I doubt much will change.

I'm not sure why, but few people seem to remember that YC has (what appears to be) pretty much the exact same partnerships with Twitter[1] and JustinTV[2]. Both of these partnerships were announced, if I remember correctly, around this time last year as a part of the W09 applications. So far, I haven't seen any startups which have launched that take advantage of either partnership.

Given the seeming propensity of startups which leverage Facebook to get acquired, this could be a completely different ballgame though.

1. http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

2. http://ycombinator.com/rfs4.html

Think of facebook as a service - using it for identity and also possibly your social network. A lot of startups have a social component and having an easy facebook integration means no longer implementing it from scratch.

However, it does not mean that the startups will be skewed towards facebook (i.e. are glorified facebook apps). Rather, I see them as using facebook the same way as companies use blogs, messaging, message boards, maybe even a billing system (if facebook introduces one).

If the integration is tight and this happens on a large scale, however, it does mean that the balance is slightly against them being acquired by google!

I doubt much will change, actually. I'm guessing most people applying to YC have some kind of idea in mind, and apply with that idea; I know I have.

I doubt reading the Facebook RFS is what triggers someone to apply to YC.