• Fortune, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11 AM

Facebook just took giant steps toward expanding into a global technology company. The social network's decision to extend its technology platform to software developers should "create a raft of new opportunities for companies of all sizes," Kirkpatrick says, because it now allows anyone to build applications for social computing. In conjunction with the announcement, Facebook announced that 65 partner companies were unveiling more than 85 applications its members could install immediately.

Sounding Google-like, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said "we want to make Facebook into something of an operating system, so you can run full applications" similar to how Microsoft's Windows provides a platform for developers. Use of the Web-based platform doesn't require any permission or business relationship with the social network, though Facebook's total user-base--a little over 24 million--is far smaller than Windows.

"This is likely to result in an explosion of creativity," says Kirkpatrick, and if the tools are cool enough, it could potentially draw users away from its chief competitor MySpace, which has a user base that's nearly 10 times as large. The idea--and it could be a brilliant one--is to draw more users and more page views per user. Kirkpatrick believes other social networks will be forced to follow suit.

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