Facebook’s 23-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg said the company has set in place programs to encourage third-party developers to build applications that tightly integrate with the platform.
“Until now, social networks have been closed platforms.Today, we’re going to end that,” Mr Zuckerberg told an audience of more than 750 developers and partners.
“With this evolution of Facebook Platform, any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook.”
The keynote opened the Facebook f8 event, named to reflect the developer hackathon that ends 8 hours after the address during which new applications will be created for Facebook.
This week, Facebook Platform launched with more than 65 developer partners and 85 applications and with the introduction of an example application called Video.
E-commerce giant Amazon.com is the highest profile of the third-party firms committed to using Facebook Platform to deliver applications. Amazon will next week launch an application that lets Facebook members publish book reviews on their profile page.
Mr Zuckerberg detailed how any developer can build an application that is as integrated into the site’s information flow and connections of relationships as Facebook’s own applications.
Facebook users decide which applications to add and can control their order and appearance within their profiles, all with the familiar Facebook design. Users can always remove applications, including those built by Facebook, and will have their privacy controls maintained across applications.
Facebook introduced a new markup language, Facebook Markup, which along with its previously released APIs allows developers to build applications fully integrated into the site.
Facebook Markup includes features, such as dynamic information tags, conditional privacy tags, image caching and Flash. Developers can build anything they want in full, unlimited application pages on Facebook, called the “canvas pages,” and applications also can have a box in users’ profiles and navigation.
The Facebook site is now the sixth most trafficked internet destination in the US, and is second only to News Corporation’s MySpace as the world’s largest social networking site.
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