Andreessen-Horowitz just invested a $7 million first round of funding in IFTTT today, a company that lets you command the Internet like an organizational wizard.

IFTTT stands for “if this then that,” and lets anyone set up a set of various commands that helps them organize their lives online. Seed investor Mike Maples explained it to VentureBeat like this:

“With IFFT, you can create these recipes. If the weather drops, program it to send me a text message in the morning to bundle up. If I receive an attachment in gmail, put it in my dropbox. If i take a photo on Instagram, put it in my dropbox. If I tweet, put it on Facebook.”

The company said in a statement that it will use the funding to create new ways for people to use IFTTT on mobile devices, “simplify the design,” and build a platform upon which people can build more “channels.” For example, Facebook could build tools on top of IFTTT for its users.

Andreessen-Horowitz investor John O’Farrell explained IFTTT in a blog post as “digital duct tape,” being able to connect and weave all your apps together. O’Farrell joins the board of IFTTT with this investment and says while the team is a small one — seven people — the technology is important as the things in our home become “connected.” He envisions a day when his refrigerator texts him every time he needs milk and says IFTTT will be there to facilitate that connection when fridges become smart.

IFTTT was launched in 2010, and is based in San Francisco, Calif. Other investors participating in the round include NEA and Lerer Ventures.

hat tip All Things D; Orb image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Platform-as-a-Service is part of the booming cloud computing sector, one area of the cloud that some analysts, companies, and developers have overlooked. But recent research shows that PaaS is no longer the ugly duckling of the cloud industry — and that it’s ready to grow quite a bit during the next few years.

PaaS will make up barely 1 percent of the overall $109 billion cloud industry this year. But it will likely grow more than 30 percent annually over the next four years, according to research firm Gartner.

This could make PaaS a $2.9 billion market by 2016, or more than 2 percent of the $209 billion total cloud market. While small, it’s the second fastest growing “layer” of the cloud and one that cloud-watchers should be paying closer attention to.

What is PaaS?

Like many things dubbed cloud, PaaS is a term that sometimes get lost in technobabble or marketing jargon. So let’s break down what PaaS actually is.

The cloud features four main layers, according to Gartner: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, and Business Process-as-a-Service (IaaS, Paas, SaaS, and BPaaS,).

IaaS companies such as Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, and Joyent offer the core infrastructure and virtual servers that host applications and data. This is where the heavy iron sits, such as storage, servers, and so on. The SaaS category, meanwhile, lies on the opposite end: It includes applications that companies deliver exclusively via the web (rather than desktop apps). These include apps such as Google Docs, Salesforce CRM, Workday, Box, Taleo, and NetSuite that enterprise workers rely on. BPaaS includes business process services like advertising or payments.

PaaS sits in-between IaaS and SaaS, providing an environment for developers and companies to host and deploy applications more easily. Simply put, PaaS companies shield developers from the hassle of setting up, configuring, and managing things like servers and databases, so that they don’t have to see the infrastructure side.

What makes PaaS so attractive is that it can improve the speed of developing an app, save you money, and maybe most important, let you focus on innovating your application and business. Major PaaS providers include Salesforce (Heroku), Google (App Engine), and Microsoft (Azure).

In the diagram below, you can see how PaaS fits into the main layers of the cloud:

Boom time

In terms of size, SaaS, IaaS, and BPaaS far outstrip PaaS. In 2012, PaaS revenues ($1.2 billion) will be a tenth of the size of SaaS ($14.4 billion), a fifth of IaaS ($6.2 billion), and just a tiny fraction of BPaaS ($84.1 billion).

However, when it comes to year-over-year growth of the PaaS segment itself, it looks quite nice.

Research firm IDC breaks down the market slightly differently than Gartner and is more bullish on PaaS. It estimates that the worldwide public PaaS market will grow from $2.6 billion in 2011 to $9.8 billion in 2016. That represents 30.9 percent annualized growth.

By 2016, IDC believes public PaaS will account for 8.5 percent of overall app dev and deployment revenue, with “strong growth” occurring in every region of the world. Stephen Hendrick, IDC group vice president for application development and deployment research, calls PaaS’ future “exciting.”

