Facebook, the popular social networking web site, sought to give additional incentive to developers to create new software by announcing Wednesday that it would license its platform to other sites.

Developers for the Facebook site have been making software that allows users to more easily add new functionality to their web profiles, including the addition of videos, images, and text from other websites.

Facebook will even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work, Facebook wrote on its High-Level Specification page.

In August of 2006, Facebook released software that would facilitate the transfer of information on its site to other social sites. In May 2007, developers were allowed to begin adding new functionality to the site by creating their own software.

Facebook Software