Mark Zuckerberg announced today at the TechCrunch40 conference that Facebook, Accel Partners and The Founders Fund (the latter two are the main investors in FaceBook) have teamed up to start a $10 million dollar fund specifically targeted at those startups that are building FaceBook apps. The fund will invest anywhere between $25,000 to $250,000 in said startups.

Now do not get me wrong, I think it is fantastic that there are more funds being created to provide financial support for more startups, I mean the more the merrier, bring them all on. With that being said, I have to raise question as to what the monetization model is for this startups that are specifically building Facebook apps. On the surface, I completely understand why it is important to businesses to have a Facebook app, it provides a solid distribution channel for you to get your product out there. If implemented properly, it will drive traffic back to your site, thereby increasing your revenues (whether you are a CPM business or a premium services business). But for a company to funded solely for building a Facebook app makes me scratch my head.

If I am not mistaking, to date, no one has really turned a profit from any Facebook apps, aside from those that have sold themselves off to larger corporate entities (I believe that one was sold to a travel company for $3 million, man I would have loved to have been part of that). Aside from that, no one else seems to have found the silver bullet. Now I know that the F8 platform is still in it’s infancy, and Facebook itself is still trying to figure out how best to monetize what they have, but I cannot help but to be a bit pessimistic on companies getting funded that’s sole purpose is to build a Facebook app. Perhaps they know something that the rest of us do not, only time will tell. I wish both the investors and all the companies that they fund the best of luck and I hope that they prove me wrong.

The second installment of StartupWeekend has been launched (in beta form) compliments of the folks in Toronto. They pulled it off, they started with a bunch of good ideas, settled on LobbyThem, and were off to the races.

So what is LobbyThem you might ask? Well, according to their blog:

Now an individual can have the same power over their politicians as the most powerful lobbyists. Lobbythem.com will allow 1 person to pose the question that they want their elected officials to act on.

People will be able to go online and either search to see if their issue has already been posed or, if it hasn’t, have the opportunity to pose it and see if others agree. Once any issue reaches a pre-determined threshold (developed now at 100), it will be forwarded to the relevant politician for comment and action.

Politicians respond to things that will endanger their continuance as your elected official.

This is so exciting on so many levels. My hat goes off to the team in Toronto, I know that they put their all into it and got it to beta in a weekend. I am sure that there were many lessons learned along the way that will be applied to future startupweekends, and I cannot wait for us to leverage what they have done as well as the other upcoming weekends that will be going before DC.

Just 5 more weeks and we will be firing up the engine room here in DC and showing the world what we can do in a weekend.