Rochak Chauhan::Unpredictably Exciting

The news that Facebook has opened its API to allow third-party widgets will have non-technical readers scratching their heads.

What is an API, you will probably wonder? What’s a third-party widget? Indeed, perhaps Facebook itself is still a mystery to you.

Set up in 2004 as an online answer to the yearbooks popular in American schools and colleges, Facebook is a social-networking site that works in much the same way as MySpace: members can create profile pages, form networks with their friends, send messages and share photographs.

However, where MySpace has expanded in all directions at a ferocious rate, dragging anyone and everyone into its garish, chaotic pages, Facebook’s approach has been more subtle. The site was initially only available to college students and an academic email address was required to sign up. Facebook soon expanded to allow high school pupils to join before finally opening its doors to everyone last year.

The Facebook pages, with their clean blue-and-white scheme, are more uniform than those on MySpace, which often has the cluttered appearance of a teenager’s bedroom wall. This has been a major factor in MySpace’s success, it should be noted, but Facebook’s pages, which can be customised but remain broadly similar, may help it reach an older audience.

At first glance it seems that Facebook exists simply to catalogue one’s friends and demonstrate how popular you are. It’s only when you start watching the “front page” of your profile that Facebook’s power becomes clear. This rolling list of the little interactions your friends have had - “X added a new picture”, “Y is hung over” (I’ve seen that one a lot already), “Q and R are now friends” - is weirdly addictive.

Awareness of the site, boosted by recent news stories revealing a page purporting to belong to Prince William, has now spread beyond teenagers and those in their early twenties. Thirty-somethings are logging on and tracking down old school friends and former colleagues. It’s like Friends Reunited all over again.

Facebook’s breakthrough was opening its API - application programming interface - to outside developers. An API is a way for one computer program to use the facilities of another. Microsoft’s Windows API is open to the public, for example, enabling anyone to write programs for Windows.

It means that developers can write all manner of little programs, known as widgets, that drag content into Facebook pages.

Want to track an eBay auction, show a YouTube video or make a slideshow of your photos? Want to integrate your Last.fm personalised radio stations and playlists into your profile? There’s a widget that does all these things.

This makes the site far more powerful - the more content a user can pull into their page, the less need they have to leave Facebook to visit other websites. Facebook promises developers that they can keep all the revenue generated by their widget. In response to this news, Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman wrote on his Redeye VC blog: “Facebook has just increased its virtual research and development budget by over $250 million”.

All this sounds like a recipe for growth, something that Facebook was already doing very well. Blogger Robert Scoble claims that a million new members are joining Facebook every week and the site currently has around 25 million members.

There is a long way to go before Facebook can challenge the social networking behemoth MySpace, which has well over 100 million members and is said to be the fifth largest website in the world in terms of traffic. It is thought to be adding around two million members per week.

However, smaller social networking sites are well within Facebook’s striking range. Bebo (bebo.com), tremendously successful in Britain, has around 34 million members, while Orkut (orkut.com), the Google-owned site that is huge in Brazil, has 46 million people on board. Even lesser-know social networks such as Classmates (classmates.com), Xanga (xanga.com) and former market leader Friendster (friendster.com) are currently thought to be bigger than Facebook.

The API advantage should not be underestimated. MySpace has made developers very nervous about creating widgets after the website suspended some third-party widgets and banned others. MySpace could wipe out Facebook’s advantage at a stroke by emulating their more laid-back approach to third-party applications, but will it ever do so? So far MySpace, now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, has behaved as if it wants to control everything on its site.

Facebook has recognised, in Josh Kopelman’s words, that it is better to own “a web platform than a web property”. It is still in a viciously competitive market and its users could head to another service at any moment.

However, it’s taken a step towards the future, both for social networking and the web as a whole.

Five most popular widgets

Mobile - access profiles from your phone

iLike - add music to your profile

Horoscopes - what does the future hold?

Movies - rate and review films

Me - tired of “poking” friends? “Hug”, “kiss” or “nudge” instead.