Vasanth Sridharan at Silicon Alley Insider had an interesting conversation with Keith Rabois, VP of Strategy and Business Development at Slide. In their discussion Keith suggested that Slide will no longer be developing new applications on the Facebook platform. Instead the company will be focusing on how to build out their existing applications and monetize them more effectively. This is a significant development.

Keith also suggested that due to the new profile redesign it is going to be more challenging for new applications to gain traction. The largest applications that Slide has are Fun Wall and Top Friends. Super Poke comes in at a distant third. It’s strange to hear that the company will stop focusing on new applications and begin focusing on their core apps. One would imagine that the company would leverage these applications to distribute users to other applications.

Having a constant flow of users enables the company to test new applications. Even if an application isn’t successful they can try again thanks to the millions of active daily users on their existing applications. Apparently it’s time to focus on monetization but can the company figure out a way to effectively monetize Fun Wall and Top Friends, applications which are essentially features more then anything else? I am doubtful but perhaps the company has some bigger plans such as their newly released Slide TV.

My guess is that the company is going to focus on building their core site rather than external applications given the soon to be released Friends Connect service on Facebook and competing services by MySpace and Google. Do you think this spells trouble for the Facebook platform? Considering Slide is the largest Facebook application developer, I think it definitely spells trouble.