WebProNews

Last week, three German entrepreneurs invested in Facebook, and they presumably supported the company's $15 billion valuation by doing so.  Now there's word that Slide has received $50 million in funding, and its worth is estimated to be around $550 million.

Slide makes many of the applications found on Facebook and other social networks; generally speaking, we're not fond of these things.  Yet Slide's apps tend to be more polished and less ridiculous than some of the others we've seen, and apps on the whole are growing in popularity, regardless.

On that note, Sarah Lacy writes, "Slide needs to build a jaw-droppingly huge audience - so huge that advertisers will see Slide as a way of advertising across the hottest Web sites in one move, versus advertising on each of those places."  She later adds, "According to comScore data for October, Slide ranked ninth in terms of its reach on the Web, right after Amazon.com.  Its applications had 150 million unique users, an increase of 142% over the previous year."

So it looks like, initial reactions aside, Slide's funding and valuation aren't entirely insane.  Also, since Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price were behind the funding, we're all the more inclined to put away the straitjackets.  The U.S. economy is undeniably shaky, however, and we're not sure that many people or companies are going to mimic this development anytime soon.