Best Facebook Apps for Super Social Geeks
244019
Users and companies have created a slew of applications for Facebook's open-app program, launched in May 2007. Some are stellar and some are stinkers; here are the ones Wired News readers love best.
169915
These five mobile social networks are all vying to be the next hot thing. See how they stack up.
625387
Belatedly recognizing the importance of social networking as an online service and advertising vehicle, Google this week will unleash its strongest response yet to the rising threat and skyrocketing popularity of MySpace and Facebook.On Thursday, Google will announce OpenSocial, an initiative with a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) at its core that is designed &quot;to spread social applications across the Web,&quot; the company said.These common APIs have been designed to let developers create social networking applications that will run on multiple Web sites, simplifying the making and distribution of these programs.Partners supporting OpenSocial include various well-known software developers and social networking sites: Oracle, Salesforce.com, Hi5, iLike, LinkedIn, Slide, Ning, Friendster, and Plaxo. Neither Facebook nor MySpace is on the list of partners at press time.The move is also no doubt intended to dilute the massive&#160;success Facebook has had in attracting external developers&#160;since it opened up its Web site platform to third-party applications in May.About 7,000 such applications have been built for Facebook so far, helping to make the social networking site more attractive to people and thus boosting its usage.&#160;MySpace recently announced it would follow Facebook&#39;s example.By allowing developers to write an application once and have it work in multiple social networking sites, the OpenSocial initiative could, in theory, water down the appeal of Facebook&#39;s ballooning applications catalogue.Once considered a fad of interest mostly to teens and young adults, social networks have significantly broadened their demographic appeal, attracting many people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond.Along the way, social networking sites have been created for other purposes beyond entertainment and staying in touch with friends. For example, there are social networks tailored for specific occupations, such as doctors, and interests, such as sports.Google has had a social networking site named Orkut for several years, but it doesn&#39;t seem to have merited much attention from the company until recently, and only after the popularity and potential of this type of site became evident.Google was reportedly locked in a battle with Microsoft&#160;over which one would be chosen by Facebook to buy a stake in the social networking company and earn a deal to provide advertising to it.Microsoft eventually won, buying a 1.6 percent stake that values Facebook at an eye-popping $15 billion, although the social networking company reportedly will have revenue of just $150 million this year.With about 300 employees now, Facebook expects to have about 700 a year from now, its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said. About 250,000 new users register every day at Facebook, which was founded in 2004.In June, MySpace had 114.1 million unique visitors worldwide, ranking first among social networking sites, followed by Facebook with 52.2 million, according to comScore. Hi5 ranked third with 28.2 million, while Friendster was fourth with 24.7 million. Orkut rounded out the top 5 with 24.1 million.More information about OpenSocial and resources for developers will be available in this Web site later this week. There will also be a developer sandbox.
474059
The DeveloperTutorials website has a new tutorial posted that walks the reader through a step-by-step process to create a PHP Facebook application of their very own.   Everyone is talking about Facebook and their new Application Platform and I have to admit I think it's pretty cool too. So I decided to create an application that uses the Facebook Platform. I'm writing the application in PHP and I thought it might be useful for others to know how to write their own Facebook applications with PHP.   They show you where you'll need to go to set up an ID with Facebook to develop with, the developer application you'll need to add, where to grab the Facebook developer API and, finally, creating a simple application.   Their example is just of the "Hello World" sort, but it gives you a good foundation to start from. They also include pointers to the Facebook Markup Language and a reference for the Facebook REST-based API interface.
689991
Facebook is asking all of the right questions.
19306
Social networking sites like Facebook have wooed millions of users with their easy format for keeping in touch but left them navigating the pitfalls of interacting online -- is it really private?
735186
PALO ALTO, California  - Apple's iPhone may be big  news, but in Silicon Valley all eyes are on Facebook. The  all-ages private Internet club that began as a college student  hangout has become the tech industry's hottest ticket.
29063
For business or pleasure? Reg Technology Panel Over the past two or three years, zanily named social networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and Twitter seem to have come from nowhere to wheedle their way into just about every aspect of online life, both in business and pleasure. Such facilities share a handful of simple, but powerful core features: each will enable information sharing of some form, will have some kind of community orientation and will be constructed in a way that several of the blighters can be merged (or should I say, âmashed upâ) into clever, multifaceted concoctions of collaborative capability.â¦
136818
The balance of power in social networking is moving from the Web site to the user, and that could be accelerated with a new tool released Friday by Google -- a Social Graph API (application programming interface).
54374
FaceBerry or BlackBook. Whatever combo-name is used, Research In Motion's new application for Facebook on the BlackBerry moves the company's popular mobile device further into the Web 2.0 world.
130047
It's kind of like Facebook's feed for people who don't do Facebook. http://friendfeed.com/davew  It seems pretty cool.
582461
MySpace has an impressive lead today, but things can change quickly in the fluid world of mass-market social networking sites. Just ask Friendster.
170399
New social networking site lets users share photos, videos, and more.
409840
The HowTo Forge website has this new tutorial posted today taking an extensive look (complete with tons of screenshots and code along the way) on how to create a Facebook RSS reader to add to your blog of choice.   This guide shows how you can build an RSS feed reader application for the social network Facebook that will display your blog's/web site's RSS feed on the profile pages of Facebook users (that have installed the RSS feed reader application). Each item of the RSS feed will have a Share button so that people can share the story with their friends, and the application will have an Invite link so that people can invite up to ten friends at once to also install this feed reader application.   They use PHP5's functionality to make building the reader simple and take advantage of Facebook's simple application system to make the reader. You can stop after the first few steps of the tutorial and have a working application, but they take it further. They show how to make customizations to the reader, making the feed auto-update, creating an icon for the app and make an invite page.
450090
CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about changes at Facebook, his super-popular social-networking site. By Aria Pearson from Wired magazine.
250470
Facebook.com on Thursday took the  wraps off its highly anticipated makeover from a members-only  club into what it hopes can allow it to become a software  operating system for all sorts of Internet media.
226258
Facebook will help other social networking sites to run applications developed for its own software platform, it said Thursday.The company already encourages developers to build applications that work with its site, publishing details of the tags and APIs (application programming interfaces) needed to exchange data.Now it plans to license those details for use by other social networking sites and platforms, according to the Facebook Developers blog . The idea is that developers will only have to write their widget or small application once if there is a common platform for structuring how the applications integrate with sites.The initiative runs in parallel with Google&#39;s OpenSocial project, which revolves around creating standard APIs (application programming interfaces) for social networking applications. APIs let applications exchange information and are crucial to building programs that, for example, take information from Facebook profiles and blend it with some new functionality or feature.Facebook already has a taker. On Wednesday, social networking site Bebo said it would use Facebook&#39;s standards for its own Open Application Platform. Bebo isn&#39;t taking sides, however: it will eventually support Google&#39;s OpenSocial too, it said.MySpace, the largest social networking site, has also said it will support OpenSocial.Facebook said its architectural platform is composed in part of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) related tags and methods for building applications.It published details of FBML , its set of tags for formatting data exchanged between applications and users. Some of the tags enable developers to build programs with the same design elements as Facebook&#39;s site, so the application blends in.External developers have created about 7,000 applications since Facebook opened up its site in June. The applications have offered a commercial opportunity for developers, although Facebook has been under fire for how those programs respect users&#39; privacy.Google&#39;s OpenSocial platform got off the ground last month with Plaxo&#39;s Pulse, the first application to use the APIs. Pulse, which aggregates and delivers new information from social networking and other Web sites, is a feature of Plaxo&#39;s Web-based address book service.&#160;