Silicon Alley Insider: Slide Says It's Done Releasing New Facebook Apps

"Slide, the company that makes Facebook's most popular apps, says it's done making new ones for the social network. Keith Rabois, VP of strategy and business development, told us this week that the company wants to concentrate on making the existing apps like FunWall and Top Friends better -- and ultimately figure out how to generate real money from them.

To us, this sounded like Toyota announcing that it's keeping its current lineup stable, so it can make better Corollas. But we double-checked with Keith, to make sure we hadn't misunderstood him: Yup, he said -- we're going to work on improving our existing Facebook products, not making new ones.

Read between the lines here, and you can see a slightly different story: Slide is saying that the great Facebook app landgrab, which kicked off a year ago, is over. And it's ended up with the best property.

Wait a minute. Isn't there unlimited real estate in cyberspace? Sure, theoretically. But Facebook is going to launch a massive overhaul that will ultimately make it harder for new applications to get the same kind of traction their predecessors did, because it will be harder to “go viral.” Rabois insists that the redesign hasn't had an effect on Slide's thinking. But..."