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Facebook Opens New Developer PlatformPOSTED May 25, 2007 SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook, a popular social network, is opening up its site to third-party developers and inviting them to build new applications for its users. "Until now, social networks have been closed platforms.Today, we're going to end that," CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg told an audience of more than 750 developers and partners on Thursday. "With this evolution of Facebook Platform, any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook." The keynote address by Zuckerberg opened the Facebook f8 event, named to reflect the developer hackathon that ends 8 hours after the address during which new applications will be created for Facebook. The Facebook Platform launched with more than 65 developer partners and 85 applications and with the introduction of an example application called Video. Video allows for the simple sharing of personal videos between friends within Facebook, as well as the creation and sending of video messages directly to and from the Facebook Inbox. To allow users to better share the increasing amount of video being shot from mobile devices, Video supports mobile uploading of video directly into the application. Zuckerberg detailed how any developer can build an application that is as integrated into the site's information flow and connections of relationships as Facebook's own applications. Facebook users decide which applications to add and can control their order and appearance within their profiles, all with the familiar Facebook design. Users can always remove applications, including those built by Facebook, and will have their granular privacy controls maintained across applications. Facebook also introduced a new markup language, Facebook Markup, which along with its previously released APIs allows developers to build applications fully integrated into the site. Facebook Markup includes features, such as dynamic information tags, conditional privacy tags, image caching and Flash. Developers can build anything they want in full, unlimited application pages on Facebook, called the "canvas pages," and applications also can have a box in users' profiles and navigation. As users benefit from new choices in the applications available through Facebook, developers can build their business at the same time. Applications within profiles will remain free of advertising, but Facebook is allowing developers to make money within their canvas pages, through advertising, or transactions that they control. Facebook has more than 24 million active users in over 47,000 geographic, workrelated, collegiate, and high school networks, and according to ComScore's MediaMetrix report, Facebook ranks as the sixth-most trafficked site in the United States. The new platform is the company's strategy to close the gap between industry-leading MySpace, which is owned by News Corp.
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