Sun and Joyent are announcing today a program to offer 12 months of free hosting for Facebook and OpenSocial applications. Using Sun's servers running OpenSolaris, powering Joyent Accelerators virtual servers, a social application can be prepared to cope with rapid scaling if they become an overnight success. Free hosting is quite compatible with the monetization difficulty of Facebook applications; quite hard. Hopefully within 12 months, you'll either figure out how to monetize the app, or have convinced your Grandma to fund you.
Sun's business model has traditionally been selling servers, so it's good to see them supporting cloud hosting. Increasingly, "the cloud" is proving itself more cost effective and efficient alternative to server ownership. Further, their recent open sourcing of Solaris into OpenSolaris makes it a viable option for developers who would normally pass on it for a free, capable Linux distribution.
In support of this program, Sun and Joyent are holding a training tour that will hit San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver, among others. Er, they don't seem to have dates posted yet, but I'll update this post when I see them, and post to the Techvibes event calendar.
Didn't they already announce this? They've been running the Facebook Developer Program since November http://joyent.com/developers/facebook
@Simon: I believe Joyent had been running the program, but Sun's partnership is new.
