Some say Facebook announced new APIs seeing the growing popularity of Twitter; Some believe Facebook's APIs are aimed to lure support for its platform, and away from Twitter; Some reckon Facebook is gearing up to edge out Twitter.

Just two days after it celebrated its fifth birthday, the social networking service Facebook announced new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Facebook Platform to let developers access content and methods for sharing for Facebook Status, Notes, Links and Video. Facebook also launched APIs for uploading and viewing via Facebook Photos.

According to Facebook, it announced a new API platform to allow third-party applications to access users' status updates, as well as its Notes, Links, and Video content. The new APIs help the developers to create new applications for the social networking service.

In the Facebook Developers blog, the company said, "Your application will have access to any status, notes or links from the active user or their friends that are currently visible to the active user. In addition, we're opening new APIs for you to post links, create notes or upload videos for the current user, and we've made setting a user's status easier. For example, a travel application could make it really easy for users to create and share notes and upload photos and videos from a recent trip. Users could then display that content within a profile tab for that app."

Palo Alto, California based Facebook made another important announcement that "It would officially join the board of the OpenID Foundation, which promotes open frameworks for users' Web-based digital identities and which is designed to facilitate the sharing of identity information online across social-networking Web sites."

Facebook announced new APIs with progressive intentions, but these developments have certainly heated up the speculations that Facebook is toning up its platform in order to block potential threats from Twitter.