Facebook Opens Up To Developers, Partners
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TechWeb - More than 65 developer partners had created software applications based on the social networking site, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
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Facebook Inc., the fast growing  Silicon Valley social networking site, said on Thursday it has  acquired Internet start-up, Parakey, run by two of the  co-creators of the popular Web browser, Mozilla Firefox.
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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.
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A small step for the budding social network's quest to be the anti-Facebook: Plaxo has opened up a portion of its source code dedicated to helping users manage their various social-networking identities.
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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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Social networking site Facebook has bought internet start-up Parakey.
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A small step for the budding social network's quest to be the anti-Facebook: Plaxo has opened up a portion of its source code dedicated to helping users manage their various social networking identities.
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Facebook.com took the wraps off  on Thursday of its highly anticipated makeover from a  members-only club into what it hopes can become a kind of  software operating system for Internet media of all sorts.
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Firefox co-founders get networking Facebook, the ubiquitous, in-your-face social [cough] networking website, has acquired Parakey, a startup run by the co-founders of Mozilla Firefox.â¦
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The new Facebook application for the Rhapsody music service shows some of the advantages of integrating powerful applications into Facebookâs environment.
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It looks like the social-networking world has moved on from Google's yet-to-launch developer initiative, but top engineers and partners say give it time.
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Plaxo, Google, and Facebook now have members in the relatively new consortium to promote social-networking interoperability. Don't expect to see immediate results any time soon, though.
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InfoWorld - Many Web developers these days feel a sleep-depriving mix of unbridled enthusiasm and nagging concern over Facebook&#39;s social-networking platform.
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Social operating system Facebook, the mainstream media web darling du jour, has opened up its development platform to allow other firms to develop applications to run on top of the site, broadening the range of features available to users.â¦
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MySpace next week will begin providing APIs to developers looking to create applications to run on the social networking site.
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Facebook, the social-network site that has enjoyed explosive growth in new members over the past three months, said it plans to let users tell the rest of the world how to find them on the site.
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Social networking giant MySpace will open its platform to outside application developers,&#160;a move that was made months ago by its close competitor Facebook&#160;and helped boost its popularity.Chris DeWolfe, MySpace&#39;s CEO, made the announcement during an appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.The first step in opening the platform will be the creation in the next week or two of a catalog of existing widgets from third-parties that MySpace has allowed on its social network for the past four years.Then MySpace will open its platform broadly to outside developers at some point in the coming months, said DeWolfe.MySpace will have a &quot;sandbox&quot; where applications will be given test-drives by a portion of its members, to make sure the applications are safe and secure, before they are deployed to all users, DeWolfe said.However, DeWolfe said that the overall intention is to make it easy to incorporate the applications into MySpace. &quot;The idea is that, at the end of the day, most of these applications will come to MySpace,&quot; he said.MySpace will also let developers generate advertising revenue from the applications they build for the site, he said.Since opening its platform to external developers in May, Facebook has built up a catalog of about 6,000 applications, which it credits with increasing its members&#39; engagement on the site and their enjoyment of it.Facebook&#39;s popularity has grown very quickly this year, as the site has grown to 47 million active users today from 12 million in December, according to company statistics. Over half of its active members return to the site daily.In June, MySpace had 114.1 million unique visitors worldwide, up 72 percent from the same month last year, according to comScore Networks. Meanwhile, Facebook had 52.2 million unique visitors in June, up 270 percent from June 2006, according to comScore.Until now, MySpace has granted access to its platform on a case-by-case basis to developers that request it, but it doesn&#39;t have open APIs (application programming interfaces), a source of much criticism for the company in this Web 2.0 age when mashing up applications has become so popular.DeWolfe shared the stage with Rupert Murdoch, CEO of MySpace&#39;s parent company News Corp., and both answered questions from conference chair John Battelle and from audience members.With some people putting Facebook&#39;s value at around $15 billion, Murdoch was asked how much he thought MySpace would be worth and whether he would consider &quot;unlocking&quot; that value by selling the company or taking it public. Murdoch said nothing of the sort is being considered for MySpace.The Web 2.0 Summit ends on Friday.