Palo Alto, Calif. - Facebook, the second-largest online social network behind MySpace, this week launched its anticipated open platform that lets businesses and developers create their own pages and applications.

The company signed 65 initial partners, including Microsoft, Amazon.com, Photobucket, iLike, Twitter and Jaxtr, who can sell ads and provide e-commerce features on their pages, and aren't required to share revenue with Facebook.

The company also introduced its own video widget, which allows users to share videos with one another, and even send live webcam or camera phone shots to their Facebook friends.

Partner Amazon.com launched a book reviews widget, that lets members write and share their reviews and include links to purchase the titles on Amazon.

"Until now, social networks have been closed platforms," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told developers at a conference in San Francisco.

"Today, we're going to end that. With this evolution of Facebook Platform, any developer worldwide can build full social applications on top of the social graph, inside of Facebook."

Related Links:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2415922130

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070525/tc_nm/facebook_software_dc_3