The ‘Facebook India Developer Contest’, which began on July 2 this year has picked up tremendous speed and has garnered a lot of attention from young Indian developers. There are close to a thousand people on the contest’s Facebook page already and discussions are flying back and forth on what is poised to be a huge success.

It’s a contest for Indian developers to showcase their web- development skills by creating Facebook applications and Facebook Connect Integrations. The contest runs for three months and ends on September 11, 2009 and is located at www.facebook.com/developercontestindia.

This is the first time Facebook is organizing a developer contest in India. Entries will be judged on originality, business potential, social utility, usefulness, expressive features, intuitiveness and potential of the application.

There are three cash prizes: $4000 for the first place, $2000 for the second and $1000 for the third, in each of the two categories.

To enter the contest, participants are required to create a Facebook platform application for use on the Facebook site or Facebook Connect integrations in English or Hindi and register their application in the contest’s homepage. The contest is open to Indian residents over the age of 16 with a facebook.com account.

During the launch of this contest, Ruchi Sangvi, Engineer and Manager of the Facebook platform, had remarked, “India ranks second in the number of software developers with 3.9 million software developers; we are very excited to engage with the developer community. Facebook has experienced a tremendous growth in India. Through the contest, we hope to see many rich experiences that leverage the social graph and empower Facebook users to share and connect.”

The contest is well on its way to do just that. This is the perfect platform for youngsters to showcase their programming skills. The fact that signing up for a Facebook account is so easy will definitely attract more students to participate in the contest.