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Facebook opens doors to developers, partners

Facebook.com CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces plans to open up the site to allow outside companies build Web applications for Facebook's 24 million active members.

The college student social networking site, Facebook.com hopes to become a software operating system for all sorts of Internet media. The site, which opened up to users of all ages over the past year, said that more than 65 developer partners, including Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com, had created software applications on the Facebook Platform.

We're pushing to make the world a more open place," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company, which operates under the radar of much of the traditional tech industry, is looking to transform itself from a Web site into what Silicon Valley calls a "platform" -- a foundation service on which many other applications can run.

Facebook decided to open its platform to outside developers because, as Zuckerberg put it, there's more value available from outside developers than Facebook could ever build on its own.

Companies building services within Facebook include photo-sharing site Photobucket, multimedia presentation site Slide, music discovery site iLike, new-style instant messaging site Twitter.com and Web-calling companies Jajah and Jaxtr.

Facebook itself has created a video application that allows any user with a Web-connected camera or mobile cameraphone to share live, personal videos with their network of friends on Facebook. Cameraphone users can shoot video on the go and the video instantly will appear on their Facebook profile.
Independent developers can sell ads or incorporate tools for conducting online transactions and keep all the resulting revenue, said Zuckerberg, casually dressed in surfer sandals.

Facebook now has 24 million active users and is growing by 3 percent a week.

[ Via informationweek ] [ Via reuters ]

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