Facebook.com has revealed makeover plans that will turn it from its current members-only club into a hub software operating system for a variety of internet media.
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.
Other companies building services within Facebook include photo-sharing site Photobucket, multimedia presentation site Slide, music discovery site iLike, new-style instant messaging site Twitter.com and Web-calling companies Jajah and Jaxtr.
Facebook was founded by 23 year-old Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 as a socialising site for fellow Harvard students.
It now has 24 million active users and is growing by 3 percent a week.
The company, which operates under the radar of much of the traditional tech industry, is looking to transform itself from a Web site into what Silicon Valley calls a "platform" -- a foundation service on which many other applications can run.
Facebook is the second largest social network site, behind Rupert Murdoch owned News Corp.'s MySpace.
It will allow developers to build services that work both inside Facebook's site and on their own independent sites.
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