Facebook: Is it Going Open Source?

by Sam Dean - May. 27, 2008Comments (4)

While nobody at Facebook is commenting on the rumor yet, TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook will turn the Facebook Platform into an open source project. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington reports that he has heard confirmation from multiple sources that the year-old platform will go open source, and that application developers will easily be able to migrate their Facebook applications to other social networks. If the rumor pans out, this could be good news for open source.

UPDATE: Soon after this post went up, TechCrunch reported that Facebook confirmed this story as correct.

Social networks of various stripes have increasingly been opening up some aspects of their platforms, especially after widespread criticism of obstructions when trying to move applications and profiles from one service to another. Earlier in May, Facebook announced its Facebook Connect initiative, which seeks to open avenues for users to connect--at least on a limited basis--with other social networking sites. That move came directly on the heels of MySpace's similar initiative and Google's announcement of its Friend Connect service. Friend Connect allows users to attract users from Facebook, Orkut and other sites and enhance web sites with social features.

Bebo licenses the Facebook platform, which allows users to take their Facebook applications to Bebo. Also, OpenSocial--a common set of APIs for building social applications and migrating them across services--is backed by Yahoo, MySpace and Google.

If Facebook makes its platform fully open source that would mean opening up four components: FMBL (the Facebook markup language), FQL (Facebook's query language), FJS (a Javascript library) and the central Facebook API. Via the API, the open source community could make it easy for social networking applictions of all kinds to to migrate to and from Facebook.

It remains to be seen whether Facebook will open up all of these components. Social networks have been rife with initiatives that appear to be fully open, but are in fact only partially open, placing restrictions on how free users are to migrate applications and profiles to other services.

Without a doubt, though, Facebook has momentum, and making its platform open source would be likely to increase, not decrease the amount of developer and user interest in its platform. We'll keep our eyes peeled this week for word from Facebook on the reported plans.

 


Browse Blog

Jesse Babson uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?



4 Comments
 

Wow - this would be a big move, though I think this might dilute Open Social's impact and fragment the market.

0 Votes

I think Facebook needs to read the definition of Open Source. This is purely a marketing gimmick to get more buy-in from the developer community

0 Votes

I think Facebook needs all the help they can get. I'd imagine the usage (pageviews/user) will start declining over time - its not a productivity app and playing scramble can get old after a while, and anything they can do to increase distribution is critical if they want to keep justifying the $15B valuation.

Oh, and @osfiend23 - I agree - this is not Open Source!

0 Votes

And why is this so important....?

0 Votes
Share Your Comments

If you are a member, to have your comment attributed to you. If you are not yet a member, Join OStatic and help the Open Source community by sharing your thoughts, answering user questions and providing reviews and alternatives for projects.