Facebook announces the “Facebook Open Platform” for developers on the anniversary of its’ platform launch.
The facebook developer blog stated:
It’s been quite a year, with over 24,000 applications built on the platform and over 400,000 developers building new social experiences. We see about 140 applications added to our directory per day, and nearly all of our users have added at least one application.
The Facebook Open Platform is opening up parts of its application platform (open source -kinda) to developers. What makes me spill my coffee and laugh in the morning is the FB “open source” includes , the FBML parser, the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, and FB javascript. All of these custom language enablers are only opening up a proprietary social platform called Facebook. So this is more of a opening of a walled garden approach then true open source like Drupal. There will be some real advantages to utilizing the FBopen platform but open source may be a stretch (I guess there will be a new definition of open source soon seeing how even Microsoft is going down this road).
My bias aside, the FBopen is a definitive effort to compete with the Opensocial club which includes the alliance of Google/MySpace/Yahoo/AOL.
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