Just this week, Salesforce COO George Hu said at DEMO Fall 2012 that its platform services have surpassed Salesforce’s CRM in terms of API calls per day. “The pace keeps me up at night,” he said. “Things are moving incredibly fast at Salesforce right now.”

Additionally, a recent survey by smaller PaaS provider Engine Yard, which had $28 million in revenue last year, indicates that PaaS adoption is on the rise with medium and large companies. Two out of three survey respondents said they already use or plan to use PaaS in the next two years. “Enterprise is beginning to bite,” Mark Gaydos, the Engine Yard SVP of marketing, told us at the time.

For more on how the market is growing, take a look at some of the biggest players:

Heroku

One of the largest players in the PaaS marketplace is Salesforce with Heroku, which has more than 2.3 million apps currently deployed on it. A year ago it had just 200,000. Heroku customers include Walmart, Macy’s, Activision Blizzard, and GroupMe.

“We see PaaS as a fundamental game changer,” Heroku chief operating officer Oren Teich told VentureBeat. “We’re looking at the base of innovation. We’ve only climbed 100 feet of a 3-mile-high mountain.”

Teich said he expects Heroku to host more than five million apps a year from now. He admits that he’s being cautious with that number and said it could potentially be more akin to six million or seven million apps if momentum really picks up. Salesforce would not reveal the revenue it generates from Heroku.

Google App Engine

Google and its App Engine is one of the earliest players in PaaS, opening its doors in “preview status” in April 2008 and officially leaving preview in November 2011.

Here, too, Google does not break down revenue it gets from App Engine. However, Google’s statistics show that usage of App Engine is growing quickly. At the Google I/O conference this past June, Google announced that it had more than 1 million active apps deployed on GAE and 250,000 active developers building on the platform. In May 2011, Google said it had 200,000 active apps and 100,000 active developers.

Half of the Internet’s IP addresses touch Google App Engine servers each week, a Google spokesperson recently told me. Some two trillion datastore operations are performed on it each month.

Microsoft Windows Azure

Thirdly, we have Microsoft and Windows Azure. Azure turned some heads in June by also starting to offer developers IaaS on top of its already strong PaaS product.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us that Azure has “tens of thousands” of customers and that Azure has doubled the number of its customers over the past 12 months. He said Microsoft has doubled compute capacity for Azure so it can meet demand and that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the world used in 1998.

“We’ve worked hard to keep up with demand the past two years,” Martin told us. “In the long term, PaaS will be most widely used for application development.”

Other players

The PaaS market also encompasses a number of smaller players, such as VMWare’s Cloud Foundry, AppFog, dotCloud, CloudBees, Engine Yard, Red Hat’s OpenShift, and Salesforce’s enterprise-oriented platform, Force.com.

AppFog has more than 60,000 apps hosted, up from 50,000 apps a month ago and 10,000 apps a year ago, according to AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson. AppFog also recently acquired Nodester, a PaaS that supports the popular Node.js programming environment.

Developers take control

The prospects for PaaS weren’t always so exciting. Redmonk analyst Steve O’Grady says that the earliest PaaS implementations — Salesforce’s Force.com, Google App Engine, Microsoft’s Azure — did not sell as well as the market expected.

“From an adoption standpoint, early PaaS largely failed,” O’Grady said. “Did Force.com and Google get users? Yes, but they did not live up to expectations.”

That said, a few barriers were stopping the mass market from buying in. First, many large enterprise companies don’t permit PaaS use. AppFog’s Carlson says that CIOs are often concerned about vendor lock-in and don’t like PaaS providers taking over functions the company could potentially set up on its own.

But developers go around their IT overlords and use PaaS services anyway. Because much of the technology is low-cost or open-source, developers say “screw it” because PaaS greatly improves their productivity and lowers project costs.

O’Grady says what the CIOs want doesn’t matter now that their developers have taken control. “They don’t have a choice,” he said.

The second barrier to Paas adoption? Not enough people know what PaaS can help their company accomplish. Heroku’s Teich said when he talks to developers and enterprises about PaaS, they don’t do much evaluation of their options or even know what the options are. Basically, they are woefully uneducated.

