Facebook Invites in Third-Party Developers

The Wall Street Journal says that Facebook will announce later today that it will "open up core parts of its sites" to third-party developers (subscription required). If you look at how third-party development has transformed things like the iPhone and Twitter, it's hard to underestimate how important this will be in supercharging Facebook, which, of course, is supercharged already.

Like most of you, I'm no geek, so I don't see things through the prism of code, but of how developers expand the top-of-mind awareness, and techno-footprint of products that welcome an infusion of ways to use them that their original creators never thought of. The iPhone App Store, which just celebrated its one-billionth download only nine months after opening, shows just how powerful the third-party app explosion has been. Of the 25 top paid apps, only one was created by Apple; the same holds true for the top 25 free apps.

As popular as the core Twitter service is, its popularity is vastly understated when all that's being counted is traffic to Twitter.com. Though the metric I'm about to give you is much less scientific, 20 of the last 25 tweets that showed up in my Twitter account (I'm accessing it these days mostly via TweetDeck), were from third-party Twitter sites, ranging from Twitterfeed.com to Tweetie, which brings this discussion full circle -- Tweetie is a Twitter app for the iPhone.

So now, imagine Facebook experiencing the same effect. It's already, of course, on the verge of putting MySpace in the rearview mirror, but now it has upped the ante considerably.