Facebook to award software developers
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Facebook Inc. is offering to pay up to $250,000 to software developers who create applications that help make its rapidly growing online social network an even more compelling Internet hangout.
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Social networking site, Facebook, believed to be in negotiations with Microsoft.
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A report coming from the Inside Facebook blog today details three new features that may be making their debut in the first few months of 2008.
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Facebook has become such a popular social networking site that some companies are betting their businesses on it.Participants in a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco Thursday cited the impact of Facebook."We looked at the Facebook platform before it launched and came away with the conclusion that this could be the greatest paradigm shift in technology since the Internet itself," said panelist Ali Partovi, CEO of the iLike music discovery service.iLike bet close to 100 percent of its business on Facebook, he said."We made a very big bet. We basically decided to halt work on our own Web site and spent the next [several] weeks that we had building a Facebook application," Partovi said. iLike's own Web site, meanwhile, is used to drive traffic to the Facebook application, he said."Literally, within the first 24 hours, our Facebook registrations exceeded the rest of our Web site," by a dramatic amount, he said. In the first 12 hours, iLike signed up 10,000 users, followed by 10,000 more in the next three hours and 10,000 more in the next two hours, he said.Facebook application developer Slide is probably allocating 35 percent of its efforts to the site, said Slide Vice President Keith Rabois. Slide decided to invest in Facebook because it created an open environment that encouraged developers to make money for the first time."That has been a sea change," Rabois said.Facebook opened the floodgates for a raft of innovations, said Seth Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of SocialMedia, which also has developed applications for Facebook. Facebook has 2 million users, half of whom use it daily, he said."There's a level of engagement," inside the Facebook platform, he said.Another panelist noted Facebook widgets. "The neat thing about the Facebook platform is you can actually talk to friends through widgets, thorough the APIs," said Lance Tokuda, CEO of the RockYou photo-sharing site.
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MySpace on Tuesday opened its popular social-networking platform to software developers, echoing a move credited with helping Facebook gain ground on its market-leading rival.
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Facebook will help other social networking sites to run applications developed for its own software platform, it said Thursday.
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As previously announced, the popular social-networking site joined other sites in opening its platform to outside developers -- and potentially opening it to applications that could reach into enterprises.
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Facebook kicked off the new year with additional tweaks to its development platform as it continues to&#160;grapple with external programmers&#160;who spur adoption of their applications among Facebook members through deceitful and abusive practices.Facebook has been battling this problem since May, when it opened its social-networking site to third-party developers interested in building applications for it.Chief among the annoyances have been self-promotion features in applications such as bulk unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays. Although&#160;Facebook has made several changes&#160;in past months, the problems persist.On Jan. 1, a Facebook official made an official blog posting titled &quot;New Year. New Rules&quot; in which he states that some developers have been sneakily bypassing the amount of e-mail notifications applications are allowed to send.&quot;Specifically, these developers have been sending notification e-mails to users for one application with another application, in order to &#39;pool&#39; the total quota of e-mail notifications together,&quot; wrote Dave Morin, Facebook&#39;s senior platform manager.In addition, other applications have been designed to trick Facebook members into inadvertently installing other applications by placing links into e-mail messages, internal notifications and the Mini-Feed feature in member profiles.&quot;Starting today, we&#39;ll begin blocking links in Mini-Feed, Notifications, and Notification E-mails which lead to the installation of another application in the hopes that developers focus on user experience and engagement being paramount, not deceiving users for the sake of growth,&quot; Morin wrote.&#160;
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MySpace Wednesday will begin letting programmers pre-register for its developer platform program, which will open for business next week.Interested developers will be able to sign up on the site to receive information about the MySpace Developer Platform, announced in October. Then next Tuesday, the developer site will become fully operational and feature documentation and API tools to build and test applications for MySpace, the world&#39;s most popular social networking service.Although over the years MySpace has allowed, on a case-by-case basis, some external developers to put their widgets on the social networking site, the upcoming program potentially&#160;opens the door to any coder&#160;by providing open APIs and makes it possible for developers to generate revenue from those applications.&quot;This gives developers deeper access to our community through APIs so they&#39;ll be able to build richer applications and also gives them an opportunity to build their business directly on MySpace. It&#39;s a natural step in the evolution of how we&#39;ve worked with third party developers,&quot; said Amit Kapur, who has just been appointed chief operating officer after being in charge of business development for several years.In October, the move was widely seen as a competitive response to rival&#160;Facebook&#39;s successful opening of its platform&#160;to outside developers in May, which has resulted in the creation of about 14,000 applications and widgets for that social networking site.Other social networking companies have also followed suit and decided to let external developers create applications for their sites. Moreover, in November, Google launched its&#160;OpenSocial initiative to promote industry-wide adoption of common APIs for social applications, so that developers can more easily port their applications to different sites. MySpace, along with others, has indicated it supports OpenSocial.As it gears up for the launch of the application development platform, MySpace has taken special care to put safeguards in place to prevent security and privacy breaches from third-party applications, Kapur said.&quot;A key interest we have as we launch this platform is to protect the user experience against things like application spam and security holes, so that&#39;ll be a major part of our launch. We&#39;re extremely committed to safety and security,&quot; he said.Facebook has been dealing with this problem, as some over-eager developers have built self-promotion features into their applications to spur their adoption. Since its platform launch, Facebook has tweaked its tools and APIs several times to address the problem of applications that annoy users with intrusive displays and unsolicited messages, and seems to have the issue well under control now.&#160;
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According to this new post on the SitePoint blog, you could win some cash if your Facebook application is chosen as best:   Our current feature article about developing for the Facebook Platform with PHP is extraordinarily timely, given the recent announcement from venture capital firm Bay Partners on Tuesday that they will be offering cash prizes for the best Facebook applications.   According to the article, Bay Partners will be offering cash awards (ranging from $25,000 up to $250,000) for the best applications built on top of the Facebook API. You can get more information about this AppFactory program from the Bay Partners website (as well as how to apply for the contest).
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Online social networking  phenomenon Facebook Inc said on Monday its backers have created  an unusual $10 million fund to dole out grants to start-ups  with ideas for innovative Facebook applications.
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MySpace will launch its application development platform next week.
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Facebook's backers launch fbFund to give grants to startups developing Facebook applications.
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Developers get early code for new operating system 'skin' still being crafted.
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InfoWorld - Social networking giant MySpace will open its platform to outside application developers,Â a move that was made months ago by its close competitor FacebookÂ and helped boost its popularity.
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BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd  has launched Facebook software designed especially for its  smartphones to make it easier for users to browse the popular  social networking Web site.
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MySpace will allow third-party software developers to create applications for the site from next week.