FOUNDER OF Facebook Mark Zuckerberg this week outlined at Facebook's annual conference how the company's features will run on affiliated sites outside its own.
Facebook Connect will transform the social network from a private site where activity occurs entirely within a "walled garden" to a web-wide phenomenon where software makers, with user permission, can tap member data for use on their sites.
"Facebook Connect is our version of Facebook for the rest of the web," Zuckerberg (24) told the second annual F8 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Facebook, begun in 2004 as a socialising site for students at Harvard, has seen its growth zoom to 90 million members from 24 million a little over a year ago, overtaking MySpace to become the world's largest social network. It has lured 400,000 developers to build programs for it since opening up its site in May 2007.
Now Facebook is letting designers build software on affiliated sites, for mobile phones or as services that tap desktop applications like Microsoft's Outlook e-mail system. In coming months, it says it will let designers building software for Facebook to simultaneously create versions for Apple's iPhone.
"This year," Zuckerberg said, "we are going to push for parity between applications on and off Facebook." In doing so, it is positioning itself to play a role similar to what Microsoft has long had for developers within its Windows operating system.
Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard to run Facebook, is a shy programmer turned billionaire with an anything-but-humble vision to make the world a more "transparent" place to live.
Facebook has been translated, largely by its own users, into 20 languages since the start of 2008.
Zuckerberg, who grew up in an affluent suburb north of New York City, described the epiphany he had last year while travelling in Istanbul. "A couple of bloggers called it my vision quest, but I called it a vacation," he joked.
Free of his Blackberry and daily management pressures, he got to define some ambitious new goals.
"I want to be able to build a product that allows you to be able to see a person and feel their presence, to have people have more open connections by helping them to share more." - (Reuters)
