Facebook opens up to developers and its looking good!

Facebook has just released a fairly open platform for developers called the Facebook Platform. The Facebook Platform has been the subject of quite a bit of chatter (here are some discussions I have come across) on the Web the last few days and for good reason. So what does this have to do with users? Quite a lot actually. Until now Facebook users have become accustomed to a fairly simple interface on Facebook. You have various elements (photos, notes, links, groups and more recently, the Facebook Marketplace) that have a similar format and which you can move around and elect to either display or hide. With the new development platform it has become possible for developers (Facebook and third party developers) to create applications to run on Facebook. The end result is a more customisable Facebook profile which could look something like this:

There are a number of applications that Facebook users can add to their profiles and, in the process, add additional functionality to their profiles including SplashCasts, Twitter feeds and a lot more. This new development platform gives developers access to the awesome number of Facebook users and they, in turn, have the option of customising their profiles to introduce a variety of content to reflect their personalities. Facebook also becomes a more compelling alternative to MySpace and it will be interesting to see if Facebook surpasses MySpace in the near future. When you consider some of the statistics (sourced from TechCrunch) given at the announcement of the Facebook Platform you can begin to see the potential for this new service:

Facebook is growing 3% per week, which is 100,000 new users per day.

The fastest growing demographic is the 25 and up age group.

50% of registered users come back to the site every day.

Talking about how Facebook opened up registrations last year, and launched News Feed.

Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month. That’s 50 pages per user every day.

6th most trafficked site in the U.S.

More page views than eBay. Says they are targeting Google next.

Applications: photos, groups, events. Plug into profiles. Use all the real connections people have

Their photos app is by far the number one photo site on the internet.

So have you added any applications to your Facebook profile? Apparently the application iLike is one of the most popular applications on Facebook.

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