Facebook opens Status, Notes, Links and Video to developers

Move to counter Twitter's rising popularity?

9 February 2009 13:43 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Facebook is opening up more of its platform to developers, said by some to be partly in a bid to try and counter the rising popularity of micro-blogging site Twitter.

In a blog post, Facebook says: "We're launching several new APIs for Facebook Platform today. These new interfaces open up access to the content and methods for sharing through several Facebook Applications - including Facebook Status, Notes, Links (what we used to call Posted Items), and Video - to go along with the APIs already available for uploading and viewing through Facebook Photos".

Twitter is seen by some as "the new Facebook", and essentially offers just what Facebook's "status" feature does - a short message describing what the user is up to.

Although Facebook says it has 15 million users updating their status each day, some suggest that it is threatened by Twitter's rise - with traffic to the micro-blogging service up nearly 1000% on same-time-last-year's figures.

By opening up the "status" feature in Facebook to developers, widgets, apps and tools can be created that may help to reinvigorate interest in the older social networking site's services.

Full tags

Software, Websites, Facebook, Twitter, Social networking