Facebook opens apps to other sites

Last month, Google announced a program called OpenSocial that lets anyone create social "applications" that users of social networking sites can use within those sites. It was largely seen as a response to Facebook applications, which can be created by anyone and promoted to Facebook users. You know that Google, always wanting to be at the center of every business transaction while supposedly doing no evil.

Facebook apps had an estimated 14 million users in August, which is amazing given that they only started to become available in May 2007.

Now Facebook is countering Google by letting other sites use Facebook apps. Cool! Here's the announcement from Facebook's senior platform manager Ami Vora's blog:

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins -- users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

LinkedIn, Friendster and Bebo are following suit, with Bebo using Facebook's protocols. (Um, sorry, but I just have to say -- have you honestly ever heard of Bebo? Are you "Beboing" right now? Hats off to their marketing people for using this announcement to get their name out there. And for the record, Crunchbase says Bebo has 34 million registered users and 7 billion monthly pageviews. So I guess my unfamiliarity makes me not cool, or maybe too old.)

Hey, you Time Magazine people, are you listening? Last year you declared "You" to be the Person of the Year. Now the Word of the Year is OPEN.

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