should capitalize on the Facebook buzz while they can. (We hear that one large and notoriously gullible buyer may actually be interested.) And he's selling as fast as he can:

This is a completely new channel of delivering content to users and letting them communicate. Owning that over the long stretch can be worth a lot.

In other words, in the Facebook universe, profits don't matter. Heck, revenues don't matter! All that matters is that application developers are brave new pioneers on an untapped frontier. Never mind that that frontier is already filled to bursting with more than 5,000 (mostly useless) applications. And never mind that Facebook, at any point, should you come up with a genuinely useful tool, reserves the right to build that function into the site itself.

And that reality is hitting home for Tokuda. Facebook has already moved to copy some of Super Wall's features. RockYou itself splits its audience with a similar application, FunWall. Over the long stretch, Super Wall is completely irrelevant. Not that the long run matters. If anyone has actually named a price for SuperWall, or for all of RockYou, Tokuda should sell now. We call it making hay while the sun is shining.