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Social Gaming Network, or SGN, is one of the more promising companies exploiting Facebook’s platform. It builds “social games” — online games that use friend relationships and other social data from social networks to deliver more compelling games.

It’s promising because it wants to straddle the lucrative world of video games and the not-yet-lucrative world of social networks. It is one of many companies with ideas for how to turn social gaming, sometimes called “funware,” into a big business — even as big video game makers like Electronic Arts, stay out of the picture.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, which is located in the building formerly occupied by PayPal and Google, sees itself as unique because it focuses on creating its own games, as opposed to copying others. Example: Warbook, a Facebook-based fantasy style game that came out last year, that today has 34,658 daily active users, four percent of the 784,050 who have installed it — these games have life cycles. SGN has since developed its own repertoire, including a smaller but rather active sequel to Warbook. It has also purchased smaller rivals, like game developer company Esqut.

The company has just raised a big $15 million round from Greylock Partners, Founders Fund (both of whom are investors in Facebook), Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle Venture Partners, to help it on its quest.

Pishevar hopes to create what he calls a “gaming graph,” where SGN learns what people like through what they play and what they do. He hopes to create “amazon-like” intelligence where the company can make recommendations to its users about games they’ll like and who they’ll enjoy playing against. Like many other Facebook developers, he is working on taking SGN games to other social networks, like MySpace, as well as to the web.

To this end, the company also offers a “social bar,” a window at the top of its applications that shows you things like when your friends are playing SGN games online. As we’ve covered, this is also what SGN calls a “social gaming network,” where independent game developers can run this bar on their own applications, and cross-advertise games to users between their applications and SGN.

The battle for social gaming

SGN isn’t the only company to come out with a social gaming bar and social gaming network. Its most immediate rival, Zynga, has nearly simultaneously come out with its own versions of these features.

It’s not clear how big a deal either feature is, though. Pishevar says that 70 independent game application are running on its network so far, but he isn’t providing more detail on traffic that the features drive.

In total, SGN-owned games have been installed a total of more than 51.5 million times, representing a total of nearly 40 million unique Facebook users, according to chief executive Shervin Pishevar. Zynga has grown to more than 43.3 million total installs.

SGN today has more than 800,000 daily active users on Facebook, according to Adonomics, down around 200,000 daily active users from a month ago. Then, before it incorporated Esqut, it had more than one million. Zynga, meanwhile, has grown around 200,000 daily active users in the last month and today has more than two million. Like SGN, it has bought smaller companies; it has also more openly emulated existing games, like poker, rather than just focusing on original titles.

The promise of social gaming is high engagement among its existing users — not so much total installs, nor even daily active users (although both are necessary, of course). If you, a game developer, can get a user to spend hours per day just playing your game (or game network), you have all sorts of opportunities to sell them branded virtual goods, ads that are closely tied to users gaming profiles, online sales of real goods, and other ways of making money.

Slide and RockYou, the two largest Facebook application companies, are building increasingly complex applications that resemble the more complex games built by companies like SGN and Zynga. Pishevar says that he welcomes the competition, calling these companies “frenemies.” Like many startup-up entrepreneurs I talk to, he says that more competitors means more innovation among the companies as well as heightened awareness from users.

RockYou and Slide focused on growing big through simple applications like being able to send simple, nonverbal messages to people that emulated Facebook’s “poke” feature. As Pishevar tells me, now Facebook applications are about “engaging users and bringing them back — where they get a positive experience, not bombarded” with invites, email alerts, etc.

As we’ve written, the large and increasingly well-funded companies including Slide, RockYou, Zynga and now SGN increasingly have the means to cross-promote their own apps and allied apps — and buy apps — which means that its getting harder for smaller, less experienced, less-funded developers to get users and create businesses on Facebook. This may have already contributed to the drop-off in application growth and developer activity on Facebook.

SGN’s funding is just another step in the market maturing. The missing piece, as usual, is revenue numbers. Like most social application developers, Pishevar refused to give me any details about ways that the company is making money, or how much money it is making.

