Facebook introduces tools to improve applications

San Francisco: Facebook Inc. is introducing more tools to help the software applications fueling the online hangout's popularity and is promising to intensify its efforts to weed out programs that violate its rules for protecting users' privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's precocious chief executive, outlined on Wednesday the steps in a programmers' conference that underscored the growing influence of the Web site.

A crowd of about 1,500 programmers turned out to hear Zuckerberg discuss how he hopes to make it easier for people to share information and entertainment wherever they go on the Web.

Zuckerberg, 24, is counting on programmers who are not employed by Facebook to play a vital role in realising his vision.

More than 30,000 applications have been designed to run on Facebook since the company opened its site to outside developers 14 months ago.

Facebook estimates that the makers of its top applications have raised a combined $200 million from venture capitalists. The applications offer a wide variety of features, including sharing photos, recommending music and playing games.

"I have to credit Facebook with a large part of our success," said Hadi Partovi, president of iLike, which offers a music-recommendation application. Partovi said about half of iLike's 30 million users signed up through Facebook.

As the number of outside applications has swelled, Facebook's users have ballooned from 24 million in May 2007 to about 90 million today.

The rapid growth has narrowed MySpace.com's lead in the Internet's social networking niche and helped privately held Facebook secure a $240 million investment from Microsoft Corp.

Zuckerberg is setting out to broaden the appeal of Facebook's outside applications by giving programmers access to Facebook's tools for translating into 20 different languages.

Facebook is also trying to make it easier for its users to transfer their personal profiles and favorite applications to other sites.

The "Connect" initiative, announced in May, moved a step closer to fruition with the opening of a "sandbox" for programmers to begin making their applications more portable. Two dozen Web sites have already signed up for Connect.

Facebook has already removed about 1,000 abusive applications since it opened up its Web site to outside programmers and plans to move even more aggressively as it establishes clearer ground rules for operating on its site.