Bebo, the third-largest social networking site in the US, on Wednesday dealt a blow to Google's ambitions in the sector by adopting Facebook's open standards for applications.
Bebo, founded by Michael and Xochi Birch, said it had made its platform compatible with Facebook's. This will allow developers to make applications, such as movie ratings and photo-sharing tools, work on both sites with the minimum of alterations. Bebo members could also interact and play games with Facebook users.
Google also plans this kind of interoperability with its OpenSocial initiative, announced last month. Bebo was among 75 launch partners backing a common set of programming interfaces that would link the growing number of social networks.
But Mr Birch, Bebo chief executive, said on Wednesday that, although his development team would get round to working on OpenSocial, its efforts had been concentrated on compatibility with Facebook, which announced its platform in May.
"We thought we don't want to launch another platform because it just becomes a format war, which is very confusing and a pain in the butt for everyone. So we are launching something that's compatible 100 per cent."
Google and Facebook appear to be in competition over the development of what has been described as an alternative web operating system, where social networks would be the desktop from where users would launch their applications.
The Bebo announcement came two weeks after Li Ka-shing, the chairman of Hong Kong group Hutchison Whampoa, invested $60m in Facebook.
The investment, in exchange for a 0.4 per cent stake, follows a recent $240m investment in Facebook by Microsoft, the US software group, in exchange for 1.6 per cent of the company.
The investments, both of which valued Facebook at $15bn, are part of an ongoing funding round that could see the company raise as much as $500m from late-stage investors by January, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Two people familiar with Mr Li's investment dismissed reports that the deal would lead to a tie-up with Mr Li's media operation, Tom Group.
Dan Rose, Facebook's vice-president for development, told Les Echos, the Financial Times' French sister paper, that Facebook's new funds would "enable us to develop internationally".
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