“Developers have a lot of preconceived notions about which PaaS they should use,” Teich said. “It’s another sign that PaaS is something that has a lot of growth potential.”

If you feel like you need a PaaS education, come join us for the CloudBeat 2012 conference on Nov. 28 and 29 in Redwood City, Calif. We look forward to seeing you there.

Clouds photo via Nicholas A. Tonelli/Flickr

Cloud breakdown slide via “Windows Azure Platform: Cloud Development Jump Start” via Microsoft

As far as user milestones go, 20,000 is usually nothing to boast about. But for App.net, a nascent for-charge social platform, the modest achievement means the company can reduce its prices.

App.net is a Twitter-like social network where consumers pay to post in an ad-free environment. It’s also a framework that allows developers to not only build applications as they see fit but also make some moolah in the process. The service launched in beta two months ago following a successful Kickstarter-style funding campaign.

“The membership of App.net is just about to cross the 20,000 user level, which creates some economies of scale for us,” founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell penned in a blog post. “Because of this momentum and scale, we’ve decided to introduce a couple of updates to our pricing model.”

From here on out, App.net members can opt to pay $5 per month or $36 a year. Previously, the startup offered one member-tier plan that cost $50 per year. Members who paid the $50 free are being gifted a few additional months of service.

Unfortunately for App.net developers, who pay $100 per year to build applications, the discounts aren’t open to them. Last week, however, the company rolled out a developer incentive program to begin rewarding the best app-markers with cash for their machinations.

There are currently 10 App.net iOS apps, three Android applications, one Windows Phone app, four Mac desktop clients, and several browser plugins, Caldwell said.

Photo credit: timparkinson/Flickr

Fresh off a stellar second quarter earnings report, the professional social network LinkedIn has today released new developer tools and resources in an effort to stimulate application development and supply its service with enough content to keep members continually engaged on its web and mobile platforms.

LinkedIn sign-in experience

In the form of developer tools, LinkedIn has released a refreshed sign-in with LinkedIn experience, a reworked share API to give developers more exposure on LinkedIn, and a cleaner, simpler developer website. The company has also revised its developer terms of service.

Specifically, the sign-in experience, which appears to be modeled after the screens used by Twitter and Facebook, has been improved with a new design and enables developers to request email addresses from the people who want to log in with LinkedIn. The screen now shows users exactly what types of data the application in question may access. The upgrade should encourage more publishers and mobile app makers to add a log in with a LinkedIn option.

The spruced-up share API is equally important as it gives approved devlopers exposure inside LinkedIn. The API has been updated with an attribution element so that should a LinkedIn member opt to share a piece a content to the site, the publisher will receive credit in the form of a “via” link listed atop the post.

The message from LinkedIn today is this: Come build your media-rich applications on LinkedIn and integrate with us, and we’ll put your content in front of 175 million people. In return, LinkedIn gets content flowing into its network that should further engage its members who, especially on mobile, are consuming it even more rabidly with each passing month.

Head of API platform product and strategy Madhu Gupta summed up the intent of the changes: “We’re now making it even easier for our developer community to use LinkedIn as their main distribution platform for discussing and sharing professional content.”

You can read that statement as LinkedIn wanting to be the single place where business folks go to get, discuss, and share news. And really, this is all about content, as evidenced by developer tool launch partners WordPress, Flipboard, and Business Insider.

Content will be the thing that keeps LinkedIn relevant on mobile. CEO Jeff Weiner said as much to investors last week. Content is driving especially high engagement rates in LinkedIn’s iPad application, where the company is starting to experiment with advertisements, he said. “We are seeing encouraging signs of engagement as more than half the page views on the app are being generated by content-focused products such as updates, news and groups.”

LinkedIn also wants to be seen as having a platform as robust as any other. Twitter and Facebook, even amid a wave of recent criticism and growing tension with developers, sit very much atop the platform hierarchy. LinkedIn’s platform offerings seem at best tertiary when pitted against Twitter and Facebook, which have their sign-in buttons embedded everywhere.

One of the major issues with the mobile ecosystem today is that developers are still separated from the app store, insists Zynga founder Mark Pincus.

