Today's Boston Globe has a nice
piece on Facebook. According to the article, they now have 39 million users and 3000 applications that run on the platform. In order to let third parties add value to the platform, Facebook opened the APIs for application development in May. The hope is that these applications will draw/keep users to the platform and in return more developers write to the platform hoping to attract more users. In effect, open architectures generate virtuous cycles.