At the time he left last summer, Colleran was Facebook’s earliest remaining employee, save for Mark Zuckerberg.

General Catalyst told the Boston Business Journal that Colleran’s focus will be working with its early stage portfolio companies.

Colleran said today that he expects to eventually land in another operating role at a company, but for the time being he thinks he can help young start-ups figure out “how to make advertising a benefit rather than a cost” and tell them stories about the early days of scaling Facebook.

For instance, Colleran said he advises start-ups to think about monetization early on. Despite the perception that Facebook focused on growing its userbase first, and then figured out how to make money later, the reality was the company sustained itself on campus “flyer” ads in its earliest days, Colleran said.

Since Facebook had always had advertising, users came to expect it, Colleran said. “We were break-even profitable in the early days, before Sean came in and raised the big VC. We knew that if we got $25 for a flyer we could spend that money on paying ourselves, or on servers.”

Colleran said he also expected that being part of a venture capital firm will be a bit like going to business school, as he’ll be broadening his own horizons to learn about the financing side of the industry.

Boston-based General Catalyst also a good perch from which to look at the industry and try to find the next Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard or Drew Houston at MIT, Colleran said. “I’ve figured out the likelihood of me being on the ground floor of another company that changes the world is probably unlikely,” he added.

Colleran said that he is personally joining the advisory boards of Path, VaynerMedia and Backplane, in addition to similar roles he already holds at Buddy Media, Causes and the Basis health band.

Colleran spent the eight months since he left Facebook traveling with his fiancee, but he is “just too antsy” to take more time off, he said.

Early Facebookers are big into investing their money in tech. Matt Cohler became a VC at Benchmark Capital in 2008, while Chamath Palihapitiya started the Social+Capital Partnership last year, and Ali Rosenthal is now an EIR at Greylock Partners. Many early Facebook employees make angel investments, often in each other’s projects.

“In the print era, when this country was founded, reason and truth and facts played a bigger role,” Gore said. Now, television and money have overtaken the American political system and lowered the level of discourse, both he and Parker said, in an interview that was added to the schedule of the Austin-based interactive conference over the weekend.

The two men said they think social media can make campaigns and governments more efficient, vetted and more democratic.

“I would like to see a new movement called ‘Occupy Democracy,’ where people who are Internet-savvy remedy this situation,” Gore said (by the way, he co-founded Current TV, so I assume they’re excluded from the rant about television).

“We are in the early days of using the power of social media to activate people,” Parker replied. “Just having large numbers of people on social media doesn’t mean we’re going to do anything more than create virtual farms and innovate newer and more psychologically addictive ways of wasting people’s time.”

He said he thought tools that help voters become more educated and mobilize around elections at all levels could combat the role of campaign spending. “Money is just a proxy to buy votes,” Parker said.

The two plugged various political Internet start-ups — mostly Parker investments — such as NationBuilder, Votizen, Causes and Electionear (see our recent coverage of NationBuilder and Votizen).

Gore also called for a big-data-style approach, in the manner of CompStat, for vetting the American health care system. And he asked those in attendance to continue to activate for net neutrality and against Internet censorship.

Before the people who are currently in power figure out how to use social media, Parker said, “there may be a window of opportunity to take back the system.”

Parker said he thought the SOPA and PIPA protests had awakened the technology industry from its apathy, and perhaps even beyond “armchair activism.”

“I call it the ‘Nerd Spring,’ kind of like the Arab Spring, but the SXSW version of it,” Parker said.

RELATED POSTS:

• The Homeless Defend Becoming Hotspots
• Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann’s Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way
• The Best and Weirdest Requests and Errands at SXSW From Zaarly, TaskRabbit and Others
• Al Gore and Sean Parker Blame TV and Money for Ruining Politics, and Say Social Media Ought to Fix It
• Letters From SXSW: How to Be “Disruptive”
• SXSW News: Jerry Levin’s StartUp Health Academy for Entrepreneurs Announces First Class
• The Best (And Worst) Marketing Gimmick in Austin
• Forget Cleantech — It’s Cleanweb at SXSW
• Houston Comes to Austin as Kara Swisher Talks Lessons Learned with Dropbox CEO
• After Nearly Doubling Its Userbase in Three Months, Instagram Will Finally Come to Android
• The Power of Power at South By Southwest
• How Jimmy Fallon Uses the Nike FuelBand (It’s Naughty, Of Course)
• Gawker Will Deputize Commenters, Says Sheriff Nick Denton
• Microsoft’s Danah Boyd: Social Media Makes the World More Fearful
• Etsy CEO on Building a Lean Start-Up: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy
• South By Southwest Parties On, Despite the Rain
• At SXSW, Joi Ito Invites Tech Entrepreneurs Into the MIT Media Lab
• Texas Gov. Rick Perry Drops In on South By Southwest
• Can Playing More Games Make Your Life “SuperBetter”? Jane McGonigal Thinks So.
• Google’s Vic Gundotra on Why Plus Isn’t a Minus
• Rain Douses Austin as Crowds Flood Into SXSW
• Checking In and Checking Out South by Southwest
• SXSW Serendipity Gets Yet Another Helper: Kismet
• The Essential SXSW Tech Tool Kit
• Geek in the Heart of Texas: AllThingsD at SXSW 2012

