The 26-year-old, a former Microsoft employee who helped put together the Windows Home Server product, founded a company called Esgut within months of the debut of Facebook's developer platform in May 2007. Esgut is a portfolio of Facebook applications, and a few of them, like Superlatives and Entourage, became genuine viral hits.

In April, Ali sold the 12-employee Esgut to the Social Gaming Network, a Silicon Valley company backed by the likes of Bezos Expeditions, the Founders Fund, and Greylock Partners. He said the price was in the seven figures.

But Ali is the first to acknowledge that for upstart social-platform developers, hailed just months ago as the Valley's hottest breed of bright young things, the condition has taken a significant turn for the worse.

"Most people are not counting on anything," the lanky and bespectacled Ali said over lunch at an organic restaurant near New York's Union Square in early December. "They're just operating from day to day."

When Facebook's developer platform launched, the social network's traffic began to really skyrocket. What had started as a no-frills networking site for students at elite universities became a Silicon Valley buzz factory with legitimate geek credentials. And however gimmicky many of the most popular Facebook Platform apps were, millions of people decided they now had a reason to join the site. The floodgates had opened. Facebook was a phenomenon.

When other social networks such as MySpace, Friendster, and Hi5 also paraded out developer platforms, the tech world took it as evidence that there was a big future in building platform applications. More importantly for developers and ambitious tech entrepreneurs, it looked like there could be gobs of money in it; the open, anyone-can-play attitude created the notion that there was enough for everyone.

"The social platform (on Facebook) actually launched the last day that I was at Microsoft...I was quitting without any idea of what I was going to do," Ali recalled. His aims for leaving Redmond were starry-eyed. "I left because I wanted to do a start-up. I wanted to see what I could do out there on my own. And I wanted to care deeply about what I was working on."

But he had no concrete plans to go the Facebook route initially, he said. "I ended up in my parents' house in Florida and was kind of bored, and started building Facebook apps just out of restlessness and the desire to do something."

Then, Ali continued, he went to the Graphing Social Patterns West conference in San Diego in March and met Social Gaming Network founder Shervin Pishevar. At the time, he was looking to raise venture funding but hadn't thought about selling his apps. "We talked for 30 minutes and he was like, 'You sound like the exact type of people we want at SGN.'"

Ali sold Esgut to Pishevar's company the next month.

Widgets buzz turns into hush

Ali got lucky. Even before the reality of the recession set in, the social-platform craze was subsiding. The venture capital buzz about widgets began to quiet over the summer. Some of the sillier novelty apps wore off in popularity. Companies that were snapping up small apps and raising huge amounts of venture capital, like Slide and RockYou, grew intimidatingly bigger--but the glut of independent apps made it more difficult to grab the attention of potential buyers.

And after new restrictions, a redesign, and then the social network's focus on expanding through its Facebook Connect log-in service, it became evident that a social-network platform is still a new phenomenon that can change dramatically, and not always to the benefit of little start-ups.

"There's definitely a lot of tightening up," Ali said. "There's a few people that I know that have apps that are relatively small, and they're selling them for valuations lower than what they could've sold them for a month ago, and there are just no buyers in the marketplace. I think they're going to have a hard time selling, period--forget trying to sell at a lower valuation. They're just having a hard time getting rid of them."

So would he still be able to sell his company as easily now? "No, probably not," Ali admitted. "If we were the same company we were then, it would be much harder to sell today. I think we would've had to evolve as a company. I think we would need to be generating more revenue than we were."

But for all his concern about the fate of social-platform developers in a recession, Ali is still strikingly bullish on Facebook--enough so that his newest project is a fund for Facebook stock. He started purchasing it in November, he said, and is meeting with investors in the hopes of purchasing more. He added with surprising gusto that Facebook's decision to delay direct cash-outs hasn't derailed his plan.

"I think that's actually good news for us," Ali said. "I think that means that the price that we pay will actually go down because there are all these employees who intended to sell stock back to Facebook, and now they're not going to be able to sell it to Facebook, (so) they'll have to sell it somewhere else."

