facebookFacebook, the popular social networking site and the main competitor to News Corp.’s MySpace, announced the opening up of its platform to third-party developers for creating full-scale applications inside Facebook. The announcement was made at its press release after the launch of the platform, titled “F8”.

“We believe there is more value in having others build applications and develop completely new things,” said CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The site that started out in February 2004, now boasts of more than 24 million users.

Here’s an excerpt from an article at Internetnews.com:

“Zuckerberg described the three major components of the Platform as deep Integration into Facebook, mass Integration through the ‘social graph’ that connects Facebook’s users to each other, and new business opportunities for developers. Facebook said developers can create applications and keep all the ad or transaction revenue themselves.”

Facebook has created its own variant of the HTML programming language, termed Facebook Markup, that can be used by members to create pages with ads or other tools. Also, the list of Web service providers for the new platform includes the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Photobucket, iLife, Slide, Twitter and Jajah. Facebook was in the news recently as a possible buy-out target for Yahoo. The deal, however, fell through.

For more on Facebook in the news:

Facebook opens its API in hopes of eclipsing MySpace (Ars Technica )

Facebook opens to third party developers (MSNBC)

Facebook welcomes outside services (News.com)

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