SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook is loosening its grip on millions of personal profiles to allow inhabitants of its popular Internet hangout to transplant the information and applications to other Web sites.
With the changes, Facebook joins a growing movement to make it easier for people to share their favorite pictures, information and applications with family and friends anywhere on the Internet.
Facebook, which has about 70 million users worldwide, unveiled its plans Friday, a day after rival MySpace made a similar commitment.
Unlike MySpace, which has about 200 million users worldwide, Facebook plans to allow users to take their personal profiles to any Web site that wants to host them. For starters, MySpace is opening user profiles only to a select group of sites, including leading destinations owned by Yahoo and eBay.
Facebook and MySpace say several weeks remain before their users' data become portable.
The transition poses a risk for Facebook and MySpace because they are effectively tearing down the barriers that sequestered the personal profiles on their sites. This so-called walled-garden approach kept people coming back to the sites, creating a magnetism that appeals to advertisers.
But pressure to offer portable profiles has been building as people have embraced the Internet as a convenient way to swap personal information and interests.
Internet search leader Google waded into the fray last year by creating a network that's supposed to make it easier to share music, pictures, video and other personal interests on a range of online hangouts.
MySpace joined the Google system, known as OpenSocial, but Facebook hasn't.
If freeing up the personal profiles on its site turns Facebook into the command center for shaping and steering social interactions across the Web, that could make Facebook more powerful than it already was becoming.
Facebook's Web site could also become an even more attractive platform for hosting a range of mini-applications, known as “widgets,” now that its users will be able to take the same bundle of programs to other Web sites. Drawn by a potentially larger audience, developers may see greater reason to create applications for Facebook.
