Facebook site invites outside software makers

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook.com took the wraps off on Thursday of its highly anticipated makeover from a members-only club into what it hopes can become a kind of software operating system for Internet media of all sorts.

Facebook, the college student social network site that opened up to users of all ages over the past year, has signed up 65 partners including Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. , Photobucket, Slide, Digg and iLike, to build applications within Facebook.

The company is looking to transform itself from a Web site into what the computer industry calls a "platform" -- a foundation service on which many other applications can run.

Facebook plans to let its users select from this growing stable of applications in order to create a personal set of features on their Facebook pages.

The Palo Alto, California-based company, which was founded in 2004 by then undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg as a social site for his fellow students at Harvard, has signed up 24 million active users in three years.

Zuckerberg, the now 23-year-old chief executive of Facebook, is looking to provide what he calls "social utility" -- a set of communication, networking and entertainment tools for people's social lives.

Facebook, the second largest social network site behind News Corp.'s MySpace, is seeking to function as a Web technology and services provider to its members instead of a media entertainment destination as MySpace does.

The company is making the announcement at "f8," a carefully orchestrated event held in a cavernous conference center in San Francisco, where it has invited 750 developers and industry figures.

The f8 event features an eight-hour "hackathon" where Facebook engineers and outside developers will showcase new applications being built on Facebook.com.