Social Media, Facebook App | featured news

Last spring, the future for Viddy, a video-sharing Facebook app, seemed as sunny as southern California's skies. Based a block away from Venice Beach, the 30-person startup impressed prospective investors with skyrocketing user growth figures and won funding from them at a $370 million valuation. The tech press hailed it as the "Instagram for video," potentially ripe for a billion-dollar-plus buyout. Justin Bieber wanted to invest — and the pop star eventually did just that.

Airtime, Sean Parker's new social video chatting service for Facebook, launched today with an event that totally unraveled into a complete fiasco. But what might rankle more than a rocky launch is the revelation Airtime will take “snapshots of users periodically to ensure site safety,” according to an Airtime spokesperson quoted in Forbes.

The new app is similar to Instagram, the photo-sharing app Facebook is in the process of buying for $1 billion. The acquisition, however, has not yet been completed, and Instagram's employees did not work on the Facebook app. Facebook has said it expects the Instagram app to close sometime this year.

Facebook took another step toward its goal of being a platform for developers Wednesday, by announcing that it will launch its own App Center, a single location for the platform’s many applications. The company also announced that it will begin supporting paid apps, a program that it is offering to developers in a beta test. (Right now, developers can have in-app payments on the network, but all applications have been free to access.)

“OMG! A big Zynga group hug to OMGPOP, talented creators of Draw Something,” tweeted social games titan Zynga Wednesday. Apparently, in this universe, a “big Zynga group hug” translates to $180 million, the price that All Things D claims Zynga paid to acquire the makers of the most popular mobile Facebook app.

Investors are pumping more and more money into web services that are heavily reliant on Facebook. So how big is the economy around the world's most popular social network?

While some of us might be willing to pay to make Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars go away, it appears that Wall Street has other ideas.