Turns out you don't need $999.99 to get the "I Am Rich" app for your iPhone after all. Gone from Apple's iTunes App Store, it's available free on Cracked Apps, blog linking to pirated, generic versions of Armin Heinrich's useless widget and other less useless apps too. Haklabs just put Hakstore, which does much the…

Today at its F8 developers' conference, Facebook will announce a plan to give favored widgets more abilities to promote themselves on the site. The first two apps to get "preferred" status will be Causes and iLike. What does being a "preferred" widgetmaker mean? A source tells us that in the short term, Facebook will…

Bitter widgetmakers may want you to believe venture capital for the Facebook platform is all dried up, but don't believe it. Not when there's visionaries like former AOL CEO Steve Case still around. Case has joined a $5 million funding round led by Grotech Ventures for widgetmaker Living Social. Living Social builds…

Facebook will follow its F8 developers conference this Wednesday with another 8-hour "hackathon" for third-party developers and Facebook engineers to work on widgets. This will be fun to watch, because those two groups kind of despise each other right now. Last spring, Facebook began taking a hardline stance against…

Over the past month, Facebook has shown itself to have a quicker trigger when it comes to banning applications from its site for rule violations. It's part of the reason, observers say, that venture capital for Facebook-app startups is slowing down. The punished include apps from major developers RockYou and Slide.…

Facebook will not launch a payments system for its platform application developers at the upcoming F8 conference. Inside Facebook says though Facebook engineers are working on a system, it just won't be ready in time — even though Facebook began asking developers to participate in a payments beta test last December. …

They can't say they didn't have it coming. But widgetmakers are angry all the same about Facebook's decision to clone Slide's Top Friends application as a feature in its latest redesign. "It would be insane for a new developer" to begin creating new apps the platform now, says an executive at one of the many…

If you're the application developer and they're the platform owner, you have to know death can come at any moment: Create a popular, simple application, and the platform owner might just rip you off in their next release. It's happened to Max Levchin's Slide, maker of the popular Facebook widget Top Friends. With its…

Widgetmaker RockYou acquired Pieces of Flair and Speed Racing, applications which, according to Facebook's directory, see about 432,042 and 190,441 daily active users. Terms of the deals weren't disclosed, but an industry insider says RockYou probably paid $1 million for Speed Racing and $2 million for Pieces of…

Facebook's third-most popular widget, Slide's Top Friends, is back after Facebook suspended it on June 26. (The offense: displaying Top Friends' users birthdays and other private information that wouldn't normally be visible on Facebook.) What took so long? Following the suspension, Slide wanted to call its apps the…

Facebook released its schedule for its second annual F8 developers' conference on July 23. Facebook's servile, so-called independent developers have three tracks to choose from: "User Experience," "Technical," and "Business." If you work for a Facebook widgetmaker, you're probably confused, because who among you…

On Wednesday, Facebook and MySpace users who have installed Slide's near-ubiquitous SuperPoke widget — the one that lets you throw sheep — will be able to send messages branded with characters and slogans from VH1's stable of reality series such as Flavor Flav from Flavor of Love. It's all an effort to promote the new…