Today at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook’s platform, where it’s been and where it’s going as a result. Although the company’s stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore — by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month. Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-party developers via its APIs.

Peter Deng of Facebook said on stage at the TechCrunch CrunchUp today that the company’s mission is now focused on mobile.

In the newly crowded wedding space, Lover.ly has found a way to not only make money but also connect brides and grooms with the best possible vendors for their wedding. If you have yet to dabble on the platform, it’s much like a Pinterest for brides, offering a curated imagery-based interface to market wedding bloggers and vendors while helping brides plan for the big day

Doug Purdy, Facebook’s Director of Developer Products, just announced that 230 million people played games on Facebook.com in the past 30 days and that 8 of the 10 top grossing iPhone apps are integrated with Facebook. This is an interesting bit of news when thinking about actual user interaction with the service and what third party developers could expect to see when building for the platform.

Google just announced yet another batch of services it plans to discontinue on the near future. Most of these are relatively obscure products that probably didn’t have a large amount of traction. In this round, Google is shutting down three products, as well as a number of company blogs that had become redundant or just weren’t updated very frequently

Blake Commagere, who’s probably best known for building early, popular Facebook apps like Zombies and Vampires (hey, remember those?), has started a new company called MediaSpike to tackle one of the big problems he faced as a developer: Integrating sponsored product placements into the games. Commagere says those placements were one of the most effective and popular ways to monetize — in fact, when some of those campaigns ended and the sponsored content disappeared, “Users would actually complain.” On the other hand, he says that managing the process was “incredibly difficult.” Without any tools to help with the process, everything took a lot of time, whether it was determining where the sponsorship would appear, creating the media assets (i.e., the art for the sponsored product), and then providing all the data that the advertisers wanted. Then, when the next campaign came around, he’d have to start from scratch and do it all again.

Facebook announced in a blog post today that they are doubling the site’s release speed, rolling Facebook onto new code twice per day. “Last week, in conjunction with the opening of our engineering office in London, we decided to double the release speed of facebook.com and indeed “ship often,” release engineering manager Chuck Rossi writes

Why is mobile such a challenge for Facebook? Well, for starters, 7,000 different device types are used to access Facebook each day.

Gillmor Gang – Doc Searls, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, and Steve Gilllmor. Recording has concluded.

A challenging area that has seemed perpetually ahead of its time, HTML5 gaming has seen many startups come and go as Flash or native iOS and Android development have held their own.