Funding notes: Columbia Partners and Novak Biddle were previously investors in the company that SGN was spun out of, Freewebs. Meanwhile, as mentioned, the investor connections in the Facebook world are drawing tighter, too. David Sze, a partner at Greylock, is joining SGN’s board of directors — he’s also an observer on Facebook’s board (and he also sits on LinkedIn’s and Digg’s boards).

Investors also include Amidzad and angel investor Aydin Senkut, both of whom have separately invested in Webs.com, the company formerly known as Freewebs, which SGN was spun out from. [Disclosure: Both of the latter two investors are also angel investors in VentureBeat.]

OLX, a company competing with classifieds site Craigslist, but more popular outside of the U.S. than it is here, has raised $13 million in a second round of financing.

The company, based in New York and Buenos Aires, is like Craigslist in that it focuses on urban centers to ensure mass. To gain visibility, it partnered with social networking company Friendster — which has also has more traction outside of the U.S.

The two-year-old company was started by Fabrice Grinda and Alex Oxenford. Grinda blogs about the recent funding here, saying it will help the company expand but also tide it over during the economic downturn.

It operates in 40 countries in 15 languages.

The funding comes from General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital. This adds to the $10 million the company raised in September 2006 from the same VCs and various angels.

The company is trying to differentiate itself by offering more modern features than Craigslist does — Web 2.0 bells and whistles like letting you easily promote listings on other websites, like MySpace, Xanga, and Blogspot.

YouNoodle, a new San Francisco company, says it has developed a “startup predictor,” or a set of analysis tools to help investors place bets on the university entrepreneurs that are the most likely to succeed.

The company, founded by two 20-something entrepreneurs who met at Oxford, will offer its basic technology beginning March 3. Its core analysis stems from work YouNoodle has done over the past 11 months, working with universities to help them organize business plan competitions. The “predictor” analysis will consist of historical data about qualities of a start-up team’s founders, the type of network these founders have, their participation in competitions and their progress over time. By comparing founding teams across hundreds of university, college and vocational campuses, YouNoodle says it can make good estimates for success entrepreneurial teams in their earliest stages. A more advanced algorithm will be released some time later for professional investors, for a subscription fee.

I talked with two of the founders this evening, Bob Goodson, 27 (left) who is chief executive, and Krill Makharinsky, 22 (right), both recruited by PayPal founder and Slide chief executive Max Levchin to come to the U.S. Levchin and former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel have both invested in YouNoodle, as has Thiel’s Founder Fund. Goodson wouldn’t disclose the amount; he said other investors will also be announced.

I challenged them on their audacious goal of predicting success of start-ups, telling them it was impossible to say which ones become the next hundred billion dollar Google. I’d read Goodson’s quote the NYT earlier in the day where he said: “Give us some information, and we’ll give you some idea of what the company will be worth in five years.” That’s pretty absurd, and investor Paul Kedrosky’s quote to the Times was spot on: “If their tool did such a good job, they’d raise a fund themselves and beat the tar out of us.”

But when I talked with them directly, the two founders were somewhat chagrined by the New York Times article, saying it was sensationalist, especially the Times’ headline about being able to predict a company’s fate. Whether they were backtracking or not, I don’t know, but what they told me seemed to make a lot more sense than what I read in the Times. “That’s not what we’re doing,” Goodson told me. “What we’re interested in is the very earliest stage. That’s the biggest pain, when it’s just getting off the ground,” he said. He explained that they’re trying to do with more mathematical rigor what an investor tries anyway through time-intensive diligence, that is, check into a team’s heritage, its network, success with early prototypes, etc., and then make conclusions about a team by comparing it with other founding teams. Goodson conceded: “Of course, it would be absurd to say we’d predict all the factors involved that go into a startup being successful.”

In other words, this makes a lot of sense, and I can see it being quite useful if done right. There is so much work investors have to do, and so much inefficiency before the first round of capital, that anything to make it smoother would be good for both the startup and the investor. However, after the first round, market factors, and other dynamics take over, it’s impossible to predict how a company will do.

