San Francisco - Following in the footsteps of rival social networks Facebook and, asl of last week, MySpace, Friendster announced on Thursday that it will launch a developer program next month to allow third-party applications to be added to its social networking service.

The company said that developers can immediately access the initial set of APIs and a testing environment for the Friendster Developer Program.

While attention has lately been centered on Facebook, which claims 49 million users, and MySpace, which has a reported 200 million users, Friendster still counts over 50 million users, and remains quite popular in Asia and other regions abroad.

Like Facebook's application directory, Friendster will feature a widget directory with applications that can access Friendster data.

Related Links:
http://tinyurl.com/24qzmy

http://developers.friendster.com

http://www.friendster.com