This week two of the largest social gaming developers, Playfish and Playdom, announced that they are opening offices in San Francisco. Is this part of the massive Silicon Valley “revival” that the BBC described yesterday? I doubt it but it’s clear that no matter where the social gaming companies are hiring from, San Francisco and the bay area in general, are important for any growing internet startup.

At an event in Washington, D.C. today, Shervin Pishevar of Social Gaming Network explained to an audience of entrepreneurs and government decision makers how he had built a network of developers from around…

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Just last week we wrote about the MySpace acquisition of iLike and this week it appears that some form of agreement between Facebook and Spotify is in the works according to Techcrunch. The rumor is based on a status update by Mark Zuckerberg in which he simply stated “Spotify is so good.” While Mark may be a victim to the classic “shiny object syndrome” found in much of Silicon Valley, he probably wouldn’t have written the update had something not been in the works.

Whether or not discussions or near the final stages, Spotify is most definitely an interesting product…

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I was in the process of writing a post today about the new ability that Facebook’s adding for users and Mike Arrington of course beat me to the punch. Mike is calling it the “Everyone Button” and while I can’t confirm that an “Everyone Button” is how it will be implemented, I can confirm that Facebook will be launching a tool to let users post public status updates. I’ve also heard that users will be able to subscribe to the public status feed of users, in a model that’s similar to Twitter.

This is essentially another step in Facebook’s assault…

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Facebook is in the midst of transforming the way businesses interact with their customers and it has all been built on top of the Facebook platform. In an interview with Robert Scoble, Mark Zuckerberg only briefly mentions the Pages product and how that has been a recent focus of the company. It’s entertaining watching the video because Zuckerberg and his team of developers are in the process of developing a product which essentially duplicates the majority of the features within Ning, the product of Marc Andreesen, a fellow Facebook board member.

A little over a year ago Marc Andreesen was…

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Today Facebook will announce 25 of the 50 fbFund finalists. The latest round of the fbFund was targeting Facebook Connect applications as well as iPhone applications although a number of general platform applications were also accepted into the fund. This is the second fbFund round in which finalists will have a chance to compete for seed investments of up to $100,000.

According to an upcoming blog post from Dave McClure, “10-week program will begin in mid-June and go thru end of August in Silicon Valley, and will be housed at one of the former Facebook offices in downtown Palo Alto.”…

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It’s no secret that Facebook is no longer the hottest startup in Silicon Valley. With Twitter pursuing an aggressive search strategy and a fast growing user base thanks to Oprah’s support, Twitter is now Silicon Valley’s darling. Facebook however continues to add millions of users a week and the company has an active developer base that’s looking for some indication of Facebook’s next big step.

The first f8 event brought about the beginning of the Facebook platform during which time Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed the era of a new web-based operating system. While Facebook was able to attract a large number…

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