Facebook.com -- the social network with style and the 17th most visited site in the world, opened to applications from independent software developers last month. While other social network sites also permit integration of third-party widgets, Facebook differs by being more business-minded. It will allow other companies to offer retail services and advertisement, taking advantage of Facebook's wide user base and existing infrastructure.  For businesses that translates into millions of potential customers and access to a web server cluster with a total of 2TB of RAM.

This latest development of the Facebook Platform, called F8, was unveiled at a special event at the San Francisco Design Center on May 24th. At the time of the launch announcement, existing third-party offerings for the plarform included widgets from Microsoft, Digg, and Washington Post. The number of additions to Facebook grows constantly: some of the widgets are simply toys, like the Graffiti app which allows your friends to draw on your profile page; other, consumer-oriented functionalities are also appearing, like Facebook's Marketplace, which was created in-house.

Aside from the robust technology, good design and excellent usability that power the success of Facebook, their greatest asset is the 25 million people that frequent the site. MySpace's design and legions of teen members have been the pun of many jokes and the subject of much general ridicule on the internet. For example, a recent blog post, which made it to the frontpage of leading social news sites, stated that the best CSS layout for a Myspace page was *{display: none;}. Facebook, on the other hand, started as a social network for people in colleges and universities, and that approach alone filtered its audience to educated and relatively well-to-do youngsters. As the site opened to the general public, it kept being a reflection of real-world relationships amongst what, to companies, essentially amounts to a high-quality visitor demographic. The ease of use and the attractive simple design also remained a constant.

With the launch of F8, Facebook is dedicating special attention to software developers, and enabling them to include their application into the Facebook Platform. The "developers" section of the site now provides extensive documentation, developer forums, and news about the platform. Activity there is visibly intensifying, as the F8 platform receives more attention from programmers.

The development and inclusion of third party applications is made possible by a suite of dedicated tools: a REST API, an SQL-derived query language, and a text markup languge similar to the old warhorse HTML. Developers with knowledge of, respectively, web services, databases, and hypertext, can quickly grasp Facebook's interface, query system, and markup. Online testing consoles are also available. Every reasonably talented web developer is able to work with the tools and documentation after a simple, free registration.

The extending of existing online services with APIs and the inclusion of funcitonalities provided by third-party developers is a trend that is hard to miss. As social networks grow in popularity and the methods for interaction between their core platforms and possible extensions mature, the symbiosys between said social networks and external application developers will become ever more widespread.  In the end, no single company can conceive and create all the interesting, useful, or plain weird things a large community of users and developers can.

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