I just sat down with Max Levchin, chief executive of leading widget-maker Slide, after his talk at the Web 2.0 Expo this afternoon.
He gave me more information on Slide’s interest in forms of revenue besides advertising and the role of feeds — like Facebook’s news feed or Friendfeed — on the web. He also tells me about the increasing number of application programming interfaces for third-party developers, and how maybe one day there’ll be APIs that let him create multimedia widgets featuring his favorite Russian rock band.
VentureBeat: There’s been a lot of talk about sites like Friendfeed, that let you see what your friends are up to across the web, on various services. Do you think this is a standalone company, or will large networks dominate, sites like Facebook that also have feeds?
When there’s a powerful network affect, then there’s not a lot of room for more than one winner. You have a winner that wins big, then also-rans that occupy niches. Its unclear to me whether that’s exactly how it is in Friendfeed’s case — but it’s clear that the news feed within Facebook has a very powerful network effect.
Right now, I’m not sure whether [Friendfeed's] service adds so much value that it essentially stands alone [although Max notes he hasn't been focused on studying Friendfeed, and may be wrong]. Any one of the sites that appears in a feed can also offer its own feed.
There’s a network effect of users, and a separate network effect of aggregated sources. I think I’m more drawn to users than sources. If I see what you’re up to on Facebook but I don’t see your updates on Flickr, I’ll still care about Facebook.
If there’s doubts about the genius of Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook's founder and chief executive], then the feed is proof that he has something gray between his ears that ticks pretty well.
[Facebook was the first large social network to introduce the feed concept, and it has since been widely emulated by social networks and other sites.]
VB: Nearly every web company seems to be launching their own application programming interface, to let other services in one way or another interact its data and features. While the significance isn’t yet clear, these APIs are creating new business models, ways of filtering lots of information and standards for helping lots of services to interoperate. [Check out this post by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb for more on that.]. What impact do you see this movement having?
It’s obviously pretty cool but the reason it matters is because the web is becoming more centralized. We’re becoming slaves to our social networks — and that’s not a bad thing. You like your favorite networks, so do you friends, and pretty soon you have market winners.
It doesn’t change the fact that even the largest are still young and in need of help. That can mean not just throwing sheep in Facebook, but doing it on other sites.
But it gets more complicated, and lawyers are helping these companies define how to help users how to do things like revenue sharing and data sharing across networks. To some degree, it has to do with the culture and the mores of the social network? Maybe a network wants to maintain privacy to the degree that they don’t share information with other sites like that.



Internet traffic measurement company ComScore will release data showing that slideshow company
It has a reach of 117 million unique viewers, around 13.8 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience. By contrast, competitor 
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.
The funding also included previous investors, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund.