Facebook Turns Over New Leaf

May 25, 09:22 AM

Current Headlines: By Barbara Grady

Facebook, the Palo Alto-based social networking site popular with college students, on Thursday said it is heading in a new direction to give its 24 million users more to do on its site.

Facebook Inc. launched a software development platform and invited developers to use it to create new applications for users to mess around with, including video-production and sharing programs, music sharing, and more.

"Until now, social networks have been closed platforms. Today, we're going to end that," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement and at an event for software developers in San Francisco.

"We are at a time in history when more information is available and people are more connected than they ever have been before," Zuckerberg said. Facebook and other social networking sites, such as MySpace and YouTube, are at the center of that, he said.

Facebook said it already signed up 65 software companies to build new applications, including Berkeley-based MOG Inc., which creates music sharing programs, as well as applications from Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

MOG is offering its music discovery Web service on Facebook.com, including an application that lets users share songs with friends.

The way Zuckerberg imagines it, application developers would build on top of Facebook. "Any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the (platform) inside of Facebook," he said.

To allow developers to build applications right into its platform, Facebook developed a new Web markup language it called Facebook Markup. It had already released the Facebook APIs, the application programming interface or the coding Facebook used to build applications.

The platform could boost Facebook into a realm beyond social networking, where it competes with MySpace, which has almost three times the number of users.

Zuckerberg, 23, started Facebook in 2004 while an undergraduate at Harvard University. The company remains private and independent, even though other popular social networking sites have been acquired by big Web companies. San Bruno-based YouTube, for instance, was bought by Mountain View-based Google Inc.

Said MOG founder David Hyman: "We couldn't be happier about being one of the inaugural applications built on Facebook Platform."

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