The new incentives, announced Monday evening by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at a high-tech conference, are part of a $10 million fund financed by Accel Partners and The Founders Fund, a pair of venture capital firms already connected to the Palo Alto-based company.

Accel is one of Facebook's biggest stockholders, while The Founders' Fund is run by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, an early investor in the company who remains on its board of directors.

The fund will give grants ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 to developers interested in building applications for the platform. The awards will be determined by a panel that includes Zuckerberg, Thiel and Accel partner Jim Breyer, who also sits on Facebook's board.

Any developer who hasn't already raised venture capital will be eligible to apply for the grants. Recipients must agree to give Accel and The Founders Fund the first chance to invest in any business that sprouts from the applications placed on Facebook.

The call for more software applications marks the latest step in Facebook's evolution from a Web site that once was primarily a place for college students to flirt and exchange information.

Facebook finally began accepting non-students last year and then, four months ago, set up a platform to make it easier for outside applications to run on its site.

That has proven to be a boon for other sites like music-sharing service iLike.com and photo-sharing service Slide Inc. that built popular applications on Facebook.

Those applications in turn have helped make Facebook even more popular, although it still ranks as the second most trafficked Internet social network behind News Corp.'s MySpace.com.

Privately held Facebook doesn't disclose its financial results, but its revenue this year is expected to approach $200 million. The company's success has spurred speculation that Facebook could be sold for billions of dollars, but the 23-year-old Zuckerberg so far has shown little interest in parting with the business.