Today (Monday), the company has opened up sections of its site, including profiles of companies, entrepreneurs, as well as several of the groups that are hosting business plan competitions on the site, such as Stanford’s BASES, and the Stanford Social e-challenge Competition, as well as programs at Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London. You can subscribe to an RSS feed to stay updated on events and news about start-ups of your choice, and you can upload your resume for others to see.

The company is a team of five.

Alamofire, a company bringing professional web design principles to gaming on Facebook, has gotten a recent boost of venture capital coinciding with the release of its first game.

The company is an offshoot of Firewheel Design, an award-winning designer of Web 2.0 sites including IconBuffet, which sells packages of icons to other web designers.

Alamofire’s first game, Packrat, stays close to those design roots. The aim of Packrat is to collect as many items as possible, represented by “pixel perfect” icons, by stealing them from friends.

The slick look and feel of Packrat gives the game an edge over some of the less more ad-hoc efforts on Facebook. It’s so far accumulated almost 2,000 daily users since its release on January 22nd.

We found out about the $2 million investment by the Founder’s Fund around the same time as the game’s release, so there’s probably a lot more forthcoming from the company, which is based in Southlake, Texas. Anyone know more about what they’re up to? Drop me a line.

Update: Josh Williams of Alamofire has gotten in contact to note that some portion of the above is incorrect — but not which. We’ll do more reporting on the company when they’re ready to talk.

Quantcast, the company that places a piece of code on Web sites so that it can track traffic and other data directly, has raised $20 million more in financing.

The round was led by the Founders Fund and included Polaris Venture Partners. It follows $6 million in previous funding from Founders Fund, Revolution Ventures, Allen & Co., and the company’s founders.

Some 20,000 publishers have already agreed to place Quantcast’s code on their sites, which allows them to get more accurate information about the types of people that use their site. Quantcast supplies the service for free.

San Francisco’s Quantcast still hasn’t disclosed how it plans to make money, but chief executive Konrad Feldman suggested that one way may be to license the data it gets to advertising networks, so that advertisers can make better decisions about where best to advertise.

No other measurement companies has such an offering. There are sites like Comscore, which draw data from the surfing habits of large “panels” of Internet users. But few offer a code that tracks traffic directly from a site and then makes it publicly available. Sites with an interest in secrecy have avoided using Quantcast’s code. However, even here, Quantcast has moved to allow sites some flexibility in what is made public. (See our coverage of the significant methodology problems of industry leader Comscore and others).

Quantcast is also tracking widget traffic. Widgets have confused advertisers because widgets distribute content across multiple sites, and it’s difficult to know whether visitors to a site are actually reading the widget information. For example, if VentureBeat supplied a widget of news stories to the homepage of Dogster.com, few visitors to Dogster would likely stop to read VentureBeat’s news because it isn’t relevant to their passion (dogs), even though the widget would be registering plenty of traffic by counting all visitors to Dogster.com’s home page. Quantcast’s traffic tools help by measuring user interaction with the widget (see our coverage).

Quantcast combines its traffic with various panel data, to build audience profiles for Web sites. See the profile for CBSNews.com, for example (partial screenshot below).

Ken Howery of Founders Fund and Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners will join Quantcast’s board.

Updated

Widget-maker Slide has raised nearly $50 million at a $550 million valuation from two private equity funds, Fidelity and T-Rowe Price, according to the New York Times, with the two firms buying a total of around a nine percent stake in the company.

San Francisco-based Slide has more than 144 million users of its widgets on Myspace and other social networks, and another more than 50 million total (not necessarily active) users of its Facebook applications, according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who first reported that a large round was in the works earlier today.

However, Slide hasn’t, as far as I know, publicly stated significant revenue streams — as is the case with many other Myspace widget and Facebook application companies. A large funding round could mean that the company has proven to investors that it can monetize.

On the other hand, investors may just be impressed with the number of eyeballs Slide has attracted. The company’s Top Friends Facebook application, which lets you designate and display your favorite Facebook friends on your profile page, has 2,483,760 daily active users. Its FunWall application, which replaces Facebook’s “Wall” of messages from your friends on your profile with its own features, such as video-sharing, has 2,762,039 daily active users.

