This is a guest post by Vicente Silveira. Vicente is a social graph geek, with a special interest in the balance between privacy, security, and functionality on social networks. He is currently a Director of Product Management at VeriSign, working with Online Identity, Fraud Detection, and Data Analysis.

Facebook is serious about their platform and they are making sure everybody takes notice. This past Friday I attended the TechCrunch Cloud Computing roundtable in Mountain View where Facebook’s VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer joined the likes of Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff and Google’s Vic Gundotra to discuss the future of cloud-based applications.

Mike Schroepfer said that Facebook’s application storefront is growing at an impressive clip of 140 new applications per day. Shortly before the roundtable we watched five minute pitches from startups showing their cloud-based wares and one of the most impressive ones was Appirio’s viral marketing app, which spans across Salesforce, Google and Facebook’s platforms. This is the kind of buzz that Facebook wants to get around, where Facebook applications are fun, trustworthy and (gasp) even useful.

On the other hand, Facebook has been plagued by malicious experiments like the recent “Terms of Service” and “Error Check System” rogue applications. Although the developers behind these applications haven’t yet figured out what to do with them (maybe other than get some spyware downloaded), I think it is a matter of time before they figure out more harmful and profitable uses cases.

The problem is that Facebook doesn’t want to slow down innovation but at the same time they have to separate well-meaning and well-developed applications from the malicious or poorly executed junk. This is a daunting task, given the rate of application submission as well as the challenges in verifying a developer’s identity credentials and code behavior.

The Application Verification Program ($375 for businesses, $175 for students and non-profits) has the potential to address these issues and help users figure out which applications to trust. Although non-verified applications will still be allowed, there is concern that this could drive developers away or create a two-class system, but I’m not sure there is a better answer to this problem. My take is that if you are a developer short on cash or just not too sure about your application, you are best served by Beta testing this with your friends and their friends (who will trust to download your app even without the verification). Once you think you have something, then you pay the fee for the verification.

So far I haven’t heard of any developers that have been verified by Facebook, so leave a comment here if you have applied and if you received any feedback on where you are in the process.