Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive officer, announced at the company's annual conference that took place in San Francisco that the site is opening its arms to third party developers who are able to create applications that fulfill Facebook's expectations. Mr. Zuckerberg also announced the way the general public is going to know which applications are trustworthy and which not.

Facebook's CEO admitted that the company made some mistakes in the past, most of then being caused by the fact that Facebook has rushed to bring third party applications on its site, without taking precautions about their quality.

Indeed, some people complained that some of the applications that Facebook supported on its site were increasing the spam the users were receiving and that sometimes their personal data was open for others to see.

Mr. Mark Zuckerberg announced at the press conference that Facebook has come up with a ranking system that will allow people who have an account on the site to see what applications are worth and safe using and which not. The way this system works is as follows: every new third party application will be checked to see if it complies with a set of 10 guidelines that Facebook came up with.

These guidelines say that the application must be trustworthy, meaningful and useful, among other things. The applications that respect some of these guidelines will be marked “Facebook Verification”, while the ones that respect all of them will have the title of “Great Apps.”

Even though the ranking system is good for developers also, Mr. Zuckerberg didn't say anything about a subject that everybody who is planning to create apps for Facebook is really interested in: if and how much will the company pay for the applications that are delivered to its site.