“We need to be more interconnected with each other as an industry,” Pincus said at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat-GamesBeat 2012 conference in San Francisco. “We need channels so that many more games can be discovered.”

Currently, the market breeds fear in independent developers. They fear betting on an app and losing their entire business. App store channels are one of the main issues facing these developers. If you don’t get your app on one of the top 25 lists, it faces falling into the no-discovery-depths of the app store. The frustrating part? Some of the apps that make it into the top 25 lists pay their way in with various marketing strategies as opposed to organic growth. Pincus is calling upon platforms such as Apple and Google to serve the consumer and promote apps that grow naturally.

This type of manipulation of the app store is scary to larger scale companies as well. These bigger guys want to make sure they can be profitable while distributing their resources to the many different app ecosystems. Zynga looks at this type of success as the “90/10″ philosophy. That is, the company will begin to put a lot of resources on a game when it sustains 10 million daily active users in a 90-day period. Zynga is obviously putting a lot of those resources into mobile after its $200 million acquisition of Draw Something, but there’s still some hesitation.

“Facebook has been there [fueling 90/10 games] for awhile,” Pincus said. “Apple hasn’t fully gotten there yet.”

It’s a song we’ve heard over and over again, but developers are calling out for an opening of the industry. The lines of communication need to be broader, collaboration deeper. Pincus suggests we start by concentrating more on the content of our apps, as opposed to the platform. Pincus’ idea is “north star is social,” saying that the company is built on user retention and that retention is built on social. Nowhere in there does he mention platform.

“We want to isolate this to be more about great design, great mechanics, and great marketing,” Pincus said. “Less about if you picked Adobe Air, or HTML5, or native code, of Facebook, or Apple.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It is shaping up to be a critical year for mobile tech.

If you’re tired of the endless iOS versus Android market share reports, take heart: There are new issues, and new challengers, making 2012′s mobile landscape more complex and more important than ever before.

Windows 8 is emerging as a viable threat to the iPad, while Android tablets continue to struggle. Google and Facebook are continuing to square off for domination of social interactions on your phone. And several mobile payments services, including Google Wallet, Isis, and PayPal’s offerings, are hoping to replace your credit card. More than ever, platforms are fighting to get and maintain a share of what you carry with you every day.

Meanwhile, the years-long iPhone versus Android battle has reached a bit of a standstill. Android continues to dominate in terms of overall smartphones sold (though Apple had a particularly great fiscal first quarter), and Apple remains triumphant in terms of actually making money from its devices.

We’re going to be discussing all of the above, and more, at our second Mobile Summit next month in Sausalito, California. If you haven’t yet scored one of the 180 invitations to this exclusive event, here’s a glimpse of what we’re expecting for the next year in mobile platform wars.

Tablet wars: Episode 3

We’re now three years into the post-iPad tablet generation, and it seems like the competition is finally beginning to get interesting. After suffering through mostly lackluster Android tablets over the last few years, Microsoft has emerged as a surprisingly refreshing tablet competitor with Windows 8. (Check out our in-depth preview with an early Windows 8 tablet.)

As I’ve written before, Microsoft is taking its approach to tablets a step beyond Apple with Windows 8, something that the company made abundantly clear during its unveiling for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in Barcelona. Unlike Android or iOS, Windows 8 is a full-fledged desktop operating system, not just a souped-up mobile OS on a bigger screen. Microsoft is positioning Windows 8 as its OS approach for all computers in the next decade, not just tablets.

Indeed, Microsoft can show Android tablets a thing or two. Google has said that it’s going to be focusing even more on tablets this year, but I think the bigger problem for the search giant is its fundamental misunderstanding of tablets. They’re not just bigger mobile devices, as Android tablets initially were. Instead, tablets are more akin to PCs, thanks to their bigger screens and support for peripherals like keyboards.

The confusingly named new iPad will likely continue to dominate the tablet market (and the now-cheaper iPad 2 won’t do Android tablets any favors either). But Microsoft has a good shot at snagging the second-place spot this year — if it can keep Windows 8 tablets cheap and keep computer makers from ruining its shiny new OS with bloatware.

