Facebook to help some programmers, punish others

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer Thu Jul 24, 1:46 AM ET

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.

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.

More than 30,000 applications have been designed to run on Facebook since the company opened its site to outside developers 14 months ago. The most successful applications have been embraced by millions of Facebook users, helping to turn the startups that developed them into hot commodities.

"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.

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.

The "Connect" initiative, announced in May, moved a step closer to fruition Wednesday with the opening of a "sandbox" for programmers to begin making their applications more portable. Two dozen Web sites, including Digg, Citysearch and Movable Type, already have signed up for Connect. Facebook expects the feature to debut in autumn.

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, said Benjamin Ling, Facebook‘s director of platform program management.

Rating the applications "is a huge shift in philosophy for Facebook," said Sean Parker, Causes‘ chairman and a former Facebook executive who remains close to Zuckerberg. "Every developer involved with Facebook is going to either walk out of here elated or scared to death."

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