After a few months in the shadows, Bay Partners has decided to publicize its seed fund investment activities and focus its sub-$250,000 investments on companies that have developed applications for Facebook's platform. This means any startup that has integrated its own web service or a related service into the Facebook web site in order to make it available to Facebook's 27 millions users.

It's a smart marketing ploy by Bay. Taking a page from Charles River Ventures' QuickStart program, Bay Partners had already made a handful of seed investments designed to boost its deal flow of Web 2.0 startups. But, its announcement today that it will only fund startups that have developed Facebook applications differentiates the firm from CRV and gives it a fresher look.

In reality though, the two seed programs will look at very similar startups since most consumer Internet companies would benefit from the attention that could be garnered from creating a popular Facebook application.

The biggest beneficiaries from Bay Partners' App Factory may be Facebook's venture capitalist shareholder trio of Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners. The larger Facebook's ecosystem grows, the more valuable the company itself becomes.

For more on Bay Partners' new App Factory initiative, see:
Tech Crunch
Inside Facebook

Tags: bay+partners, facebook, crv, vc, venture+capital