The college student social networking site, which opened up to users of all ages over the past year, said it has signed up 65 partners, including Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to build Web applications within Facebook.

    In late May, the company's 23-year-old CEO Mark claimed in San Francisco at an event, the company called F8, that Facebook would no longer be just another social-networking site. Instead, he said, it aims to be the place where you can involve your friends in everything you do online.

    Zuckerberg said that the move was similar to what Microsoft Corp. did decades ago, when the relatively obscure software maker began encouraging third-party companies to write programs for its personal computer operating system. The strategy made Microsoft phenomenally profitable and helped turn founder Bill Gates-like Zuckerberg, a Harvard University dropout-into world's richest man.

    Facebook users will now be able to develop their own third-party applications, distribute them to other Facebook users, and even use them to start their own businesses.

    "You can serve ads...And if you don't want to run ads, you can just go ahead and sell something. You don't even need to send people off-site for transactions. You can do it all onsite, run ads, do transactions, and we encourage both," Zuckerberg said. "You keep all the revenue."

    Facebook.com was founded in February 2004 by Zuckerberg and his Harvard buddy, Dustin Moskovitz. The site was supposed to be the virtual version of paper "face books" that Harvard and other colleges distribute to freshmen.

    Within a month, the site had caught on at Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. By December 2004, it had nearly one million active users.

    After the site opened up registration to non-college students last September, it evolved into a major social networking destination to rival MySpace.com. It now has 24 million members (less than half of whom are now in college), and it is adding about 150,000 a day.

    (Agencies)