Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook‘s CEO, is once again courting software developers. Where he once invited them to live on its site, he’s now hoping they’ll knit Facebook into desktop applications. It’s another move to ape Twitter.
Twitter has been an obsession of Zuckerberg’s for some time. He tried to buy the message-broadcasting startup last year, but talks fell apart. Now he’s set about rebuilding Facebook in Twitter’s image. Facebook has announced an “Open Stream API,” an interface for application programmers to download the spew of friends’ status updates that now greets users when they log into Facebook. In theory, developers will now be able to code a raft of applications whose main purpose is reading Facebook. rest