Facebook wooing developers
2008-05-28 09:03
San Francisco - Social networking website Facebook Inc, in a move aimed at competing aggressively against Google Inc's ventures into social networking, said it would open its development platform to encourage more application development.
"We're working on an open source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it's by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimising their applications," the company said.
Facebook's attempt to further woo the developer community comes against a background of heightened competition to create "widgets", social networking software applications that are seen as the key to persuading users to spend more time on sites and ultimately to monetising social networking.
On his InsideFacebook blog, industry watcher Justin Smith said the move represented an attempt to compete more directly with Google.
"Given the 'social platform wars' with Google, open sourcing Facebook Platform standards would create an alternative platform to (Google') OpenSocial for social networks to integrate rich third-party applications."
Palo Alto, California-based Facebook has around 70 million users worldwide. It is privately held, but Microsoft Corp owns a roughly $240m stake.
Facebook, Google and MySpace, a rival social networking site owned by News Corp, have recently made changes to allow users to move their personal profiles to other websites.
Google, seeking to broaden its revenue sources beyond internet search, last year announced a series of technical specifications called OpenSocial, designed to encourage developers to use its platform to create widgets.
Despite their popularity, especially with younger users, social networking sites have struggled to generate viable commercial business models.
Last year, users of Facebook rebelled at the introduction of a marketing tool that tracked and displayed information about the behaviour of users across other websites. The application was initially seen as a promising tool to allow marketers to reach consumers.