Facebook, the dominant social-networking Web site for college students, is opening up its pages. The company, which has had a set format policy, said last week that it would allow anyone to add "widgets" to their pages: for example, music players, games, or collections of book reviews written by the page owner.
It's doing this by opening up its application-programming interface–the code that governs each page–to developers, allowing them to create things to attach to the plain-vanilla Facebook pages.
Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, told developers at a conference that the move is "good for Facebook because, if you're building great applications, it is a service to our users," according to Ars Technica.
Widgets that let users share their likes and dislikes with others may help promote the social networking that already makes Facebook appealing to students. –Josh Fischman
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