Facebook becomes a development platform

Stan Beer
Friday, 25 May 2007 12:28

Your IT - Home IT

No longer content to merely live in the shadow of MySpace, popular college student oriented social networking site Facebook has reinvented itself as an open development platform for social networking applications.

The new development platform called simply Facebook Platform will give developers access to a new markup language called Facebook Markup and the site's APIs, enabling them build site integrated social networking applications that users can add to their profiles.

At an event for developers called Facebook f8, 23 year old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg launched the new development platform using an example application called video, which enables users to share videos between friends on the network. A further 85 newly developed applications from 65 developers were unveiled.

While developers will not be able to sell advertising for applications that have been added to profiles, they will be free to advertise on their own pages within Facebook where they develop applications called canvas pages.

“Until now, social networks have been closed platforms. Today, we’re going to end that,” Zuckerberg told an audience of more than 750 developers and partners. “With this evolution of Facebook Platform, any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook.”

With an estimated 23 million visitors a month, making it a top 10 web destination in the US, the opportunity to develop applications for Facebook has so far received an enthusiastic response from developers.

There have already been a number of media releases issued by partner developers from the Facebook f8 event. Interactive digital entertainment service uPlayMe has launched a free application that enables users to automatically generate lists of their listening and viewing habits from their computer or iPod and share the lists with contacts on the network. Similarly, a company called Ma.gnolia has developed a social bookmarking application which enables the sharing of members’ latest web bookmarks for friends to see. Users will also be able to follow the latest links published by their friends on Facebook who have also added the application.

The ability for third party developers to add their applications to the social network may well see an explosion of development of rich applications for Facebook. However, like other social networks with huge memberships, including MySpace, Facebook still faces the problem of finding a way to financially capitalize on its massive audience.