Facebook aids some apps, punishes others on privacy

SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook is introducing more tools to help the software applications fueling the online hangout's popularity and is promising to intensify its efforts to weed out programs that violate its rules for protecting users' privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's precocious chief executive, outlined on Wednesday the steps in a programmers' conference that underscored the growing influence of the website that he started 4 1/2 years ago in his Harvard University dorm room.

A crowd of about 1,500 programmers turned out to hear Zuckerberg discuss how he hopes to make it easier for people to share information and entertainment wherever they go on the Web.

Zuckerberg, 24, is counting on programmers who aren't employed by Facebook to play a vital role in realizing his vision.

More than 30,000 applications have been designed to run on Facebook since the company opened its site to outside developers 14 months ago. The most successful applications have been embraced by millions of Facebook users, helping to turn the start-ups that developed them into hot commodities.

Facebook estimates that the makers of its top applications have raised a combined $200 million from venture capitalists. The applications offer a wide variety of features, including sharing photos, recommending music and playing games.

"I have to credit Facebook with a large part of our success," said Hadi Partovi, president of iLike, which offers a music-recommendation application. Partovi said about half of iLike's 30 million users signed up through Facebook.

As the number of outside applications have swelled, Facebook's users have ballooned from 24 million in May 2007 to about 90 million today. The rapid growth has narrowed MySpace.com's lead in the Internet's social networking niche and helped privately held Facebook secure a $240 million investment from Microsoft.

Zuckerberg is setting out to broaden the appeal of Facebook's outside applications by giving programmers access to Facebook's tools for translating into 20 different languages.