Today Friendster has announced the launched of its developer program that will go live in this November. This move is in tandem with its third stage of opening the Friendster global social network, and now the developers can access the initial set of APIs and the testing environment in developing the widgets. It also means the developers can now have more than one month to build and integrate their widgets with Friendster before they are published to the “Friendster Widget Directory” on November 30.

Though Friendster was one of the social networking sites on the Web, it is not the first that released this kind of “widget directory,” the first was Facebook, and now MySpace, Friendster and several others are also evolving in this direction. However, Facebook temporarily is the only one with a credible claim to being a social platform. This definitely gives Facebook an edge that they are the first-mover, however first-mover does not equal to the first-mover advantage, as the advent of competition creates pressure on the profit margins of first-mover. In real example, 50 million users that Friendster owned is not small, and it’s surely outnumbers the 46 million users that currently used Facebook. And don’t forget, these are two different groups, Facebook was building its empire around the US market whereas the majority of Friendster users are reside in Southeast Asia countries.

What sets this Friendster’s Developer Program apart from others is the focus on getting developers developing the widgets that are easily be deployed to the Friendster’s user profile, without requiring them to build a totally new application. While existing widgets that based on HTML and Flash will continue to function, and a widget directory will be available that let the Friendster users to browse, discover, preview, and add the widget they like onto their profiles. Meanwhile, Friendster plans to adopt the open revenue model in which developers do not need to pay Friendster a portion of money they earn out of their widgets. Moreover, the viral support, i.e. when adding a widget, this will appear in the “My Network Activity” module which will virally promote a particular widget to the user’s friends and the developer community feedback pertaining to additional API calls will be added when this program fully launched in November.