The Core

Project Spartan, the rumored HTML5 platform aimed at the hundreds of millions of Facebook mobile users, is being developed by Facebook and a group of 80 or so third-party app developers, who are affectionately known as Spartans.

Facebook is supposedly giving third-party developers a couple more weeks to tweak their apps. Furthermore, a separate event will give them more time to present.

These developers have been working for at least a couple of months with Facebook, and the social network put in a lot of time before that. Employed by companies such as Zynga and the Huffington Post, they are building apps for the platform that range from games to news-reading apps.

The broader goal is to get people using Facebook as the distribution model for apps, rather than Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market. The social networking giant wants this HTML5 app platform to succeed so the mobile world is not fully controlled by the two technology giants. Facebook would of course also love for its own payment platform to dominate mobile by allowing developers to sell apps and offer in-app purchases with Facebook Credits.