Developer Bonanza? $250M sFund Aims to Grow Facebook, Social Web Apps

What if there was a $250 million party and everyone you knew was invited?

Well, not quite everyone, but venture capitalist John Doerr described the new sFund for social Web applications as "a quarter billion dollar party" aimed at finding and funding social Web entrepreneurs

Doerr, a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB), said the social Web represents the third great wave of computing following personal computers and the Internet. "Fifteen years after the Web, we're creating a new kind of Web," he said at an event here at Facebook headquarters to launch the sFund.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was particularly bullish on the promise of social apps.

"We think every industry will get fundamentally rethought and designed around people and social interaction," he said. But he also warned that companies that try to add a layer of social features to applications, are more likely to fail or at least won't be as successful as those designed from the ground up to be deeply integrated with the social Web.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus spoke at length about the opportunity for developers to make the social Web more useful. Zynga publishes the hugely successful Farmville game on Facebook.

"With the social Web, there are new expectations of what a service should be like. Things have changed so much, so fast, this is one of the few times venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are behind the curve," he said.


Read more here: http://www.developer.com/services/a...und-Aims-to-Grow-Facebook-Social-Web-Apps.htm


This is really good news and it'll be exciting to see what new products come out of it.

 

YUCK ... reading the article made me cringe ... big fat CEOs with deep pockets that don't know exactly what they want.

Of course they'll expect nothing new, but something that integrates all the crap that they have now ... they certainly wouldn't want anything new that would render their entire software obsolete.

I'm sure the money will get invested into lots of bullshit, and in the end, won't bring up anything really exciting.

---------- Post added at 07:39 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:33 AM ----------

What they want is the B2B part of my DELOS system, I haven't even bothered to write that concept down yet.

 

hmm, I guess I read something else out of the article.
The way I took it is this.
Developers will have a chance to develop new sites or new applications that deal with social media.

 

Recently, it was discovered that Google pays only like 2.5% taxes in the US, b/c they funnel money legally to Ireland.

This whole thing might be more like a tax write-off that also happens to fund some darling companies close to them ... I doubt there'll be any interesting things coming out of this.

Namely, the problem is: What kind of interesting things should come out of this? Facebook is Facebook, Amazon is Amazon, etc.; they all have some sort of API. Applications using these APIs are already established, b/c companies began to jump en masse on them right after they were published. One CEO mentioned "Oh I want an integration with traveller's offices" (which would require an entire industry to use the same software) ... etc. They're businessmen, I bet they know what they want isn't on the plate yet.

Imagine if there was a standardized B2B solution that companies could use to transfer data. Microsoft tried to do this with SOAP, but SOAP hasn't been widely adopted, b/c many companies usually don't want to open up their doors to internet exchanges with companies they don't know. Facebook and Amazon (and Twitter) each provide their own API to provide some B2B functionality to the outside world.

But if you look closely, the number of companies doing such a thing is pretty low.

Even if there was a perfectly safe, mightily powerful API that could be used across all the industry, companies would pick it up only if it was proven to be 100% safe. Even then, fears would rise that some companies would try to tamper with the system to "cheat", whatever that might mean. So it must be tamper-proof as well.

There's really a lot of implications with the whole shebang, and perhaps I'm overly pessimistic. But as the Russians would say "if you're an optimist, you just don't have enough information".

Perhaps something good will indeed come out of this, but after seeing what's going on in large corporations, I seriously doubt it.

 

you may be right about this. I guess we'll just have to see how it goes.

Love the quote

 

great idea to develop

 

I love the games Zynga hit out with =/ Other than that, this article is too complex for my brain to process. So i'm going to pretend I know what it's talking about.

How dare they waste that many milliions on WEBSITES that could easily be used for the people who are dying out there. /humanitarian.
Spending like a couple of thousand is maybe okay on a website, because they ARE expensive to run. However, millions? Seriously?

The rich just get richer and the poor just get poorer.

 

Sadly, website development can be very expensive, for various reasons. Spending millions on some web portal software is nothing unusual.

And running a web service like Facebook can cost many millions per year. The volumes of data and traffic they have to deal with are enormous, so they need huge server farms to remedy this. In fact, server farms have to become so massive that they've become an environmental issue, and many companies pride themselves with "green" server farms now.

Who was it? Google? That had a volume of Petabytes just in logs?

Many companies try to run their worldwide web presence thru a single data center, and that is very expensive, especially if you've got hundreds of millions of users every day.

I find it sad too that they don't spend the $250 million on something more worthwhile ... there are plenty of interesting research projects that could benefit from this. Even humanitarian projects.

A container home for a homeless family costs roughly $2,000 (rebates not counted). For $250 million, they could provide 125,000 homeless families with a new home.

Poverty in the US is unnaturally high, and if companies would spend less money on bullshit and would spend more money on their fellow citizens, the USA could be a far better place.