Note: Facebook applications give third-party developers direct access to user data, such as your list of Facebook friends, which companies like Slide can use to make more compelling applications, like Top Friends.

Slide sees itself as a “distributed media company,” relying on its widgets and applications to create new forms of entertainment for social network users. For more, see my interview with chief executive Max Levchin from last June. Its latest efforts include involvement in Open Social (our coverage), a Google-led effort that’s in development, that intends to create a standard means of implementing social networking applications on Facebook rival sites, including Myspace.

Main competitors to Slide include RockYou, which also has popular Facebook applications as well as widgets on other social networks. RockYou claims to have passed Slide as the most popular Facebook app company, as I wrote last month, although it’s not clear if that’s still the case. In late August, Slide claimed the number one spot.

Slide would use the money to expand as well as buy other companies, Swisher says, and has hired investment bank Allen & Co. to help raise the round (the bank, among other things, is also helping Digg shop itself around).

Slide’s previous valuation is based on the approximately $20 million that it raised in 2006 from Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund (our coverage).

Entrepreneur Sean Parker’s latest undertaking is Project Agape, a secretive start-up working to empower people to further their political or social cause using the Internet.

Parker, 27, isn’t sharing much publicly about the company yet, but it’s worth noting because Parker tends to make waves when he gets serious about something.

There was controversial music-sharing site Napster, where he was co-founder; the contact updating service, Plaxo, where he was also co-founder, and which rubbed lots of people the wrong way until it mellowed recently; and Facebook, where he joined up with Mark Zuckerberg early on and saw it emerge into one of the biggest social networking companies of the day. He’s also been articulate about start-up financing models.

Om Malik first found out about Project Agape a few weeks ago. VentureBeat spoke with Parker, but he’s committed to secrecy for now. The Founders Fund, the venture capital firm Parker recently joined as partner, has invested in the Berkeley, Ca. based Project Agape. Parker hasn’t left the firm, but has poured most of his time into the new venture. We’ll update when he has more to say. But here is some context, and some clues.

Notable is that Parker joined the VC world because he was exhausted with start-ups, he told us during an interview three months ago. At that time, we could tell Parker was getting impassioned about viral communication — so we’re not surprised at his quick embarking into the start-up world again. Here’s a snippet from that previous piece:

Parker also came up with much of what we see as the Facebook News Feed, and he believes that format is the future of communication on the Web. “The social graph,” he says, referring to the connection people have with others through multiple degrees, “is the critical ingredient.”

In other words, Project Agape is likely to use your extended personal network, first popularized by Friendster, to let you further your cause. (Parker was close friends with Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams.) Now, you join that with Facebook’s “newsfeed” feature, which updates you with the activities of your friends, and Project Agape may have something interesting. It’s difficult to see how this could be extended beyond social and political activism, because people wouldn’t respond very well to businesses using this sort of thing. But the number of page views created for advertising could be significant, either way.

So far, we’re just speculating, but more hints come from Michael Arrington, who has just published something based on an interview with Parker:

New sites like Change.org and dotherightthing and Six Degrees help people talk about issues online, but they don’t go far enough in using virality to get new users and get them actually doing things. Parker wants the kind of activity around these organizations that Facebook sees - tens of thousands of new daily users and hours and hours of social interactions. The result, he says, will be a much more efficient engine for organizations to get volunteers and raise money.

Geni, a new start-up in Los Angeles, wants to do for families what LinkedIn does for business contacts: Create one giant tree that shows you who is connected to who.

The world may be getting smaller; Geni, if successful, will make it tinier still.

Geni has just launched, and we found it easy to use. The company is led by co-founder David Sacks, a former chief operating officer at PayPal, who more recently started Room 9 Entertainment, a production company that financed the movie Thank You For Smoking. Geni has raised a first round of capital of “more than $1 million” from the Founders Fund, which is led by Peter Thiel, former chief executive of PayPal.

Geni has been in private testing for several weeks.

Geni is focused more on networking of living family members, giving them a friendly user interface they can play with, letting you drag the family tree around on your screen, like you can with a Google Map. Once you make an entry for a relative (see screen shots below), Geni lets you email the relative to prompt them to join, so they can make entries. Thus, it is viral.

