Facebook Follows Twitter Lead, Opens Site To Developers
"We think that working alongside our peers to create an open standard for accessing and consuming streams is the future. We'll continue to make contributions to the standards community and related technologies and are happy to be one of the first companies to implement activity streams at scale," Facebook said in a statement.
By allowing developers to build client applications that give users direct interaction with their activity streams -- the various update feeds from Facebook friends that users previously had to visit Facebook, the Web site, to see in full -- the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company seems to be moving in a direction that fellow social networking superstar Twitter has followed from its inception some three years ago.
Twitter, an open platform, has seen more users migrate to third-party sites hosting the San Francisco-based company's microblogging service than visit Twitter.com itself to post and get updates from people they "follow," according to industry watchers. The upshot for Twitter is that bringing more users on board remains its top priority as it searches for a revenue model, so site visits aren't very important.
Not so for Facebook, which pulled in some $300 million last year, mainly from ad revenues. If fewer users are visiting Facebook.com, where those ads are displayed, how does the company make money?
Facebook isn't talking about its overall strategy just yet, but many observers speculate that a plan is in the offing to sell ads that tag along with off-site user streams.