Facebook announces incentive fund for application developers
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The company announces a new program called FBFund to provide grants to developers who are interested in creating applications for the Facebook Platform.
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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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Three months after it opened its platform to outside developers, Facebook Inc. is taking steps to prevent some third-party applications from engaging in what the social networking company considers inappropriate actions.
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Facebook, a social-networking site that has become an open development platform, announced Thursday that it purchased startup Parakey for an undisclosed amount. The company, started by Mozilla Firefox cofounders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, has been creating products to unify and integrate desktop applications and the Web.
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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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Facebook has launched a licensing program to allow other social networks to use its technology.
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Following the announcement by Facebook that it would make its platform available to other sites, the application-sharing environment for social networking is moving quickly and picking up steam.
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The company will license its tags and APIs to other social networking sites, so they can run apps designed for Facebook.
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A Facebook application can be hosted on any Web site that serves static HTML, the social networking site says.
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A blog reports that a trio of German brothers have invested in Facebook through their firm, the European Founders Fund. No more details are available at the moment.
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Facebook has made a move to allow applications created on its site to run on other Web sites.The social network&#39;s new JavaScript client library, released on Friday, ends the restriction that prevented developers from running Facebook applications on other Web sites, the company announced.&quot;Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any Web site that serves static HTML,&quot; wrote Facebook&#39;s Wei Zhu on the company&#39;s developers blog.Nick O&#39;Neill, a blogger at All Facebook, noted that Facebook&#39;s move to let developers extend its platform to outside sites is a significant one for the company.&quot;The public is now aware of the possibilities to leverage Facebook outside of the main site and that is big news,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Rather than building your applications strictly within Facebook, you can now extend the full functionality of the platform to your own Web site and leverage Facebook as the tool for managing members and their relationships. Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own Web site but leverages the power of users&#39; Facebook relationships? Now you can!&quot;Sean Aune, a blogger at Mashable, noted that the move means that Facebook applications &quot;could possibly start popping up on ordinary Web sites and blogs any day now.&quot;Aune added that Facebook is looking to stem criticism for being like a &quot;walled garden in that things do go in but nothing comes out. It would appear that they made the first step last night in &#39;coming out&#39; as it were. Web apps will be able to use cookies to track the users when they are using the app in other places on the Internet. So, in theory, you could play a game on any site and your stats will still be tracked.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Developers will get to write applications for the iPhone. Sort of.
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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;
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By Alan Sipress and Sam Diaz, Washington Post Staff Writers  Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking the unusual step of allowing the public to develop features for the popular social-networking Web site, permitting any software designer to access the company's millions of members.
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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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Social networking site Facebook has just opened up its doors to the web's million-plus web application programmers. At a San Francisco launch event Thursday, the company debuted its new application framework that lets outside developers write programs to run on Facebook's website.
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Social network will allow individual creators to put a price on their content.