Facebook and Google battle for your smartphone

One of the biggest reveals from Facebook’s S-1 filing (its first step towards an IPO) was the huge risk that mobile represented for the social networking giant. Facebook said it had an impressive 425 million users accessing through mobile, but at the time it didn’t have a way to monetize them. To address that problem, Facebook recently revealed its mobile ad plan, and it looks a lot like Twitter’s: sponsored posts within your friend stream (see the screenshot to the left).

Google, meanwhile, is still trying to coax consumers into Google+, but it will likely have less trouble making a buck from them. I expect to see sponsored posts from Google+ as well, but knowing Google’s ad mastery, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had some surprises up its sleeves.

There’s no doubt that mobile is the next big goal for social networking dominance. You can look to the rise of other mobile-only social networks, like Instagram and Foursquare, as one major indicator. And unless you’re Google, you’d be crazy to take on Facebook head-on when it comes to launching a mainstream social network (LinkedIn and Twitter have been successful by focusing on things completely different from Facebook).

Last year, Facebook launched its innovative Timeline feature, and Google officially launched Google+. With the initial ground laying already done on the desktop side, expect both social networks to spend more time and energy perfecting their mobile experience.

Battle for your mobile wallet

After years of hype, we’ll finally begin to see mobile payments become a reality in 2012. PayPal is expanding its payments program to all Home Depot stores, and it’s gearing up to show off its long-awaited mobile wallet app at South-by-Southwest in a few days. Google Wallet will make its way to even more Android phones, and the carrier-backed Isis will continue to piece together its mobile payments platform.

2012 will also mark the first time most consumers get their hands on mobile payments offerings. Many have dabbled in mobile payments with Starbucks’ uber popular mobile app, but that’s a relatively simple solution. It’ll be interested to see if complete mobile wallets — which will not only handle payments, but also keep track of your purchases, loyalty cards, and wrangle special offers — actually take off with mainstream consumers.

More so than the other platform battles, there’s a ton of money at stake in mobile payments. Juniper, for example, predicts mobile payments to hit a whopping $670 billion by 2015 (with about $74 billion of that being NFC payments).

Since we’re at such a nascent stage, any mobile payment success helps to legitimize the field, according to Isis CEO Michael Abbott. In an interview with VentureBeat at the Mobile World Congress, Abbott said he didn’t think the mobile wallet war actually existed, since all mobile payments solutions are fighting against payment options consumers are already used to.

Looking ahead to VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit and MobileBeat

Our second invite-only Mobile Summit is just three weeks away, where we’ll also be exploring mobile in the enterprise, mobile media, and user acquisition. We’re holding our fifth annual MobileBeat conference on July 10-11 in San Francisco, which will open up the discussion to an even wider audience.

Stay tuned as we explore the shifting mobile landscape, both on this very website and through our conferences.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

He’s about a week late, but Google’s Android head Andy Rubin has finally responded in a blog post to claims that the platform is becoming less open now that Google is reportedly exerting more control over how manufacturers use Android and is delaying the availability of Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” to smaller developers.

Rubin’s defense of Android’s open source status is to be expected, since it’s one of Android’s biggest advantages over Apple’s closed iOS platform.

Rubin stresses that Google is operating the same way it always has with Android: It remains committed to releasing the platform’s source code when it’s ready, and he says that Google is following the “anti-fragmentation” program that has been put in place since the very first version of Android.

“We don’t believe in a ‘one size fits all’ solution,” he wrote, referring to the massive number of device types and form factors that Android now supports. He also denied that Google is working to standardize on a single Android chipset (rumors pointed to Google working with ARM).

Rubin goes on to say that the Android team is still working to bring Honeycomb’s features to phones and that its code will be released to the community once that happens. “This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types,” he said.

Still, Rubin didn’t respond to earlier claims that Google is prioritizing certain manufacturers (in this case Motorola and other Android 3.0 tablet makers) over others. That’s likely been happening for some time, especially since Google has been tapping different manufacturers for its flagship Nexus One (HTC) and Nexus S (Samsung) phones.

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. We’ve pretty much finalized the invite list, but have a few spots left. Request an invitation.