For now, Geni lets users see only the trees they build for themsleves, or those to which they’ve been invited. This is for privacy reasons, Sacks said. However, Geni will eventually allow users to merge their trees, creating larger numbers of people in a network, and where the nature of privacy changes. Geni wants to build additional features as these trees grows, and is contemplating creating an overall global tree that has some locked features, and edited only with users with certain permission.

Geni is the latest in a long list of genealogy sites. One of the biggest is The Generations Network, which last week changed its name from MyFamily.com. That company owns Rootsweb.com and Ancestry.com. There are also TribalPages.com, OneGreatFamily.com, Genealogy.com and Allfamilytree.com. Some of these, like Ancestry.com, have built impressive record databases. If you type in an ancestor, they’ll search census, birth, death and immigration records.

Sacks said he was driven to build the site because his parents were immigrants from South Africa, and wanted to track family origins in Lithuania and elsewhere — he’s used Geni to connect with relatives from Canada, Australia, France and Israel. Humans have a fundamental need to know where they come from, and who they’re related to, he said.

He plans to make money from advertising. Geni may know more about its users than any other site, and should be able to target advertising better than most, Sacks said: “We’re going to know how old they are, whether they are male or female, where they live, family structure, whether they are single or recently married, whether they have kids, newborn or in college, whether they are divorced…” He may also charge for premium services, even if the basic site remains free. He says the model has worked at LinkedIn.

Sacks wants to make it a family social network, just as MySpace is a network for friends, and LinkedIn is a network for business contacts. People want a different network for each aspect of their lives, he says.

The company was formed last year. Co-founder Alan Braverman most recently co-founded Xoom.

Facebook, the social-networking Web site courted by Yahoo, isn’t for sale, board member Peter Thiel tells Bloomberg.

“It’s going to remain an independent company,” Thiel said in an interview last week. “The plan is to actually build it, maybe at some point take it public, but definitely not to sell it.”

Thiel said the site is actually worth $8 billion or more, citing the site’s college-aged users, according to Bloomberg. He said the company is focused finding the best way to make money from its millions of members. VentureBeat also talked last week with Thiel and and his partner Sean Parker, who helped build Facebook, and we’re not surprised to here this. Parker is convinced that Facebook’s mode of letting its users communicate, and its social graph, is the way of the future (we wrote about his views here), so they may think Facebook is undervalued by Yahoo.

However, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, doesn’t appear as assertive as Thiel:

“We are not necessarily focused on what the exit is going to be — whether it’s selling the company or an IPO or when that’s going to be,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “But we obviously think that there’s a lot of potential to keep growing.”

(Updated with more details on how FF works)

A form venture capital funding in Silicon Valley is getting increased interest from founders of start-ups.

It is called the “FF class” of stock, for founders who want to cash out a small percentage of their stake in a company so they don’t have to wait until the company is sold or goes public.

This practice is not entirely new. Many founders through the decades, including at Intuit years ago and Jonathan Abrams at Friendster more recently, have sold shares in their company to their venture backers and gotten cash to enjoy life a little more. But with the favorable start-up climate now, VCs are doing more to accommodate founders, entrepreneurs are getting more sophisticated, hearing more about these sorts of terms, and increasingly asking for them.

The practice is mentioned in the SF Chronicle story by Jessica Guynn, about the Sean Parker of the Founders Fund (the fund’s partners pictured above) and his decision to devise such a stock for Barney Pell, founder of young search start-up Powerset:

Inspired by his personal frustrations as a startup founder, Parker came up with a novel arrangement that he hopes will benefit other founders as they build their companies: a new type of stock that allows founders to cash out a small percentage of their stake in a funding round so they don’t have to wait until the company is sold or goes public.

Pell, who maxed out credit cards, deferred salary and considered taking out a second mortgage until he could raise serious money and interest from the right investors, says he’s relieved that he and his fellow founders don’t have to feel rushed to sell the company to get some return on their investment of energy, time and money.