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

Colleran, who has worked at Facebook longer than anyone except Mark Zuckerberg, said he did not have immediate plans post-Facebook besides taking time off and traveling.

Colleran added that he will remain involved in the industry, with advisory roles at Causes, My Basis and Buddy Media. And for good measure, “I also hope to eventually do some additional angel investing as well as potentially some consulting, public speaking, and non-profit work,” he said.

“My journey at Facebook has been incredible and I am very grateful for Mark, Sheryl [Sandberg], and the rest of the team for giving me such an amazing opportunity,” Colleran said in an email. “I take a lot of pride in having been Facebook’s most tenured employee (after Mark) as well as the first member of Facebook’s advertising sales team.”

A spokesperson for Facebook said today, “Kevin played an instrumental role in building Facebook’s advertising business from the ground up. We’re sad to see him go and wish him all the best.”

Facebook’s ad sales team is now led by Carolyn Everson, who replaced long-time VP of Global Sales Mike Murphy. Meanwhile, Colleran’s title is “global sales lead.”

Colleran’s tenacity as a salesperson was detailed in David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect, which described him as “a gung-ho cold-caller who could get in almost any door.”

Kirkpatrick reported that Colleran’s first big ad deal at Facebook was a user-acquisition buy by Party Poker, which brought in $60,000 per month (but was dropped due to online gambling regulations). Colleran also led efforts to create sponsored Facebook groups, which eventually became Facebook Pages. An early promotion that Colleran put together targeted Crest White Strips to college kids by offering them Matthew McConaughey movie tickets and the chance to win a concert at their school if they became members of a sponsored group.

Other significant recent or planned Facebook employee departures include VP of Growth, Mobile and International Chamath Palihapitiya and VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

With that in mind, the company is incentivizing developers to create useful applications with its new Great Apps program. Great Apps, Ben Ling, head of Facebook Platform Product Marketing says, recognizes applications that are meaningful, trustworthy and well-designed. Apps that hew to Facebook’s “Guiding Principles for Great Applications” (see image below)–they must be “social, useful, engaging, expressive, secure, respectful, transparent, clean, fast and robust”–will be given greater visibility across the site and early access to new features. The first apps to be awarded that status: iLike and Causes.

Facebook, it should be noted, plans to aggressively police its site for apps that abuse user trust and will take “enforcement actions” if necessary.

Tomorrow, when it rolls out its new platform, one of the more interesting pieces of news from Facebook will be its initiative to dub certain of its third-party app developers more special than others.

According to sources, the social-networking site has selected just two, in fact, iLike and Causes, to receive “preferred” status.

Several sources said that this initiative has to do with developing in a way more in line with the goals of Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Some issues Facebook has had since unleashing third-party applications on its platform last year have been related to the widgets producing too much spam, not having adequate privacy protection and simply being too buggy.

Included in the criteria for inclusion as a preferred partner is being “meaningful” and also not having been in violation of a wide range of Facebook policies in the past. Individual apps can be approved, even though others made by the same developer might not be.

Causes and iLike are the inaugural partners in the program, with others to follow.

Perhaps more interesting about this move is why two of Facebook’s major developers, Slide and RockYou, are not part of the preferred program.

The pair that have been are among Facebook’s most popular.

iLike is a hugely popular music discovery and sharing service (I will be posting a video of my visit to its Seattle offices tomorrow) and Causes is an app that allows users to share information about various charities and social initiatives.

Facebook declined to comment on the initiative.

But it surely will tomorrow. Facebook is in the midst of a major redesign of its service and will be mounting its second developers’ conference tomorrow in San Francisco.