As part of the launch of Startup America, a national campaign to “celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship in the U.S.”; Facebook has announced a new initiative called ‘Startup Days.’
Facebook will hold 12 monthly Startup Days in 2011 to “provide early-stage companies with engineering and design support on the Facebook Platform.” These meetings, which will be held around the country, will provide entrepreneurs with resources to build social applications. Facebook has also announced it will continue its efforts to stay active in open source communities.
Startup Days builds on Facebook’s previous initiatives to help connect entrepreneurs with the Facebook platform including 170 Developer Garages hosted globally and the social network’s joint seed fund and incubator fbFund. And Facebook has also launched customized programs for Y Combinator companies as well as for Kleiner Perkins’ sFund.
For Facebook, the benefit of holding these hacker sessions are two-fold. Initiatives like ‘Startup Days’ help contribute the greater good of the entrepreneur community by giving founders and developers access to inside resources and APIs. And these events also help continue to grow the ecosystem around the Facebook platform (though the social network doesn’t seem to need to much help in that department).