The controversy was sparked by Twitter’s purchase of Atebits, the company that created a mobile version of Twitter called Tweetie, with Tweetie becoming the first official Twitter mobile app. Developers who had built their own mobile Twitter apps were concerned, and so were other developers who wondered if they might end up competing with Twitter, too.

Andreessen (pictured above) argued that developers are looking at things backward. They need to swing for the fences, aiming to build companies that will succeed even if Twitter builds something that competes with one of their products. The problem isn’t the fact that Twitter might compete with them, but rather that they’re not ambitious enough — at best, they’re building individual products rather than real companies, and in most cases they’re not even building real products, just features.

“That just doesn’t work regardless of what the platform vendor does,” Andreessen said. “At least not for a venture-backed company.”

The other speakers on Andreessen’s panel at f8, the Facebook developer conference, didn’t agree. Yelp chief executive chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman said you have to start out small and dependent on someone, then grow. And Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus (pictured right) said the problem may be intrinsic to Twitter, not the developers. Zynga is making lots of money from its Facebook games, but no one has repeated this success on Twitter, he said.

“I just don’t see the Twitter platform achieving scale for anyone but Twitter yet,” Pincus said. He added that the same seems to be true for Apple’s iPhone (a remark that mobile gaming companies like Ngmoco might dispute).

As for Facebook, Pincus said the social network has no obligation to protect Zynga by staying out of gaming. Instead, Facebook is building its platform out of self-interest — by opening the site and its social data to developers, Facebook sees that it can bring more innovative services to users.

“Facebook is on a mission, which is to provide the best social networking experience, and now even more broadly enable this social experience everywhere,” he said. “They’re not on a mission to make Zynga successful, or social gaming successful, or even developers successful.”

Facebook and Zynga have different goals, he added. While Pincus probably doesn’t want to compete with Facebook, if that happened, he said Zynga would compete by “going deeper into our own experience.”

So much, as Twitter CEO Evan Williams said of his company, for being a “force for good.” Last week, Twitter investor Fred Wilson speculated that Twitter would edge out third-party developers whose add-ons for the microblogging service merely filled feature holes that the company ought to have built itself. Then Twitter, which previously hadn’t developed its own mobile apps, bought Tweetie, a popular Twitter service for the iPhone, and released its own BlackBerry app.

I’m shocked, shocked that all of these announcements came right before Twitter’s big developer conference, Chirp, which opens in San Francisco Wednesday. Why? Pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire, another perennial optimist, said.

This is how building a platform for developers is much like running a casino. Some people may make money along the way, through luck or by accident. But the house always wins. And if you’re too successful, you get your chips cashed and you get walked out of the building.

People love to talk about the importance of being “open” — a key characteristic of a modern platform. Open, that is, to other people doing the work, like Tom Sawyer and his fence.

The real reason to build a platform is to boost your company’s valuation. An open application programming interface lets third-party developers donate their labor and ideas to the cause of enriching your investors. And through their creativity, investors get inspired about the potential to make money.

Want an example of this? Look no further than Facebook, which launched its developer platform in the summer of 2007 and was promptly hailed as the next big thing in computing. A few months later, Microsoft was hornswoggled into investing $240 million at a $15 billion valuation, which was far ahead of the company’s worth at the time. Microsoft, which has made so much money running its own platform for developers, would never have invested in a mere social network. But a next-generation computing platform? Sign them up!

True, some startups did make money in Facebook’s casino, like Slide and Zynga. But Facebook has done everything it can to take away the viral features that made those companies successful. Zynga’s $5 billion valuation, grown on the back of Facebook? Someone must have been counting cards. This way to the exit, gentlemen!

Twitter, by contrast, has done better in limiting its gamblers’ earnings. Come to think of it, has anyone built a large, meaningful business on Twitter? Plenty of Twitter developers have generated lots of noise and attention, and garnered some investment — often from the same venture capitalists who backed Twitter. But the best scenario they can hope for is a buyout by Twitter itself, as happened with Summize, a search engine, and Tweetie, the maker of a Twitter iPhone app.

That’s sort of like going from a high roller to a blackjack dealer. It’s hardly how entrepreneurs like to view themselves. But if you walk into a casino, you should be prepared to be taken.

Maybe next time, you’ll figure out that the real way to make money is to build your own.