He hopes to keep the stock until Facebook files for an initial public offering, and he still thinks that's on track, too. "I think it's going to be a function of the economy and when the markets open back up for an IPO," he said, and cited target dates that had been provided in interviews by Facebook investor and board member Jim Breyer. "From a Facebook perspective, I think it'll be ready to IPO in 2011."

Many critics would say that's wishful thinking, and that the company will sell--to existing investor Microsoft, maybe--for much lower than its $15 billion preferred-stock valuation.

But Ali got lucky on Facebook once already, and even in a recession he hasn't given up hope that it could happen again.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- After spending nearly 28 years in an irreversible coma, heiress and socialite Martha "Sunny" von Bulow died Saturday in a New York nursing home, according to a family statement. She was 76.

Von Bulow was subject of one of the nation's most sensational criminal cases during the 1980s.

Her husband, Claus, was accused of trying to kill her with an overdose of insulin, which prosecutors alleged sent her into the coma.

He was convicted of making two attempts on her life, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. He was acquitted in a second trial.

His retrial in 1985 received national attention.

"We were blessed to have an extraordinarily loving and caring mother," said the statement from Von Bulow's three children -- Annie Laurie "Ala" Isham, Alexander von Auersperg and Cosima Pavoncelli -- released by a spokeswoman. "She was especially devoted to her many friends and family members."

Martha von Bulow was born Martha Sharp Crawford into a wealthy family. She inherited a fortune conservatively estimated at $75 million, according to an article on the von Bulow case posted on truTV.com's Crime Library Web site.

In her early years, she drew comparisons to actress Grace Kelly.

She became known as Princess von Auersperg with her first marriage, to Prince Alfred von Auersperg of Austria. That marriage produced two children: Alexander and Annie Laurie.

The von Bulows married in 1966 and had a daughter, Cosima.

On the morning of December 22, 1980, family members found Martha von Bulow unconscious in the bathroom of the family's posh Newport, Rhode Island, home. She never regained consciousness.

She had been hospitalized a year earlier after lapsing into a coma but recovered, according to the Crime Library site. Doctors had diagnosed her with hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar.

Prosecutors accused Claus von Bulow of twice attempting to kill his wife by injecting her with insulin.

The case also led to a major motion picture, "Reversal of Fortune." Actor Jeremy Irons won an Oscar for his portrayal of Claus von Bulow.

Famed defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who won Claus von Bulow a new trial on appeal after his conviction, said in a statement Saturday that Martha von Bulow's death is "a sad ending to a sad tragedy that some members of her family tried to turn into a crime. We proved overwhelming[ly] that there was no crime and that the coma was self-induced. We saved his life, but could not save hers."

Claus von Bulow's defense team maintained that Martha von Bulow's alcohol use, among other factors, caused her coma.

Dershowitz said he had spoken with Claus von Bulow, who now lives in London, England. Claus von Bulow was saddened by his former wife's passing, Dershowitz said.

The family statement said Martha von Bulow is survived by her children, their spouses and nine grandchildren.

Alexander von Auersperg and Ala von Auersperg Isham, who had sided with prosecutors against Claus von Bulow, filed a civil suit against their stepfather after his acquittal. The case was settled out of court in 1987, according to a 2007 article in the Providence Journal newspaper in Rhode Island.

Claus von Bulow had agreed to waive his claim to his wife's money and to a divorce in exchange for the suit being dropped.

The von Bulows' daughter, Cosima, sided with her father.

Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne, who covered the von Bulow case, told the New York Daily News in 2007 that Sunny von Bulow was moved from Columbia Presbyterian hospital to a private nursing home in 1998.

Ala von Auersperg Isham served for a time as president of the Sunny von Bulow Coma and Head Trauma Research Foundation, according to the Providence Journal. An offshoot of that organization, the Brain Trauma Foundation, still operates in New York, the newspaper said.

The family statement notes that Martha von Bulow actively supported the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera and the J.P. Morgan Library in New York and the Preservation Society of Newport, Rhode Island.

A private memorial service will be held for family and friends in New York in the coming days, the family statement said Saturday, along with a private burial.

Worker productivity slowed in the summer while wage pressures increased, but both developments were better than expected and are unlikely to raise inflation alarms at the Federal Reserve.

The Labor Department reported Wednesday that productivity, the key ingredient for rising living standards, rose at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the July-September quarter. That's down from the 3.6 percent growth rate in the second quarter, but slightly higher than the 1.1 percent increase initially reported a month ago and better than the 0.9 percent rise economists expected.

Wage pressures, as measured by unit labor costs, rose at an annual rate of 2.8 percent, after having declined at a 2.6 percent rate in the second quarter. The rate of increase in the third quarter was the biggest jump since a 4.5 percent rate in the fourth quarter of last year, but was below the 3.6 percent advance originally reported and that economists expected.

The Fed closely monitors developments in productivity and wages to see if inflation is getting out of hand. But the central bank was likely to view the recent developments as temporary and not long-run trends.

Analysts had expected a big downward revision in productivity given the fact that overall output, as measured by the gross domestic product, was revised to show a decline of 0.5 percent at an annual rate, a bigger drop than the 0.3 percent decrease that was originally reported.

Still, the 1.3 percent rise in productivity was the weakest showing since a 0.8 percent rise in the fourth quarter of 2007.

While rising wages and benefits are good for workers, if those gains outstrip increases in productivity it can create serious inflation problems as businesses are forced to boost the cost of their products to cover the higher wage demands.

Japan - world's No. 2 economy - in recession

TOKYO (CNN) -- Japan, the world's second-largest economy, is in a recession, government officials announced Monday.

Japan's Cabinet Office confirmed that its economy fell another 0.1% in its third quarter, following a 0.3% drop in the second quarter.

The country's gross domestic product - second to that of the United States - has fallen by 0.4% this year.

Stocks on the Nikkei were trading about 1% higher in Monday morning trading.

Major indexes around the globe have plummeted over the last two months. The Russian stock market has lost 65.5% of its value since the start of the year. Stocks in Japan and the United States have been equally hard hit, falling 42% and 33%, respectively.

In Europe, the pain has been particularly acute. The European Union on Friday officially declared that the 15-nation group had entered into a recession, with its gross domestic product declining 0.2% for the second straight quarter.

Japan's recession announcement was not unexpected. Part of the problem is the strong yen, which skyrocketed in recent weeks as turmoil in the world's financial markets and concerns about a global recession drove investors away from high-yielding currencies such as the euro and the pound. As a result, lower-yielding currencies like the dollar and the yen surged in value because they are considered by many investors to be a safe-haven.

Since Japan is such a big exporter of goods, a more robust yen hurts profits for Japanese firms as sales from abroad get translated back into yen. The more that the yen has climbed, the worse Japan's stock market has performed, which has resulted in a ripple effect on European and U.S. exchanges.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Call it a meeting of the bipartisan minds.

President-elect Barack Obama will meet with former GOP presidential candidate John McCain Monday in Chicago, Illinois.

The meeting will take place at the Obama transition headquarters.

"It's well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government, and will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality," Obama transition spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement Sunday.

Obama and McCain will be joined in the meeting by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Obama's new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Meanwhile, the man who steered Obama's Senate office will now move over to the White House with the incoming president.

The Obama Transition Office announced Sunday that Peter Rouse, currently Obama's chief of staff in his Senate office, will serve as a senior adviser to the President.

Before joining Obama in December 2004, Rouse was chief of staff for 19 years to former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Prior to that he was chief of staff to then-Rep. Dick Durbin of Illinois.

The Obama transition team also announced that Mona Sutphen will serve as a deputy chief of staff.

Sutphen is a member of the transition team staff and has been managing director of Stonebridge International LLC, an international strategic consulting firm based in Washington.

