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In his visit to Brazil this week, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured at left) announced a Brazilian Applications Challenge. Aiming at the development of third party applications within Facebook’s own site, as well as integration with external sites, the challenge will offer prize money to Brazilian developers.

Mark has involved the press, bloggers and students in his first visit to Brazil. He arrived Sunday night and stayed in São Paulo, where on the following day he gave interviews and participated in a chat with invited bloggers (including myself).

Read on to learn more about this meeting, see photos, and watch videos of the workshop with developers, which addressed strategies like that which the portal Terra just implemented.

Challenge offers BR$12,000 to the Brazilians that best implement Facebook Platform and Connect

The challenge is a way to encourage developers to provide Brazilian users with relevant experiences. In this way, they become evangelists, multipliers, and stimulate companies to adopt applications and integration solutions. This is part of Facebook’s philosophy of opening the world through sharing; integration serves to spread the web beyond the social graph.

Incidentally, the success of Facebook’s strategy is based on the importance of connections between people, the social graph (as explained in this article, and this one). In the challenge, the category Applications will include solutions implemented within the Facebook platform that have social utility, using networks of contacts (friends) to provide an interactive and participatory dynamic. The category Connect will include Facebook integrations with other sites, connecting the content of one to the other to provide sharing across the social graph.

Watch a video in which Mark and the software engineer Rodrigo Schmidt (the only Brazilian to work at Facebook) explain the prizes for the challenge.

Check out information and opinions of other invited bloggers about Facebook and Mark’s visit:

* Rafael Sbarai: derepente.com.br
* Juliano Spyer: naozero.com.br
* Henry Martin: zumo.uol.com.br
* Eric Messa: messa.com.br / eric / ECODIS
* Thiago Mobilon: tecnoblog.net
* Manoel Netto: tecnocracia.com.br
* Joana Dambrós: simviral.com
* Gutta Birth: migrantedigital.blogspot.com

Besides the blog coverage, the meeting was also discussed on Twitter, with the tag #fbookbr, suggested by Juliano Spyer.

See more photos from the meeting.

Check out my play on words which made Mark laugh at the beginning of the chat, in a photo captured and published by Rafael Sbarai.

Watch videos from Garage Day with the developers.

Shortly I will publish another post about the Facebook phenomenon here on Startupi.