This Powerset iteration was put together by attorney Steve Venuto, of Orrick, and VentureBeat has been told that Fenwick & West and Wilson Sonsini have also given thumbs up to the practice. Venuto was also the lawyer of Facebook, another company backed by the Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel. (Someone told us Venuto also the only lawyer in the valley who can code, but we haven’t confirmed that.)

The amount of the cash-out is capped to between 10 and 15 percent, depending on the round. It should also be used with caution, because it means you get less as a founder when the company does get sold or go public. There’s a story we’ve heard about the founder of Viaweb, a Paul Graham company, who cashed out in order to buy his wife a Saturn car. It became known later as the “million-dollar-Saturn,” because of the worth that stock would have been had he kept it.

Thestock also lets the investors cash out too, allowing venture capitalists take some money out of the company during a subsequent higher-value round.

The stock type is also significant because a new law, 409A, forces companies to grant options at their fair market price. This brought more scrutiny on the cash-out process. We ran this by Gordy Davidson, of Fenwick & West, who explained the challenge as follows. If a VC buys shares from a founder for $1 each, to let the founder cash out, this effectively establishes a fair market price for the shares. All option grants going forward must thus be granted at $1. This may not be good, because companies may have been able to grant options to employees at 10 cents had no such price been set (this lower price is desirable, because it gives greater upside). The trick is to turn the founders stock into “preferred” shares, which can get around that problem. That, in turn, has some tax implications, but of course — with good lawyers — there are even ways around that.

So here’s how Parker and Venuto structured the FF class (Parker and Thiel named it “FF’ and the name stuck): The FF has a single preference clause that distinguishes it from all other stock. It is convertible to any future class of stock, when certain conditions are true. For example, the holder of FF can convert it into say, a Series B class of stock and sell it to investors, at which point it takes on all the rights and preferences of Series B stock. But it can only be done during the new issuance of that Series B, and only when that Series B is sold to investors; you can’t convert randomly.

Parker tells VentureBeat he spent nine months thinking about how to align founders’ interests more closely with venture capitalists, and this is what he came up with. The stock was first used at Powerset, and has since been used at a secretive companies Philotic in Berkeley, and David Sack’s Geni (no web sites).

[Pictured above is Ken Howery (left), Peter Thiel (middle) and Sean Parker (right). Photo by Chron's Katy Raddatz]

The Founders Fund, the venture firm led by former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel, has hired Sean Parker, the controversial entrepreneur, who has just turned 27, as a managing partner.

Parker somehow attracts attention wherever he goes. He has already launched three well-known companies. At 19, he co-founded Napster, and his cheekiness drew anger from the recording labels, which eventually shut down Napster with lawsuits. Parker told VentureBeat last week, in an interview, that his time at Napster was his biggest lesson — about who to hire to run companies and who to take money from. “I wasn’t sophisticated enough, I didn’t know any better.” But Parker’s past still has some investors in Thiel’s fund nervous. Thiel responds: “Sean has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, in part because he’s been so successful.”

One person he rubbed is the big-gun himself, Michael Moritz of Sequoia — an early backer of Yahoo, Google and YouTube. After Napster, Parker co-founded Plaxo, a site that updates contacts. Soon, Parker was in peoples’ faces again. Some accused Plaxo of spamming, because of its constant update requests. During the post-bubble downturn, Parker got pushed out by Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, and there’s been silence over the real reasons ever since. There were reports of private investigators going after Parker. And things weren’t improved, Thiel says, when Parker wouldn’t let Sequoia invest in his next company, Facebook. “Sequoia had no chance to invest,” Thiel explains, “because of the way they mistreated him at Plaxo. He’s been treated worse than he deserved.” VentureBeat has contacted Sequoia for comment.

Without Parker, Plaxo has become more diplomatic — but almost too much. You never hear about it anymore.

Parker soon met Mark Zuckerberg in New York, after the young “Zuck,” as he is known, had launched Facebook. Parker helped Zuckerberg learn the ropes. He helped him raise money at great valuations — ticking off several VCs who’d wanted in on the deal. They first raised seed money from the Founders Funds’ Thiel, who Parker had met through Sequoia’s Michael Moritz — an irony. Facebook raised only $500,000, and it was profitable immediately. Facebook’s traffic rocketed, and the company went in red again after taking more venture capital from Accel Partners to expand.

