Facebook, chums splash cash at social network wannabes

Jump onto my Web-2.0 love train ... bitch

Facebook, Zynga and Amazon.com formed a pact with venture capital outfit Kleiner Perkins and a brace of media outlets yesterday, in a $250m effort to fund social media startups.

The group, which also includes Comcast, Liberty Media and investment bank Allen & Co, has been dubbed “sFund”.

It will cough up cash, legal help and capital for Mark Zuckerberg wannabes.

Facebook’s boydroid CEO told reporters at his company’s Silicon Valley headquarters yesterday that now was the perfect time for investment in social media, as the brown stream of Web2.0 continued to splatter onto the interwebs.

"There's going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it," Zuckerberg said, reports Reuters.

According to Facebook, more than 70 per cent of its stalkers users play around with apps, some of which came under scrutiny earlier this week for riding roughshod over online privacy.

"We're at the beginning of a new era for social internet innovators who are re-imagining and reinventing a web of people and places, looking beyond documents and websites," said Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers partner John Doerr.

"There's never been a better time than now to start a new social venture." ®