Facebook to let users carry profiles with them

Facebook Inc. 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 announced Friday, 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 the day after its bigger rival, News Corp.'s MySpace, made a similar commitment.

Unlike MySpace, which has about 200 million users worldwide, Palo Alto-based 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 Inc. and eBay Inc.

Both Facebook and MySpace say several weeks remain before their users' data becomes 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 and sticking around, 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 Inc. 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 even more powerful than it already was becoming.

Facebook's Web site could also become an even more attractive platform for hosting a wide 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.

The portability of personal profiles also may help other top Web sites, like Yahoo, that have struggled to create their own social networks. Yahoo is hoping to drum up more advertising by featuring more social applications from outside sources. Yahoo is under intense pressure to boost its profits after its board refused last weekend to sell to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion.

Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook in October, valuing the 4-year-old startup at $15 billion. That deal came a little more than a year after Facebook rejected a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo.

Facebook's recent efforts to interact with other sites haven't gone smoothly. Last year, users rebelled when Facebook introduced a marketing tool that tracked and broadcast information about their activities on dozens of other Web sites. The backlash prompted Facebook to empower users to turn off the feature permanently.