On May 24th of this year, Facebook.com made the Facebook Platform available for developers to create their own applications. The platform enables independent developers to create Facebook applications for fun and functionality.

The concept is genius for numerous reasons. For one, the minds behind Facebook have much more to offer users. Furthermore, applications are completely integrated into Facebook, providing a seamless experience for the users. It’s also worth mentioning that security and privacy are kept to a high standard. As such, applications can access personal information from a user’s profile only after being granted individual permission to do so.

After delving further into the world of Facebook, I’ve found so many reasons to start creating my own applications on the site. The following are five of the most obvious and most compelling reasons to get started.

1. It’s 100% free.

If you already have a Facebook account, then getting started is simply a click away from the Facebook Developers page. Just add the Developer application to your Facebook profile, request to create a new application, and start coding. The step-by-step getting started guide is a good place to start.

2. Facebook’s News Feed offers free marketing and promotion.

Because the News Feed displays recent friends’ activities upon logging into Facebook, users immediately see what interactions you’ve had with new and interesting applications. If any of your friends in turn decide to use this application, their friends will in turn see the same actions in their News Feeds. This obviously has the potential to provide exponential growth.

3. You have instant access to millions of potential users.

As of the time of this writing, Facebook has over 40 million active users who generate over a billion pageviews per day. In this month’s Wired, Jonathan Sposato explains his surprise at the speed with which his Picnik application spread.

Within three days, more than 100,000 users downloaded his program — about 10 times more than he’d anticipated. Because News Feed instantly and automatically notified friends whenever someone downloaded Picnik, word of the application spread exponentially. Sposato called colleagues in a desperate — and ultimately successful — hunt for extra server capacity to avoid outages. Currently almost 250,000 Facebook users have installed Picnik on their pages, making it the network’s top photo-editing tool.

4. You earn the money, not Facebook.

Although Facebook always includes their own advertising banner on the left-hand side of the website, you get to control what appears in the main section of each page — the “canvas” — within your application. This could be something as simple as Amazon associate links, or something as complex as direct advertising deals for applications receiving strong numbers of pageviews.

5. It’s relatively simple to implement for those familiar with programming.

Although the documentation is somewhat limited due to its recently publication, there is not too much to be learned for basic Facebook interaction beyond the basic principles of the programming language of your choice. FBQL (Facebook Query Language) is a simple means by which user data can be retrieved. Developers who are familiar with SQL (Structured Query Language) should have little complications familiarizing themselves with FBQL.

In order to render special parts of the page (such as the user’s first name or profile picture) within the HTML, Facebook uses FBML, or Facebook Markup Language. Because FBML is simply a customization of XML, then a preexisting understanding of the latter means that it’s only necessary to learn the FBML tag and attribute names for implementation.

In order to preserve the layout and security within Facebook profiles and application pages, Facebook does not allow developers to use native JavaScript. Instead, there is a customized form of the language called FBJS, or Facebook JavaScript. While it may take a few attempts to get the syntax right, it’s not so different that it should take more than a few minutes.

Technically speaking, learning FBML and FBJS are optional. The popular social network offers developers the option of creating an IFRAME that loads remote pages from your own web server, which allows any and all HTML and native JavaScript to be used.

Add me on Facebook!

I’ll be releasing an application upon the Facebook population very soon. I’m very excited about the application, and I think it has very much potential. For those of you interested in seeing it when it’s released, feel free to add me as a friend on Facebook. Either way, I’ll be blogging about it here when it’s finished!