While Zuckerberg has been widely acknowledged as Facebook’s leader, even by Parker himself, there’s little question Parker helped Zuck keep control and ownership. Zuck loves coding, so with Parker’s business sense the two were a great pair. Parker helped bring in Owen Van Natta as COO. Parker was one of four board members at Facebook (along with Zuck, Thiel and Accel’s Bryer). He hired former Napster employee Aaron Sittig to redesign the site as we know it. Parker obsessively negotiated with the owner of facebook.com to buy the domain. Parker also came up with much of what we see as the Facebook News Feed, and he believes that format is the future of communication on the Web. “The social graph,” he says, referring to the connection people have with others through multiple degrees, “is the critical ingredient.”

[Side note: See this link here for other details. It was written by Numair Faraz, a friend of Parker's who said Parker had tacitly agreed to the post. Numair forwarded it to us a couple of weeks ago. At the time, we ran Numair's blog post by Facebook's spokeswoman, who reviewed it, and declined comment. When we ran the facts by Parker, he clarified the following: Plaxo had two other co-founders, Tipping Point was not an inspiration for either Plaxo or Facebook, he met Facebook's Zuckerberg met in NYC and Zuckerberg had every intention of turning the site into a business; Parker just accelerated the process, he clarified. Finally, regarding Numair's comparison on Parker with Jim Clark (pictured above), the same comparison was made by Peter Thiel. In an interview, Thiel said Parker reminded him of Clark, who also founded three high-profile companies (SGI, Netscape, WebMD) but that Parker was twenty years younger: "He's just getting started," Thiel said. "The time horizon is really long."]

Parker’s self-acknowledged insecurity is what drives him to be edgy, but also to excel: “I’m still super insecure,” he said. Parker feels it in talks he’s having with entrepreneurs on behalf of the Founders Fund, he says: “I always feel like the underdog. I walk away from meetings asking myself ‘Did I add any value, or are they going to tell other people that shouldn’t talk with us?’”

Like many people at Facebook with ambition, Parker left Facebook quite early in the game. Facebook is firmly in Zuck’s grip, along with a few trusted “family” members, as his close-knit circle is referred to. Parker retains a sizeable chunk of Facebook shares. Others have left, impatient because Zuck won’t sell the company or give them more responsibility.

Parker says his three start-ups have also exhausted him, another reason for him to try out VC: There was “a lot of stress, a lot of conflict,” he said.

He said he joined Thiel because of Thiel’s maverick ways. Thiel is not a classic VC; he runs the firm with an entrepreneur’s bent, from his Clarium Capital hedge fund offices — swanky, we add, nicely perched atop the hills of the Presidio. Parker says too many VC firms are run by people who never launched and ran their own companies. At Founders Fund, Thiel is focused on investing in early-stage companies, and he’s given Parker a carte blanche to find the best companies he can, Thiel says. Founders Fund is investing a $50 million fund, and it is about to launch a second, larger fund.

Slide, the San Francisco start-up that lets you create slide shows from your photos or other content, has raised a large third round of funding from Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund.

The amount remains undisclosed, but we’ve heard it is more than the company got for its second round, which was $8 million. That gives the company near or north of $20 million in total funding, putting it comfortably on the list of best-funded Web 2.0 companies in Silicon Valley — and apparently making it the biggest of any of the latest generations of photo-related sites.

The site lets you push slideshows, onto your blog for example, or to share your favorite photos with friends and family. But it also lets you pull them, accepting a slideshow of images fed from your friends or from your favorite Web sites. It is the latter feature, where people might pull slideshows of products from their favorite retailers, for example, where Slide sees a business model. Slide also lets eBay sellers feature their wares in slideshows. It’s unclear whether Slide has made progress in making money.

Here is our previous story about Slide.

Levchin (pictured above) said he hit it off with Vinod Khosla, the well-known venture capitalist who runs Khosla Ventures. Khosla grasped Levchin’s vision for slides more quickly than others, Levchin said.

The funding also included previous investors, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund.