(CNET) -- Suleman Ali cashed out just in time.

Suleman Ali sold Esgut, his portfolio of Facebook applications, for seven figures in April.

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
What is Esgut? How much did Esgut sell for? Who founded Esgut? Who sold his tech startup in April? Who sold Esgut? What was the selling price for a tech startup in April? What other company is associated with Esgut?
a portfolio of Facebook applications, in the seven figures. Suleman Ali Suleman Ali Suleman Ali in the seven figures. Facebook
question: What is Esgut?, answer: a portfolio of Facebook applications, | question: How much did Esgut sell for?, answer: in the seven figures. | question: Who founded Esgut?, answer: Suleman Ali | question: Who sold his tech startup in April?, answer: Suleman Ali | question: Who sold Esgut?, answer: Suleman Ali | question: What was the selling price for a tech startup in April?, answer: in the seven figures. | question: What other company is associated with Esgut?, answer: Facebook