• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, July 24, 2008 11 AM

As bloggers complained that Facebook announced a whole lot of nothing at its developer conference in San Francisco, developers happily received news of the social networking giant's new application verification process. Closely held Facebook now plans to begin verifying applications in order to allow some developers greater access to Facebook features than others. Jia Shen, co-founder of app maker RockYou, told The Wall Street Journal: "I am really happy they clarified the sorts of applications they want on the site. For a long time, that wasn't clear."

Mark Zuckerberg, who keynoted the event for the second year running, also outlined new details of a service called Facebook Connect, which allows people to log onto other Web sites with their Facebook accounts. This means users will be able to interact with their friends while surfing participating Web sites like Digg.com. "Things are going to decentralize quite a bit," Zuckerberg said. "Less is going to be about the site Facebook.com and more is going to be about other apps and the experience we are building together." Facebook Connect will be available this fall.

Regarding the stewards of Facebook's growing application ecosystem, Zuckerberg conceded: "We haven't done enough to reward the good citizens of the ecosystem and to punish those applications that have been abusive. We need to find a way to ensure that the applications that provide the most long-term value succeed." As part of this push, Facebook will begin featuring a more select tier of applications, called "Great Apps."

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