A RockYou representative wrote in an email to WebProNews, "RockYou . . . have entered into a five year agreement to make Facebook credits the exclusive virtual currency in their social games and applications."

That’s good news for Facebook.  The average person may not find RockYou’s apps quite as addictive as Zynga’s infamous FarmVille, but it’s nonetheless likely that this arrangement will cause quite a few users to give Facebook Credits a try.

As for what RockYou gets out of the deal, its representative explained, "As is standard for all developers on Facebook, RockYou will receive 70 percent of the revenue from Facebook Credits."

Lisa Marino, RockYou’s chief revenue officer, then stated, "As users adopt Credits, there may be a great opportunity for us to increase revenue from both a virtual goods and advertising perspective."

It should be interesting to see if any (or many) other developer outfits try to pursue similar deals with Facebook in response.

After recently banking $50 million on widget maker Slide, VCs are back, this time investing $35 million in rival RockYou.

The $35 million likely brings RockYou’s valuation under fellow widget maker Slide’s, which was $550 million in its last $50 million round from two private equity funds. It’s also less than a reported $50-$70 million on a $400 million valuation that RockYou was supposedly seeking. An insider spun this difference in valuation with Slide as a positive thing, though, telling us it would make RockYou a more digestible acquisition target.

$550 million valuation for a widget builder? With widgets still somewhat unproven as a marketing channel, could this be a bubble? Have you had success marketing with widgets? Leave a comment. Thanks!

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Popular "personal media network" Slide.com tripled its traffic, growing from 312,000 unique US visitors to 1.1 million since distributing apps on Facebook, an increase of 265 percent. Globally, daily unique visitors jumped from 753,000 to 2.3 million, an increase of 207 percent.

"Just six weeks into Facebook’s open platform initiative, we are seeing striking results," said Konrad Feldman, co-founder and CEO, Quantcast Corporation.

"The Facebook platform is driving substantial incremental traffic to application publishers’ Web sites, as consumers find new routes to exploring their wares."

Self-esteem regulation site HotOrNot.com doubled its daily unique visitors, increasing in the US from 182,000 to 350,000 (up 98%), and increasing from 289,000 globally to 722,000 (152%).

"Like many publishers, we have had a great response from the Facebook community," said James Hong, co-founder, HOTorNOT. "We are thrilled that in addition to distributing our application, Facebook’s open platform is helping us introduce our Web site to the next generation of Internet users."

RockYou, a distributer of "self-expression" widgets, spiked 228 percent in the US, and 339 percent globally, increasing, in total, from 286,000 visitors to 1.3 million.

"Facebook has been an instrumental platform to leverage our applications (widgets) and viral growth expertise," said Jia Shen, CTO and co-founder, RockYou. "We’ve been able to successfully create the deep social experiences we are committed to. Already, 30% of user profiles on Facebook showcase a RockYou application.

"The recent explosion of user-generated content has helped create a worldwide marketplace for widgets," said Linda Boland Abraham, executive vice president at comScore.  "comScore is excited to be providing measurement for this developing content medium."

comScore examined the top ten widgets worldwide and found that photo related widgets were the most popular. In April 2007, Slide was the most popular widget provider with a global reach of over 117 million unique viewers and 13.8 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience. Other popular photo related widgets included RockYou (82 million viewers), PictureTrail (31 million viewers), and Photobucket (28 million viewers).

"We are excited to see comScore’s report, which validates the enormous reach of the widget economy," said Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Slide. "This report will help to demonstrate the importance of widgets to advertisers and publishers."

In April, widget penetration was highest in North America where 40.3 percent of Internet users visited a Web site with an embedded widget, Western Europe was second with 24.3 percent followed by Latin America with 17.5 percent.

The news comes on the heels of MySpace’s deal to buy Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. The acquisition of Flektor is reported to be a smaller deal worth between $10-$20 million.

The deal could have negative implications for similar sites such as Slide and RockYou. VentureBeat raises the point,"While both Slide and RockYou have huge user-bases, they also depend heavily on social networking giant MySpace and other sites."

"MySpace has made it abundantly clear that it is happy to pull the plug on widgets that lose its favor. If a Slide or RockYou try to push more advertising, and compete head-on with one of MySpace’s new properties (Photobucket, and potentially Flektor), MySpace may try to snuff them."

The Flektor founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin co-founded game developer Naughty Dog, creators of Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter before selling the company to Sony Computer Entertainment in 2000.

TechCrunch views the acquisition of Flektor as odd since Photobucket also offers a slide creation product which means the two would be competing against each other. But they add, "Flektor is custom code built on Flex, whereas Photobucket’s competing offering is built with Adobe’s tools. If Adobe decided to compete directly in this space, MySpace will be in a better position owning their own code."

"The acquisition also makes sense from a strategic standpoint. MySpace has massive distribution as the largest site on the Internet. Photobucket brings storage to the table, and the Flektor team looks to be able to create awesome tools for users to create content. The three services actually fit together nicely."