From 1991 to 2000 she was a U.S. foreign service officer, and among other assignments she served in the White House at the National Security Council from 1998 to 2000, under President Bill Clinton.

Jim Messina was also named a deputy chief of staff. Messina is currently the director of personnel for the president-elect's transition team. He served as a national chief of staff for Obama's presidential campaign. Watch more on the Obama transition picks »

Prior to that, Messina served as a chief of staff for Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana) and Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) and for Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-New York).

President-elect Obama, in a statement released by the transition team, said, "These individuals are important additions to a team with the experience and ability to help our nation overcome pressing challenges at home and around the world."

Also, a longtime friend of the Obamas was officially named Saturday as a senior adviser to the incoming president.

Obama, in a statement released Saturday morning by his transition staff, announced that Valerie Jarrett will serve as senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental relations and public liaison. CNN Contributor Roland Martin reported the offer to Jarrett on Friday evening.

Jarrett is currently co-chair of Obama's transition team and was senior adviser for his presidential campaign. She became the president and CEO of The Habitat Company in 2007 and was also the company's vice president. The Habitat Company develops and manages residential apartments and condominiums.

Before joining The Habitat Company, Jarrett served for eight years in government for the city of Chicago, first as deputy corporation counsel for finance and development, then as deputy chief of staff for Mayor Richard M. Daley, and finally as commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development.

Also Saturday, a Democratic source told CNN that prominent Washington lawyer Greg Craig will be named White House counsel for the Obama administration. The source added that it is unclear when the appointment will be made public.

Craig first gained prominence representing President Clinton in his Senate impeachment trial, but he endorsed Obama over Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and later played a key role in Obama's vice-presidential vetting process.

CNN reported Friday that three officials close to the presidential transition said Craig was under strong consideration to be named as the incoming president's top lawyer.

One of those officials said Craig was "highly regarded" and trusted for his discretion by Obama.

The transition team also made official Saturday the hiring of Ron Klain as chief of staff to the vice president.

Klain was also chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, but he's no stranger to Vice President-elect Joe Biden, having served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee when Biden was the committee chairman.

Klain also served as general counsel of Gore's 2000 Florida recount effort and was portrayed by actor Kevin Spacey in an HBO movie about the event.

This year, Klain helped with debate preparation for both Obama and Biden.

"Ron Klain has been a trusted adviser of mine for over 20 years," a statement from Biden said Saturday. "He brings extraordinary judgment, a deep understanding of the important policy issues facing our nation, a wide range of experience in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, as well as a unique understanding of how the vice president's office works."

The transition team also announced Saturday that Phil Schiliro will serve as assistant to the president for legislative affairs. Schiliro is director of congressional relations for the Obama transition team. Before that, he was a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign.

Schiliro has worked in Congress for more than 25 years, in positions including chief of staff to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, policy director for then-Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and staff director for the Senate Democratic Leadership Committee

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged "affair" in the online world.

Amy Taylor, 28, said she had caught husband David Pollard, 40, having sex with an animated woman. The couple, who met in an Internet chatroom in 2003, are now separated.

"I went mad -- I was so hurt. I just couldn't believe what he'd done," Taylor told the Western Morning News. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much now it is over."

Second Life allows users to create alter egos known as "avatars" and interact with other players, forming relationships, holding down jobs and trading products and services for a virtual currency convertible into real life dollars. iReport.com: Share your stories from Second Life

Taylor said she had caught Pollard's avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute: "I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It's cheating as far as I'm concerned."

The couple's real-life wedding in 2005 was eclipsed by a fairy tale ceremony held within Second Life.

But Taylor told the Western Morning News she had subsequently hired an online private detective to track his activities: "He never did anything in real life, but I had my suspicions about what he was doing in Second Life." iReport.com: Anger in a virtual world

Pollard admitted having an online relationship with a "girl in America" but denied wrongdoing. "We weren't even having cyber sex or anything like that, we were just chatting and hanging out together," he told the Western Morning News.

Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.