Sean Alexander

I’ve been doing a lot less Twittering and spending a lot more time in Facebook. Given they’re adding over 100,000 users a day and the fastest growing demographic is inthe 25 and over crowd, I guess it isn’t surprising- they’re nimble, offer a whole host of social networking features and a lot of my friends and coworkers are now over there.

And yesterday things got a lot more interesting. Microsoft and Facebook announced a new partnership. Microsoft already powers the ad engine on Facebook, and now is working together to bring Silverlight and Popfly en-masse to the Facebook community.

The Microsoft and Facebook partnership means Facebook are now empowered to customize their Facebook pages in richly interactive ways. Even if they have no development experience, Facebook users will have tools that let them create pages that reflect their personality with Popfly and Silverlight delivering cross-platform, cross-browser goodness.

Also announced:

• Distribution of the Facebook Developer Toolkit. The FDT was developed by Microsoft to wrap the Facebook API into a managed component. Through this component, developers now will be able to drag ‘n drop a Facebook component onto the component tray in Visual C# Express , Visual Basic Express and Visual Web Developer (for both Whidbey and Orcas). Users will be provided all the source code, sample applications including a WPF app and detail documentation.

• Co-branded Landing Page on the Facebook developer website. At this site, visitors will be able to see Microsoft Visual Studio Express and Microsoft Popfly links. Additionally, a series of new pages were developed called Showcase on the Visual Studio Express site.

And of course now I’m playing with applications on Facebook such as the Flickr Importer and iLike (the name the song game is addictive). Fun times and diversions for the holiday weekend.