Widgetmaker Slide hired AOL's former director of national sales, Jason Bitensky, and opened a New York office in the West Village, Kara Swisher reports. Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin says his company followed the bright lights to the big city because

Linking up social websites, as proponents of "data portability" would have us do, can be hazardous to your privacy. And Paris Hilton's, and Lindsay Lohan's. But even the widgets on a single social network can leave us exposed. SuperPoke, a popular application made by Slide, will show you who's thrown a sheep at…

While people are busy complaining about Facebook's "Orwellian" redesign, you won't hear a peep from Doug Sherrets, who works in business development at widgetmaker Slide. Why? We hear Sherrets and Julia Lam, who works in platform product marketing for Facebook, are now — as Facebook profilespeak would have it — "in…

Slide founder Max Levchin believes Web 2.0 is about to bust. Funding will evaporate and revenues won't materialize; companies will fold and employees will lose their jobs. The lucky few that can will sellout to larger companies. All of which means "this is the perfect time to start a company," Levchin told the …

The bad news? While a few startup stars like Twitter and Slide can get venture cash on little or no revenue, the expiration date on your "it's [blank] with a social network layer" pitch may be well past. "There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two," Battery Ventures partner Roger Lee told the…

Before PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin moved from Illinois to Palo Alto in 1998, he'd started three companies and sold the last for $100,000 — not a tiny amount of money, especially for a young entrepreneur. But after selling PayPal to eBay for $1.54 billion, these days Levchin is worth around $100 million. Six…

Little-known MySpace "cofounder" Kyle Brinkman announced new rules for application developers on the social network's platform today. They're meant to prevent the spam bubble Facebook went through after it launched its platform last year. In response, Facebook tightened up its rules, and offended developers in the…

Kongregate, a sort of YouTube for Flash games backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos as well as Greylock Partners, will adapt some of its 4,500 games to Facebook's platform this week, Kongregate CEO Jim Greer told Inside Social Games. Kongregate makes money, or tries to, through advertising it shares with third-party…

This decade's greatest Internet hits — Google and PayPal — make so much money because they help money change hands more efficiently. The next great wave of moneymakers on the Web won't be nearly so utilitarian, Keith Rabois, VP at widgetmaker Slide, argues in a guest post to AllThingsD. Rabois says the Web's next…

Max Levchin, the cofounder of PayPal and the CEO of Slide, measures nearly everything, down to the optimum price to pay for an engagement ring. If he needs a metric for self-importance, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's new book about Web 2.0, provides one. He occupies 78 out of 294 pages, more than…

Hidden in Fortune editor Andy Serwer's stream-of-capitalism blog was this nugget: Slide CEO Max Levchin will soon wed longtime girlfriend Nellie Minkova. Minkova, pictured here with Levchin, works at Clarium Capital Management, the hedge fund of Peter Thiel, Levchin's cofounder at PayPal. For more of Minkova, see…

For the past two days, only applications from Max Levchin's Slide have appeared in MySpace's featured application page. Smaller developers asked why, the Social Times reports, and found out it's because Slide pays. On the order of around $50,000 to $100,000 per week, these developers say. Facebook does not charge…

Facebook's redesign — originally planned for early April, but delayed due to objections from widgetmakers like RockYou, Slide, and Zynga — is no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. Third-party developers have hijacked it. A source close to the redesign process tells us "Facebook has made some changes to the…

Worried about an upcoming recession, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin told News.com that his company, Slide, is "trying to shift away from advertising partially" and go "direct to consumers" for its revenues. "It cuts out one more party from the equation," Levchin said. "During a recession time you don't have to worry…

When we ran screenshots of Facebook's new profile pages back in late February, what you saw was a classic Mark Zuckerberg production. A source close to Facebook tells us the profile redesign was Zuckerberg's pet project, his baby. Well, that baby is dead.

The likely closure of troubled online retailer RedEnvelope has a benefit for space-hungry startups near its SoMa headquarters at 149 New Montgomery. Yelp and Slide are among the rapidly expanding companies in the neighborhood. I asked Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman if he was going to swoop in on the space. "I wish…

SuperPoke is worth $13 million according to Facebook application tracker Adonomics. The site awards applications like Slide's Top Friends and RockYou's SuperWall values in the tens of millions of dollars — which provides some of the basis for the 9-digit figures that Slide has commanded, and RockYou hopes to get, in…

In January a pair of money managers, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, bought 9.1 percent of Slide for $50 million. Fortune asks, "Are these widgets worth half a billion?" The mag doesn't come up with anything more than "maybe," but I'm willing to go a little further. Slide worth $550 million? No, despite its huge traffic…