One of Silicon Valley's most powerful venture-capital firms is teaming with social and traditional media companies to back a $250 million fund aimed at fostering social-technology innovation.

The firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, today announced it was creating an "sFund" devoted to putting money on the table for companies developing social-media applications—particularly those that could be integrated with Facebook and the social network’s 500 million users.

“Think of it as a quarter-billion-dollar party,” said John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. He called social media the next great wave of disruptive technology to come from Silicon Valley, after the development of personal computing and then the Web browser.

Doerr made the announcement at the Palo Alto, California, headquarters of Facebook, and he was joined by some heavy-hitting chief executives—Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, and Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus. All of those companies are investing in the sFund, as are Comcast, Allen & Co. LLC, and Liberty Media.

The man tasked with running the fund is Bing Gordon, another Kleiner Perkins partner, and he’s optimistic that it will give birth to a whole wave of entrepreneurial energy. “I think social is just beginning,” he said.

Doerr, one of the most important venture capitalists and thinkers on the Silicon Valley scene, is famous in part for betting big on companies devoted to clean energy, as well as for his friendship with former Vice President Al Gore, also a partner at the firm.

But Doerr and his firm have also had a sharp eye on media over the years by making big early investments in Google and Amazon.com. Now, Kleiner Perkins is betting that the next big thing will be the businesses built and connected to Facebook's social-networking platform.

Zuckerberg agreed and said those opportunities could come from almost any industry—and from unexpected directions. “I think there’s going to be an opportunity in the next five years to really pick an industry and rethink it in a social way,” he said. “Every industry is going to get fundamentally rethought and designed around people.”

For Bezos, the bet on social networking is also one on Amazon’s ability to help those developers who will be getting money from the sFund to scale their businesses. That’s because of Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure and the services it provides companies like the ones that will develop applications for the social network.

“I think it’s fun to work in golden ages,” Bezos said. “And this probably is the golden age of social apps.”

The last time Kleiner Perkins was involved in a similar press event was in 2008 to announce a $100 million iFund for companies developing applications for the iPhone and iPad platforms. Since then, the venture-capital firm has doubled that fund to $200 million and has invested in 13 such companies.

"Kleiner Perkins has done a terrific job at finding, funding, and supporting great iPhone app developers," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, in a release when KPCB doubled the iFund in March.

One of the investments made in that space, iPhone gaming firm Ngmoco, has already brought Kleiner Perkins a healthy return of $100 million when it was sold to Japanese company DeNa for up to $400 million earlier this month.

But the company hasn’t previously been an investor in Facebook. It has, however, invested in Zynga, the developer of such popular games for the social network as FarmVille—which is played by millions of Facebook users.

“Zynga’s successes—such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars—show the speed with which entrepreneurs can transform existing industries and invent entirely new ones through social platforms. Our model demonstrates consumers’ desires to connect with others in new and valuable ways,” Pincus said.

In fact, it was the growth of Zynga that convinced Kleiner Perkins that it needed to get rolling on a social-app fund, Doerr said. Zynga has been the fastest-growing company in which the company has ever invested, Doerr said.

“With the arrival of Zynga, we discovered that the applications [field] was going to be enormous,” he said.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com